To speak comprehensively of the Christian community as a transnational actor is to speak of a far -flung network of approximately 1,100 million people who give allegiance to one of four major groups: the Orthodox churches, the Roman Catholic Churches, the Protestant churches of the Reformation, and the Evangelical "Free" churches. But it is difficult to speak both comprehensively and incisively in brief compass. Constrains of time and competence instruct me to limit the scope of this address. I am, therefore, going to concentrate my comments on the Roman Catholic Church as it has addressed specific issues of peace and justice within the last two decades.
In speaking of the Church as a transnational actor, I am going to
follow a clear but not beaten path marked out by Ivan Vallier and J. Bryan
Hehir. In 1971, Vallier analyze those of any large organization. The
method was original and his findings revealed and clarified much that
traditional description had left in obscurity. The description was
sufficiently flattering to the Church as a traditional actor that
representatives of other transnational enterprises, i.e., multinational
corporations, occasionally said they wished their own organizations were
run as competently and efficiently - and sometimes they were serious.
In terms of international affairs, he most visible and important
units on which the Church depends include the Holy See (the papacy), the
body of bishops, the clergy, and the areas (dioceses) in which they
operate; the various religious orders; the members of the Church,
approximately 650 million in number. Elements of these units are joined in
many complex and often overlapping ways to perform specialized tasks.
Frequently too, they join with other groups outside the Catholic Church,
some of which are religious, some of are not. In terms of formal
international relations, the Vatican diplomatic corps has a unique role.
In virtue of its juridic personality, the Holy See maintains through its
diplomatic corps relations with over 100 countries around the world. In
addition, the Holly See is diplomatically in most agencies of the United
Nations, which it has strongly supported from its inception, in the
European Economic Community, the European Conference on Security and
Cooperation, and in forums on such different issues as the Middle East and
nuclear proliferation.
Although Vallier brought an untraditional method of
analysis to bear on these structures, he accepted the general and
historical view that in international affairs the policies to be followed
were generated and controlled almost exclusively by the central authority
of the Church located in the Vatican.
Giving full credit to the originality and usefulness of Vallier's
description of the Church as a transnational actor, J. Bryan Hehir found
it deficient in two significant ways: "First, it failed to provide
any sense of the ideological (theological) foundation which sustains and
legitimizes the action of the Church in world affairs; second, the
analysis of dynamics within the Church concentrated too exclusively on the
flow from the center (Rome) to the periphery (local or national
churches)."
Accepting Vallier's functional description of the Church with
Hehir's significant modifications, one can describe the Church as a
transnational actor in virtue of its internal organization, of its
relation with other institutions, of its activities and with an overall
purpose in which it perceives its own cause for being. That purpose ,
which it shares to a large extent with other Christian bodies, at the
heart of which it perceives a mystery, has been and will continue to be
variously described. In words particularly appropriate to our concerns,
one of the major documents of Vatican Council II, the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church said: "The condition of this age lend
special urgency to the Church's task of bringing all men to full union
with Christ, since mankind today is joined together more closely than ever
before by social, technical, and cultural bonds."
Against this background, I am going to trace the ways in which ,
during recent decades and up to this very moment, the Church has coped
with specific questions of war and peace and with specific questions of
human rights.