by Andrey Derevyankin
The
Christian Church has always recognised the popular right in the last
resort to rise up against a tyrant or tyrannical regime.
Numerous
governments have already capitalised on worldwide condemnations of Osama
bin Laden's al-Qaida network by applying the "terrorist" tag against
domestic opponents. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia has
indicated that he expects moral approval for a campaign against Chechen
Resistance. India has stepped up its onslaught against separatists in
Kashmir, and China has used the occasion to repress "religious
extremists" in Xinjiang.
Thus, for the first time, a universal global justification is being asserted for action against local disorders.
Human
rights groups like Amnesty International are warning of an
"opportunistic clampdown" on civil liberties. "While the world is
looking the other way, abuse and repression can be carried out without
fear of rebuke", Amnesty said in its statement (October, 2001). "The
horror of the 11 September attacks should not result in other
communities around the world being victimised in the name of fighting
terrorism."
The problem looks set to worsen until clearer
definitions are established. But these, by accident or design, have been
kept vague during the current "war against terrorism".
Terrorism,
defined as the deliberate targeting of civilians and non-combatants to
achieve a climate of fear conducive to the achieving of political ends,
can never be justified. Yet in conditions of dictatorship and foreign
occupation, resistance can often be used legitimately. In this sense,
the attacks on the United States have been a massive stab in the back
for human rights everywhere, by threatening to delegitimise the very
notion of active opposition to injustice.
Christian teaching has an
important contribution to make in this area. St Thomas Aquinas reflected
at length on the twin imperatives of obedience and resistance. After
considering St Augustine's adage, "Without justice, what else are
kingdoms but huge robberies", he concluded that obedience was a moral
virtue since it observed "the mean between excess and deficiency". Yet
obedience could only be a duty insofar as the order of justice required
it. If a prince usurped his authority or issued unjust commands, his
subjects were not bound to obey him.
Aquinas saw two preconditions
for just opposition to tyrannical government. First, proportionality:
the tyrant's rule must not be "disturbed so inordinately that his
subjects suffer greater harm from the consequent disturbance than from
the tyrant's government". Second, concern for the common good: the
tyrant himself must have rebelled against his subjects by asserting "the
private good of the ruler to the injury of the multitude".
With St
Thomas's two conditions in mind, the popes of history showed no
hesitation in supporting popular revolt where it seemed appropriate.
Paul
IV announced the deposition of schismatic Protestant rulers and
ecclesiastics in 1559, and declared that those abandoning fidelity to
them would not be liable to censures or penalties.
His successor,
Pius V, excommunicated and deposed "the servant of vice, Elizabeth,
pretended Queen of England, with whom, as in a place of sanctuary, the
most nefarious wretches have found refuge", and commanded her subjects
to refuse obedience.
In his famous Syllabus of Errors, Pius IX
condemned the notion that "it is lawful to take away obedience from
legitimate princes and even rebel against them". On the other hand, he
added that where injustice had de facto succeeded, the situation
detracted from the binding character of laws.
In a 1937 encyclical
letter, written after anti-Church excesses in Mexico, Pius XI also
recalled that the Church "condemns every unjust rebellion or act of
violence against the properly constituted civil power". However, "if the
civil power should so trample on justice and truth as to destroy even
the very foundations of authority", he warned, "there would appear no
reason to condemn citizens for uniting to defend the nation and
themselves by lawful and appropriate means".
The Vatican has shown
greater circumspection since the Second World War. Although Pius XII
called for "a war of effective self-defence" when Soviet tanks crushed
the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, later pontiffs proved increasingly
reluctant to endorse any possibilities of armed struggle.
In his
encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963), Pope John XXIII recalled that people
could not be bound by laws or commands "contrary to the moral order and
therefore to the will of God". Two years later, however, the Second
Vatican Council, in its constitution on the Church in the modern world,
Gaudium et Spes, cautioned that modern armaments had forced "a
completely fresh reappraisal of war", adding that these current
complexities could "cause incipient wars to develop into full-scale
conflict by new methods of infiltration and subversion".
In his
social encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967), Paul VI called for
"solidarity in action" to tackle the material poverty of "those who lack
the bare necessities of life", as well as the moral poverty of "those
crushed under the weight of their own self-love". But "everyone knows",
Paul VI insisted, "that revolutionary uprisings – except where there is a
manifest, long-standing tyranny which would do great damage to
fundamental personal rights and dangerous harm to the common good of the
country - engender new injustices, introduce new inequities and bring
new disasters".
Note the exception.
Justifications for armed struggle and resistance have been further circumscribed under John Paul II.
The
Vatican's Instruction on Human Freedom and Liberation of 1986, the
second such document to be issued amid heated controversy over
liberation theology, warned that the "modern liberation movement" is
"contaminated by deadly errors about man's condition and freedom". While
the Church's teaching authority accepted armed struggle as a "last
resort" against an "obvious and prolonged tyranny".
In the 1990s,
the Catechism of the Catholic Church has extended the paradigms set out
by Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, this time listing five conditions
for legitimate armed opposition.
It can be acceptable when "there is
certain, grave and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; all other
means of redress have been exhausted; such resistance will not provoke
worse disorder; there is well-founded hope of success; it is impossible
reasonably to foresee any better solution".
And the last two notes.
The most “pacific” men are slave owners…