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"Christians should voice their condemnation loud and clear, in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest person. " They should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today."
And today? True to form, laudable statements and papers have been produced and placed in in-boxes in the bowels of the bishops' bureaucracy, but they rarely find their way in any form to the pulpit on Sunday.
I am a Catholic, and initially was happy to find, by a search of the bishops' Web site that there is a Catholic Study Guide titled "Torture is a Moral Issue." It was developed in collaboration with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the group Professor Hunsinger founded.
This was news to me. Had any of my Catholic friends heard of this? The answer from a representative sampling, including progressive parishes, was No, not one. So I called the bishops' staff to inquire as to why the study guide on torture had not been published and made available to pastors to use in their preaching or in workshops.
I was told that it was "not designed as a publication, because there was uncertainty as to how much demand there would be for such a study." A publishing run would not be cost effective unless it produced at least a thousand copies and this particular subject matter might not warrant that kind of run. (There are some 70 million Catholics in this land.)
As for Pope Benedict XVI, he arrived here in Washington in April 2008, a week after media reports that the most senior officials of the Bush administration had met regularly at the White House to plan which torture techniques might be most appropriate for which high-value detainees. He said nothing.
All the more strange, it would seem, since Jesus of Nazareth, after all, was tortured to death. If the pope had an opinion on torture, he kept it to himself.
Mormons: What about the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints?
My small random sampling of the information available shows a strong propensity among Mormons toward Dostoevsky's caricature of a strong, top-down authoritative church, but with the notable exception of at least one person who could, and did, think for herself to her own peril.
The most prominent Mormon with torture connections is Jay Bybee, a devout Mormon with undergraduate and law degrees from Mormon-owned Brigham Young University.
As leader of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002, Bybee approved a memorandum indicating that interrogators could apply virtually any harsh techniques, so long as the pain involved was less than that accompanying "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or death." In my view, his memorandum must surely be the most shameful text ever to appear beneath Department of Justice letterhead. It was among the memorandums released by President Obama in mid-April, over the strong objections of many top officials.
A lively debate rages among Mormon lawyers over the morality of Bybee's approval of harsh interrogation techniques. Dan Burke, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, was incensed to learn that a fellow Mormon could justify such actions. "I cannot believe that the practice of torture is acceptable to anyone who claims to be a disciple of Jesus Christ," said Burk.
Not so fast, say other Mormon lawyers David Wenger of New York, for example.
"I would personally be uncomfortable writing a memo on how the administration could legally justify torture of people, but I don't think it's against the tenets of our faith," Wenger told the Salt Lake Tribune. "One might believe that the value of ready access to torture-obtained intelligence outweighed the negative," said Wenger.
Yet another Mormon, a woman Army specialist named Alyssa Peterson, was clear on the morality of torture. She adamantly refused to take part in applying torture techniques approved by Bybee.
She walked away from an interrogation in the "cage," where Iraqis were stripped naked in front of female soldiers, mocked and burned with cigarettes. Three days later, on Sept. 15, 2003, Peterson was found dead of a gunshot wound at Tal Afar base in Iraq. The Army said her death was a suicide.
