Warday

He drove us to his rectory, where we got a shave, a shower, and a much-needed change of clothing. He never referred to the Destructuralists, or why he had been in that particular neighborhood at that time, or why he had so mercifully helped us.

He believed strongly in the value of human freedom, though, and in the old Bill of Rights. You can read that between the lines of the interview he gave us.

Interview Reverend Michael Dougherty, Catholic Priest

I was afraid we wouldn’t have time to do this, but I think you’re probably safe here for another half hour or so. I’m glad to get the chance to speak for publication. We’ve forgotten a few basic human freedoms out here in sunny California. We need to rediscover ourselves as Americans—as people, really. As children of God.

Sometimes I think of the world—is that thing on? I don’t see the red light. Ah, okay. Sometimes I think of the world as a little lost bit of dust in the middle of nowhere, and it is deathly ill, and there is nobody to help us. But then I feel the presence of Christ, as if He had taken the world in His arms and was hugging us to Himself the way a father might hug a hurt child.

I think that we Americans are feeling terribly guilty about ourselves. Especially the older generation. I see the effects. One of them is that priests like me have gotten incredibly busy, and one of the things that keeps me busiest is ministering to the sad and the guilty. We’ve got three priests here at St. Francis, me and two newly ordained, as well as three deacons and four nuns. I’ve been a priest since 1975, so I’m an old hand. That rarity, the prewar religious. The rest are all new. Since Warday, my parish has more than quadrupled in size. In the past five years, I can hardly remember a Mass that wasn’t full. Even at six o’clock on Saturday morning, it’s full. Many, many kids. The children of secularized parents, rebelling against the indifference of their elders. And the elders too, now, fumbling with the St. Joseph’s missals we have in the church, saying their prayers as best they can.

But it’s in the confessional that I hear the motives people have for returning to the Church. It isn’t piety or love of God, not among the older folks. People are coming back to the Church because they feel that their own indifference, just letting things happen, was a big part of what caused the war. Remember, back in those days it just seemed like there was nothing you personally could do. The solutions now to our problems then seem obvious.

But in those days we were all very different people. We were dulled by living under the Sword of Damocles for nearly half a century. We had done the worst possible thing—gotten used to an incredible and immediate danger. The nuclear mechanism was far more hazardous to each one of us individually than, say, pouring gasoline on our clothes would have been. But it didn’t feel that way, not in those sunny, treacherous days.

We understood how absolutely deadly the bomb was, but we did not understand how helpless we were in the face of the mechanism of war. The mechanism began to run quite mysteriously, and went on until it broke down. It could as easily have destroyed the world. Only faulty design prevented that. We thought that people dickering about arms control in Geneva mattered, when what we really needed all along was a massive change of heart. How absurdly outmoded the elaborate diplomacy of the prewar period now seems. There could have been a massive shift of heart, toward acceptance and understanding and away from hostile competitiveness and ideological obsession.

The whole business of the United States and the USSR squandering their resources on territorialism seems incredibly silly now.

Our prewar mistake was to believe in rubble. We visualized ourselves as crawling out of the basement and putting brick back on brick. Places don’t just cease to exist.

You know, they say that a person set down in the middle of the Washington Dead Zone would have died within hours. Just keeled over and died. Birds died flying across it. That was in the L.A. Times after the war. It’s a forty-square-mile desert of black glass dotted with the carcasses of sparrows and larks and the occasional duck.

Before the war there weren’t even intellectual references for such things. No comprehension. The message of Hiroshima wasn’t understood. We thought that it meant devastation. But ruins have to do with the past. Modern nuclear war means life being replaced by black, empty space. It means ancient seats of government evaporating in a second. The moral question is almost beyond asking.

What are we, that we can do this? What is evil, that it can speak with such a voice? We no longer know what we are, we of the Holocaust and Stalin and Warday. We unleashed hell on ourselves by pretending that diplomacy, of all things, could control its fires. The heart, and the heart alone, is more powerful than hell.