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A Combatant for Peace:
Franziskus Maria Stratmann (1883–1971)[1]
Paulus Engelhard
Within the Dominican province of Teutonia, Stratmann was not regarded as
a social-ethicist, but rather as a ‘pacifist’, that is, a loner who met
predominantly with rejection and ridicule. For the year 1931, only one
person from the province seemed to be working with Stratmann – Swidbert
Maria Soreth (1890–1975), who was ridiculed as a pious eccentric. Still,
Eberhard Welty paid (qualified) tribute to Stratmann’s thought, by
emphasising where he was in agreement with him in his
Sozialkatechismus, and briefly praised his main works in the
bibliography. Later he gave him the opportunity to write in Die Neue
Ordnung, which Welty edited, allowing Stratmann to discuss the views
and philosophy of history expounded by the controversial Friedrich
Wilhelm Foerster, who was important for Stratmann from the beginning.
One reason for Stratmann’s generally lacklustre reception within the
Dominican Order may have been his education. He began by briefly
studying law at Lausanne. Then he was motivated by the example of the
famous Dominican preacher, Bonaventura Krotz, to join the Order. On 16
October 1906 he made his simple vows. He completed his philosophical and
theological studies at the German Dominican Studium in Düsseldorf. In
accordance with the curriculum, he became acquainted with the thought of
Thomas Aquinas, but did not embark on the specialised study of Aquinas
necessary for the qualification of lector in theology. His fellow
brethren regarded Stratmann as a good student whose talents lay more in
preaching and communicating than in research. He was ordained priest in
Cologne in 1912. In 1914, P. Adolf Hoffmann (1900–1987) was impressed by
Stratmann as a teacher.
Bonaventura Krotz wanted Stratmann to succeed him in his pastoral work
with students in Berlin. On his deathbed, he urgently asked for ‘his’
student: ‘is Fr Franziskus Stratmann not here yet?’ the prior arranged
with the provincial to have Stratmann removed from his teaching post in
Vechta and sent to take over the Berlin post. He held this office for
ten years, but was never wholly satisfied with it. At the end of 1923 he
asked to be replaced – partly under pressure from nationalist students –
and was moved Cologne in 1924.
The ‘Second Conversion’
Stratmann was always alert to what was going on around him – including,
of course, in the period of the First World War, during which he was a
deputy division minister, and also in the early post-war period. Towards
the end of the war, Stratmann had what he called his ‘second conversion’
– the first conversion being ‘from an unreligious life to an intensely
religious one’. In contrast to the more emotional ‘first conversion’, he
said, the second was an intellectually based occurrence.
There are three experiences, to which Stratmann responded
intellectually, whose significance, and the way they relate to each
other, are difficult to gauge.
The Encroaching Reality Of The First World War
In 1916, at the request of the chief secretary of student social Work,
Dr Carl Sonnenschein (1876–1929, famous in the last ten years of his
life as a social pastor in Berlin), Stratmann, as student pastor, wrote
a small book which was presented as a ‘gift’ to the ‘scholars in the
field’: Veritas. The author later made an entry in his
hand-written copy which he had printed in shortened form (1927):
The remarks are suffused with the sort of patriotism which always sees
one’s own cause as justified, and takes the view that war is the right
means of ensuring it is victorious, indeed that war provides a school of
higher morality. Only being there, taking part in war, reveals its
hideousness. That became clear to me from reading letters from soldiers
at the front. I got a copy of my text back from the trenches with
furious comments written in the margins, fiercely rejecting and
ridiculing my idealistic views on the terrible facts of war. I
increasingly learnt to see the truth of this criticism, so that I soon
became a fierce opponent of the war and the ideology behind it.
Morality And Politics
Looking back in his diaries, Stratmann refers to one book, written at
the beginning of 1918, as providing a special impetus: ‘it was Friedrich
W. Foerster’s Weltkrieg und Weltgewissen’. A double-edged
attitude to the pedagogue and ethicist Foerster, both as a man and as a
thinker, is a constant theme for Catholic pacifists (he features in
Stratmann’s publications until 1958). They were enthused by his fight
against ‘double morality’ (one rule for individuals, another for the
political sphere) and against the amorality of politics when it is only
interested in power, and his fight for recognition of the ‘duty imposed
by the saving importance of Christ’s teaching, including in
relationships between peoples’. But they were more ambivalent regarding
Foerster’s emphasis on Prussian-German culpability for the war, which
they saw as an inopportune attempt to justify the war-guilt thesis
enshrined in the treaty of Versailles.
Papal Calls For Peace
Foerster was a popular topic among like-minded contemporaries. To
convince people within the Catholic Church who took a different view,
the Catholic pacifists had recourse to calls for peace issued by the
popes.
Pope Benedict XV began his pontificate two months after the outbreak of
war. His greatness and his tragedy lay in the way he connected his calls
for peace (which he based on the Gospel) with – unsuccessful – political
action, as in his appeal of 2 august 1917, in which he made concrete
suggestions to the Heads of State of the belligerent parties. His desire
‘that the most perfect fulfilment of the principles of justice and love,
in the life of individuals and of the whole society, preached by
the divine Master, should protect peoples for ever from the horrors of
war’ finds its mature formulation in the great peace encyclical Pacem
Dei of 23 May 1920, which combines biblical inspiration and
political farsightedness. Its aim: ‘a sort of family of peoples,
calculated both to maintain their own independence and safeguard the
order of human society’.
In this document, Benedict expressly formulates his characteristic idea
of the unity of individual and social morality: ‘The Gospel has not one
law of charity for individuals, and another for States and nations,
which are indeed but collections of individuals’.
Here we do not need to re-describe Stratmann’s role in the
Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken (FDK), founded by Dr Max Josef
Metzger on 9 October 1919. In any case, Stratmann took over
responsibility for North Germany no later than spring 1920. He soon came
to be regarded as the spiritual leader of the FDK.
As early as September 1922 he gave a speech at the religious studies
conference of the Verbandes der Vereine katholischer Akademiker zur
Pflege katholischer Weltanschauung (United Association of Catholic
Scholars for the Cultivation of Catholic Ideology) in Heidelberg. His
talk was called ‘The Idea and the Realisation of the Corpus Christi
Mysticum’, and had the subtitle ‘The Reconciliation of Peoples
through the Church’. Its reception oscillated between enthusiastic
agreement and rejection – in between these two poles, some had
reservations because they thought it politically inopportune.
By then, though, his authority in the FDK had been so firmly established
that he had to take a decisive stance in a difficult situation. Owing to
the political activities of the Frenchman, Marc Sangnier (1873–1950),
and his attempts to secure peace, the third convention of Internationale
Démocratique, which Sangnier had founded, took place in Freiburg im
Breisgau in early August 1923. Contemporary events made ‘The Occupation
of the Ruhr’ a topic for discussion. In January ‘five French divisions
and one Belgian division had entered the Ruhrgebiet, leading to the
highest tensions between Germany and France since 1918’. The stated
reason for this was that Germany was in arrears with its reparations,
particularly deliveries of wood. This was how centre Party member Josef
Joos presented it in his opening address on 4 August. Stratmann’s
feast-day homily in Freiburg Münster on 5 August was regarded as the
high point of the proceedings. It must have been rousing. In it, he
inveighed against submission ‘to an incontrovertible fate’ and at the
same time against the militant, vindictive attitudes awakened by the
occupation of the Ruhr, arguing instead for a new way of acting: with
passion but without violence.
His moral authority was permanently secured by the appearance of his
principal work, Weltkirche und Weltfriede (World church, World
Peace), at the end of 1924. It contains ‘Catholic thoughts on the
problem of War and Peace’. Stratmann’s catholicity (and Catholicity) is
characterised by an awareness of the Church as the Mystical Body of
Christ, an awareness that is still as strong as it was then. We see it
in the Heidelberg address, in a speech delivered at Bonn University in
July 1924, and in the book that followed it. The work is dominated at
the start by an almost physical sense of suffering at this body’s
self-dismemberment by the war.
The Devout Philosopher Of Natural Law And His Sources
The main effectiveness of this work lay not in the familiar way it
identified with the Church, but in the way it extended, ‘from the
perspective of natural law’, the ‘conditions of just war’ bequeathed by
the Augustinian/Thomist tradition. This extension was motivated
primarily by Foerster’s call for a radical political ethics.
I wrote my book Weltkirche und Weltfriede in the sort of
exhilaration which a great new idea gives to the mind, although all the
material I needed was totally unfamiliar to me and I had to laboriously
read through everything in a few months first.
As Stratmann says modestly in a footnote, he was able to read the texts
that were decisive for his argument (Spanish Dominican and Jesuit
interpretations of Aquinas from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)
in the posthumously published La doctrine scholastique du droit de
guerre, which appeared in Paris in 1919. The author, Alfred
Vanderpol (1854–1915), was an engineering entrepreneur and expert on
agriculture. alongside lecturing and organising scholarly gatherings, he
gave an – often inconspicuous – impetus to charitable works and schemes:
a movement for abandoned and neglected children (1890); disseminating a
French translation of the Bible; manufacturing wall and roof lining
(1905). His preoccupation with questions of war and peace (which went
back to 1890) was deepened in studies he produced on these questions,
during a long illness, in relation to the Augustinian / Thomist
tradition. He had been publishing articles on this since 1906 and, since
1910, in the bulletin of the League of French Catholics for Peace. He
took an active part in Catholic peace conventions in, among other
places, Milan (1906), Munich (1907), London (1908) and Reims (1909). In
1911 he sent a report on the ‘scholastic doctrine of war’ to the
Congress of French Societies for Peace at Clermont-Ferrand.
He drew together various strands of his thinking for the first time in
Das Kriegsrecht bei den Theologen und Kirchenrechtlern des
Mittelalters (The Law of War in Medieval theology and Church Law),
which appeared in Paris and Brussels the same year. In 1912 he extended
his perspective to sources in the New Testament and the Church Fathers,
particularly Augustine, and developments into the seventeenth century.
To avoid the two works overlapping, he worked on a synthesis until July
1914, which was prevented from publication by the outbreak of the war
and was published by Vanderpol’s friend and biographer Emile Chénon in
1919. Here Stratmann found French translations of all the relevant
texts, especially the classics of Spanish sixteenth-and
seventeenth-century scholasticism. Like Vanderpol, he was mainly
concerned with Francisco de Vitoria.
Stratmann’s Approach To Thomas Aquinas
Stratmann formulates the motivation and the structure of his argument,
which is strongly determined by traditional patterns, with pleasing
clarity:
In view of the awfulness of modern war and its consequences, and in view
of the fact that the Catholic Church lacks a defined teaching on war, it
is surely allowable to advance the severest opinion on the
permissibility of war, in order to restrict as far as possible its
existential legitimacy (Daseinsrecht). This book therefore
adheres to the principles of saint Augustine and St Thomas, which is
beyond doubt justified, despite all the developments in subsequent moral
theology, on account of the outstanding distinction of both teachers.
In a footnote, Stratmann refers to an encyclical of Pius XI, in which
the latter refers to Thomist thought on international law, observing
which would bring the desired peace between nations.
Pius’ appeal to St Thomas to legitimate defensive war, the justification
of which is, of course, presupposed by the medieval theologian,
stimulates Stratmann to warn against extending the justification of war
on preventive grounds: ‘It is sufficient for recourse to self-defence –
that is, for the declaration of war on preventive grounds – that the
planned attack can be proven beyond doubt … But the requirement
for the legality of launching an all-out defensive war is that the
attack by the enemy should be unjust!’
He is able to follow Aquinas more closely in justifying offensive war.
He presupposes the tradition going back to Augustine (the source of
which – Cicero – he does not mention). Stratmann interprets the three
conditions enumerated by Aquinas in this tradition by providing a set of
antitheses.
In the first condition, auctoritas principis, Stratmann
transforms the basis for justification into an absence that is to be
overcome: ‘A state is only permitted to come to its own aid if there is
no supra-state authority through which the state may gain its rights’.
So the ‘aim of the peace movement is the creation of jurisdiction
between and above states – the solid, Archimedean point which would
enable us to dismantle the entire mentality of war, with its wretched
supercession of the rule of law’.
Stratmann gives a definitive moral, anti-modern slant to the second
condition of causa justa: against the rejection of punitive war
espoused by Kant and Scheler, he emphasises, with Aquinas, that an
offensive war is only justified if ‘those who are attacked deserve to be
attacked because of their guilt’.This nexus of guilt and punishment is
formulated most clearly by Francisco de Vitoria: unica est et sola
causa justa inferendi bellum: injuria accepta (the one single reason
for waging war is an injustice that has been suffered). According to
Stratmann: ‘until the end of the 16th century in the Catholic Church, it
was the unanimous view of all church fathers, church teachers and
theologians that only the certain moral guilt of one of the opposing
parties gave the other the right to declare war…’. The justified war is
therefore an act of punitive justice. Stratmann accuses Francisco Suarez
SJ (1548–1617) of having defined war, though not consistently, as an act
of distributive justice and thus of having accepted responsibility for
‘loosening the strict old morality of war’. Before then, Luis Molina
(1535–1600) had replaced grave moral culpability as a rationale for war
with ‘mere material injustice on the part of those who are to be
attacked’.
Stratmann mentions the third condition only briefly: right intention (recta
intentio). He sees this as a moral enforcement of the moral
justification understood in the second condition of just cause.
The Intensification Of Stratmann’s Ideas: A Summary
Despite his criticism of the ‘old’ Jesuits, Stratmann accepts the fourth
condition introduced by Francisco Suarez and Robert Bellarmine
(1542–1621): the ‘debitus modus, the proper way of waging war’.
This includes primarily the fundamental distinction between combatants
and non-combatants.
The logical result of the whole argument, which is based primarily on
Francisco de Vitoria’s development of Augustinian and Thomist notions of
just war, are the famous ‘10 points’, given here with Stratmann’s
emphases:
1. severe injustice on the part of one and only one of the two
conflicting parties;
2. severe formal moral guilt on one of the two sides. Mere
material injustice is not sufficient;
3. this guilt must be able to be proven beyond all doubt;
4. military engagement must be unavoidable owing to the failure
of all peaceful attempts at conciliation, which must have been
undertaken with the utmost seriousness and effort;
5. the means of punishment must be proportional to guilt.
Punishment that exceeds the extent of guilt is unjust and
impermissible;
6. moral certainty that the just cause will be victorious;
7. the right intention to promote good through the war and avert evil.
The welfare of the state expected to ensue from the war must exceed the
evil which is expected;
8. war must be waged in the proper way: the restrictions imposed
by justice and love must be observed;
9. severe disruptions to other states not directly involved in
the war, and to Christian unity, must be avoided;
10. the declaration of war must be made by a higher authority
lawfully empowered to do so in the name of God, in order to enforce
his law. If any of these requirements is not met, the war is unjust.
If one reads these points without proper preparation, one is usually met
with laughter. This was entirely Stratmann’s intention: anyone who still
thinks a war can be justified deserves to be a laughing stock!
The guidelines of the FDK carry Stratmann’s imprint, too: both the
stricter version of 1924, which dispenses with the conditions for a
‘just war’, and the guidelines presented in 1928, which were drawn up by
a commission in 1927 and contain a ‘less apodictic text’. It is also
typical for Stratmann that despite his disappointing experiences with
most of the German bishops he constantly attempts to show that he is in
agreement with the heads of the church. It is probably no coincidence
that this is not very easy for him when faced with Pacelli/Pius XII. He
tries to demonstrate agreement when he interprets Pacelli’s ‘Peace
Letter’ to a German-Polish conference (21–24 May 1929), which was meant
to be critical, as wholly consistent with the aims of the FDK. Evidence
is not forthcoming to support Hermann Hoffmann’s suggestion that in
February 1933 Stratmann characterised Pacelli’s analysis as the result
of an outdated theology of war.
NOTA:
[1]
This text
is taken from the first part of the chapter of the same name in F.
Compagnoni - H. Alford (eds.),Preaching Justice, Dominican
Contributions to Social Ethics in the Twentieth Century, Dominican,
Publications, Dublin 2007.
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