Mensuram Bonum takes on new relevance as war in Middle East enters perilous phase
During a visit to the BAE Systems shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria today, where the UK’s nuclear submarines are built, Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer was at pains to let everyone know that his party’s commitment to the UK’s nuclear weapons is “unshakeable” and “absolute”.
Sir Keir said that if Labour comes to power in the upcoming General Election, he is committed to raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP “as soon as resources allow”.
His remarks echo the commitment of Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who has said that the Conservatives are also pledged to raising the figure to 2.5% “as soon as economic conditions allow.”
Promising to increase our country’s defence spending has been a wearily familiar shout in the run-up to most General Elections – along with the likes of more nurses, more bobbies on the beat, a better rail service, more new jobs than we can handle and other voting incentives that never seem to materialise once our crosses have gone on the ballot paper.
However, in the present atmosphere of global uncertainty and economic instability, whilst few will likely baulk at anyone’s efforts to shore up our crumbling and demoralised military infrastructure, the debate about the need or not for an independent nuclear deterrent remains as divisive as ever.
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps lashed out this week claiming that Labour could not “be trusted with our nation’s defences” because Sir Keir had “tried twice to put Jeremy Corbyn in charge of the nation’s armed forces”.
“The same man who wanted to scrap our nuclear deterrent, dismantle Nato and questioned the integrity of British intelligence community,” he added.
Jeremy Corbyn – Sir Keir’s predecessor – is a long-time opponent of the UK’s Trident missile system and is vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His view on the world’s fixation with armaments and the means of nuclear annihilation are reflective of the concerns of a large proportion of the political Left in the UK, where pacifism has a long and dignified history.
Sadly, this is legacy that some in the UK Labour Party, including its present leader, appear keen to dismiss. In an article written for the Daily Mail yesterday Sir Keir pointed out the Labour Party’s commitment to an independent nuclear deterrent traces its roots to the efforts of prime minister Clement Attlee (1945-51), who is generally regarded as father of Britain’s nuclear bomb, having committed millions of pounds to its development at time when the country could ill afford it.
Sir Keir called all this a “proud part of my party’s heritage”, which is at the very least being somewhat economical with the truth. The Labour Party’s first leader, Keir Hardie, had an objection to militarism as profound as his deeply Christian religious beliefs – he opposed the Boer War and he spoke out passionately in the Commons in 1914 against Britain becoming involved in the First World War. For Hardie, war was a failure to find solutions, and only ever made everyone poorer, a view that has been shared by many Labour Party leaders since.
The strongly pacifist stance of the British Labour Party over the past 100 years has enabled many alignments with the tenets of Catholic Social Teaching that deal with conflict, and the moral dilemmas of warfare. Throughout the second half of the 20th century in particular Catholic Social Teaching and left-of-centre political ideologies shared much in common, as those campaigning for peace in the world had to confront the nuclear age.
It’s more than a little depressing that the pleas made by the likes of Keir Hardie about the immorality of warfare and its consequences for the good of humanity are still having to be uttered more than a century later, most notably by our own Pope Francis.
With most contemporary British political figures committing to significantly increased spending on defence, the question of how Catholics, and Catholic institutions, should respond becomes of ever greater importance. Whilst individual Catholics have a wealth of Vatican documents and commentaries to draw on in the formation of their opinions, the guidelines for Catholic institutions are perhaps more complex, and less explored.
Over the past decade in particular our Church has sought to redress this, and to formulate more defined guidelines on how investments in particular are handled when it comes to placing Catholic funds into the hands of secular organisations.
Although it didn’t attract a great deal of general attention at the time, the publication in November 2022 of the Vatican document Mensuram Bonum (Faith-based Measures for Catholic investors: A Starting Point and Call to Action) established a viable and clear framework for the interaction between the Catholic Church and the often ruthless world of economics and finance.
A year on, it’s encouraging to see that this groundbreaking document from the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is gaining wider scrutiny and appreciation. It could not come at a better time – the world that has emerged from the Covid pandemic is fragile and unstable in ways that few of us could have imagined. As Mensuram Bonum states: “the Covid-19 pandemic has uncovered other pandemics of dysfunctional social systems, such as job insecurity, poor access to healthcare, food insecurity and corruption.”
Whilst these are profound challenges, herein also lies a unique moment for the community of the Catholic Church to put the long tried-and-tested principles of CST into practice in the sincere hope that we can persuade society to examine its conscience and redefine its objectives as we seek to build a post-pandemic world.
With the threat of a global war hanging heavy, the question of support for, and particularly investment in, any activity or organisation that will ultimately result in much death and misery is of grave importance. Every nation has a right to defend itself against aggressors, but increasingly Catholic Social Teaching is moving away from warfare as an option for settling differences. There is also an increasing awareness that pacifism is not an optional doctrine or observance, but a foundational principle of creating a just and peaceful society.
As Mensuram Bonum says: “Military conflicts always cost human lives. The uncontrolled proliferation of arms facilitate many outbreaks of violence and erode secure peace. Thus, industries which thrive on the production of these instruments of war and destruction engage in a reprehensible business.”
The document is equally clear on nuclear weapons and warfare: “The Church’s teaching, as reiterated by Pope Francis, is that “the use of nuclear weapons, as well as their mere possession, is immoral.” The premise of nuclear weapons as deterrence is flawed, as it “inevitably ends up poisoning relationships between peoples and obstructing any possible form of real dialogue.”
Shortly after the publication of Mensuram Bonum, Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, one of its authors and Chairman of the Vatican Bank, was asked how the Church should handle its investments in an increasingly unstable and ruthless world.
De Franssu is an advocate of the ‘persuasive’ approach to dealing with companies and organisations who produce products and services that might be construed to contradict the common good.
“We should sometimes say that we won’t exclude such companies from our portfolios,” says De Fransuu, “but rather we will keep our stock in your company – but on the condition that you do the following things, these are the objectives we are asking you to work towards – but we are also going to give you objects to when those deadlines should be met. If those deadlines are not met, then we will withdraw our interest.”
In terms of gradual persuasion, such as convincing companies to divest of fossil fuel activities, this is probably a sensible strategy, but one senses that we don’t have the luxury of this option when it comes to the arms industry.
For Pope Francis the urgency seems obvious. He has regularly pointed to the arms industry as “merchants of death”, fuelling conflicts around the globe with scarcely anyone paying attention.
“It should be talked about and written about, so as to bring to light the interests and the profits that move the puppet strings of war,” he said in his Christmas Urbi et orbi message last year.
“And how can we even speak of peace, when arms production, sales and trade are on the rise?” he asked.
As we move towards the next general Election here in the UK, we’ll undoubtedly be hearing more about the need to increase our national spending on defence, and in particular the replenishment and development of our independent nuclear deterrent. There will also be an increasing need to commit more of our GDP to supporting the supply of weaponry to Ukraine, and calls for us to endorse the continuing supply of arms to Israel, even as the Gaza Strip descends into famine.
In the face of such insecurities we may feel somewhat reluctant to voice our views on the futility of war and the evils of the arms industry, but it’s incumbent on every Catholic before they but a cross on paper to ask whether or not we should continue to permit war to be available to governments as a means of solving our human differences.
https://www.pass.va/en/publications/other-publications/mensuram_bonam_eng.html
Joseph Kelly is a Catholic publisher and theologian