Msgr. Stuart Swetland, a boyish 57, sits behind a desk
arrangement stacked on three sides with papers and books, some appearing
on the verge of avalanche, in the president's office of Donnelly College in Kansas City.
Swetland has been president since 2014 of this college that
historically has served immigrants and minorities, but that fact is, in
many ways, entwined with a life of conversions that often leads him to
straddle boundaries that others might view as impermeable.
He has a
proclivity, borne out in extensive writing for mostly conservative
publications such as the National Catholic Register, for taking some of
the most difficult sayings of the Gospel at face value and allowing them
to invade his consideration of the Christian life, no matter how
disturbing to him or his audience.
His 42-page-long curriculum vitae outlines an academic
career that includes the U.S. Naval Academy; Oxford University as a
Rhodes Scholar; an advanced degree in theology from Mount St. Mary's
Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., and two others from Rome's Lateran
University through the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on
Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.; and a doctorate in Catholic
social teaching.
We met in March on the campus to talk about his military
experience, his conversion to Catholicism more than three decades ago
and how that affected his thinking on such issues as the use of force
and modern weaponry.
He detailed moments throughout his Navy career when
conscience demanded he think deeply about ethical issues arising from
the requirements of his position that have led, in more recent years, to
deep questions about the militarism of the current era.
Pushing religion aside
Swetland was born in Pittsburgh, the son of "typical 'city
of Man, city of God' Lutherans" for whom service was integral to faith.
"The verse that was probably drilled into my head the most
was 'Unto whom much is given, much is expected.' You're expected to give
back and so one of the ways to give back was through the military."
He was 18, he wanted to go to a good school to be a science
major "and we don't have a whole lot of money, and the military academy
is offering to pay for it, so there's a little bit of mercenary in
there, I think. But nobody stays at the academy for those reasons
because it's too difficult."
In a long autobiographical piece
he wrote in 2011 for the Coming Home Network, he revealed that the U.S.
Naval Academy told his parents that he probably didn't have the
academic heft to make it, so they shouldn't expect much.
"But I was born
stubborn, so I needed to hear no more."
He majored in physics,
graduated first in his class and won the Rhodes scholarship.
He wasn't so fortunate in religion. When he left his
Lutheran church in Pennsylvania, one his family had helped found, the
congregation gave him a grand sendoff with a going-away blessing.
At Annapolis, he attended a fairly generic Protestant
service that he "didn't find comforting or challenging" so he went
looking for a "civilian" church.
It was the mid-1970s, end of the Vietnam era, and when he
showed up at a local Lutheran church in uniform, he had the distinct
feeling he wasn't welcome. His instincts were correct.
After a few
weeks, he said, some members told him that he had happened upon a "peace
church" and that they didn't want him showing up in uniform. The
academy required he wear it, so that ended his attendance.
It was not the last time that he would encounter members of
the same church, professing the same faith and reading the same Bible,
coming to radically different conclusions.
The result at the time was an 18-year-old who pushed
religion aside. He "bracketed" the basic claims of the faith,
"dismissing Christianity as a religion that was hopelessly confused."
He
plunged into his studies and found himself at Oxford in October 1981.
He was encouraged by former Rhodes scholars from the Navy
to move from science and begin formal study to investigate the moral and
ethical questions that had captured his imagination from an early age.
They convinced him to study politics, philosophy and economics.
Later,
with the memory of the 1960s My Lai massacre in Vietnam still vivid in
military circles and with a growing understanding of the effects of war
on young military members, he was tapped, because of his work in
philosophy and ethics, to teach military ethics to Navy recruits.
Faith returns at Oxford
If religion had been pushed to the side at the naval academy, it came roaring back at him at Oxford.
This Protestant who, according to his written testimony,
had at several points in his life given himself over to Christ, now
began a deep examination of the basic assumptions of the Christian
faith, beginning with "Did Jesus exist?" and "Did he really rise?"
The questions led to an intense study of the biblical
texts, bolstered by the memories of childhood faith and the conviction
that "on some level of my being, I knew that I had encountered the
living God in my life."
His journey continued, first through an
evangelical Anglican church in Oxford and, ultimately, as he continued
studying, a growing conviction about the truth of the Catholic church
and what it teaches.
"I had come to believe," he wrote for the Coming Home
Network, "that the church was who she claimed to be. The fact that I
still had difficulties with some of her teachings didn't really matter.
As [John Henry] Newman said, 'Ten thousand difficulties do not make for
one doubt.' "
While all of that was going on, he had fallen in with a
small group of young intellectuals and was having dinner regularly with
them, four of whom were active Catholics.
One of them was Dermot Quinn,
now teaching at Seton Hall University, and another was Robert George, a
high-profile conservative Catholic and McCormick Professor of
Jurisprudence at Princeton University. Swetland writes that the friends
helped him work through all the "inherited" anti-Catholic prejudice "of a
typical evangelical Protestant."
George, in a phone interview, recalled that the group
regularly engaged -- over single-malt Scotch that Swetland was able to
procure from a nearby commissary "for a song" -- in long discussions of
ideas.
No matter where they started, whether in sociology, history,
ethics or philosophy, "ineluctably, we would end up at religion. And
Stuart, whether as devil's advocate or out of sincere conviction -- I to
this day do not know -- was a fierce defender of the Lutheran
Reformation."
The nightly debates went on for months. According to
George, Swetland gave his dinner companions no indication that his mind
was turning in a new direction until, one day on the streets of Oxford,
they happened to meet up, one leaving the university, the other
returning.
In response to George's question, "Where are you coming
from?", Swetland answered, "The Catholic chaplaincy at Rose Place. I've
decided to seek reception into the Catholic church."
"You could have knocked me over with a feather," said
George. "I was stunned. There was no gradual wearing down of the
Protestant defenses that I could perceive," he said with a laugh.
Swetland asked him to be his sponsor -- in effect, his
godfather -- and, while considering it a great honor, George's first
reaction, he said, chuckling at the recollection, was to ask him, "Are
you sure you know what you're doing here? You know you've got to
actually believe all this stuff you've been denying for the past several
months."
Swetland became a member of the Catholic church before his graduation from Oxford in 1984.
Soon after, he was aboard the destroyer USS Kidd in the
Aegean Sea heading for Haifa, Israel, when the ship received reports
that a TWA flight had been hijacked to Beirut by members of the
terrorist group Islamic Jihad.
Among those on board were five Navy
divers, including a shipmate whom Swetland would soon learn had been
tortured and shot in the head.
President Ronald Reagan decided to respond quickly and
Swetland was called on to command a small boat that would, at high
speed, pick up Navy Seals who were going to create a diversion ashore to
draw the enemy's fire before swimming out to sea. He was told that
there was a more than 50-50 chance of casualties.
He wrote that a great anger took hold of him and it quickly
turned to hatred toward those who killed his shipmate. "I was glad I
had been chosen for this mission, even though it put my life in danger. I
wanted to kill the terrorists who had killed" his friend.
Ultimately, the mission was called off and he was left with
himself and his hatred.
But even before that occurred, he had begun to
pray the rosary that he had recently learned.
"As I prayed, the words of the Our Father struck me as
never before," he wrote in his autobiographical piece. " 'Forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.' Forgive? How
could God possibly ask me to forgive the thugs who had tortured and
killed a brave American sailor?"
He searched for the loopholes only to come to the
conclusion: "The gospel of Jesus Christ is true, and it does not admit
of exceptions. If I had died that night," he wrote in 2011, "my
salvation would have been in jeopardy. I had hated those terrorists from
my heart. I wanted them dead."
Before that night was over, he said he had "another
conversion: I learned the meaning of mercy, forgiveness, and love."
Floating around the Aegean, "God gave me the actual grace -- the
supernatural power -- to help me let go of my hatred and wrath."
He is convinced that it was the grace he had received in
becoming Catholic that was at work. He was, he wrote, "saved from
myself" and the "conversion from hatred to love -- one of many in my
life -- brought me closer to discovering my call to the priesthood."
The episode is illustrative of both the seriousness with
which Swetland embraces his Catholicism and of the seriousness with
which, at times, he challenges his own presumptions.
Rethinking war
It may also be such seriousness that is behind his belief
that the post-Cold-War era is summoning the church, especially the
church in the United States, to rethink some fundamental points about
war.
The opinion has roots in another Navy experience, much
earlier than the episode in the Aegean. It occurred when he was deployed
to a ballistic missile submarine for the summer as a midshipman. It was
the first time the young cadet confronted questions about the wisdom
and morality of nuclear deterrence.
For someone regularly pestered by big ethical issues, the
questions were unavoidable: The sub carried 16 missiles, each with the
potential to have 10 warheads and each of them could be targeted
independently.
Each warhead, he said, was 10 to 30 times more powerful
than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War
II. "So you do the math, and you could destroy up to 160 cities, which
for all practical purposes was the whole of the Soviet Union at the
time."
"We were handmaidens to the doomsday machine," he said.
"Every day we practiced for a football game we'd never play and if we
ever did play, we'd already lost."
Deterrence only works, he said, "if you have people who are
willing to turn the key and push that button." Otherwise, the weapons
aren't a deterrent.
"But then I said, 'Wait a minute, how can we threaten to do what we know is immoral to do?' I wasn't a Catholic. I wasn't even thinking about becoming a Catholic, but I was reading a lot of philosophy, and most moral philosophy would say your intention has a lot to do with the morality of the act, and is determinative. … If we have real people who are ready to turn those keys and push those buttons, then we've already formed them to be mass murders. They're just waiting for the conditions to be met. Which is totally external to their choice. It's when they're ordered to do so."
That is how, in the belly of a nuclear sub, the summer he
turned 20, Swetland came to a conclusion.
"I couldn't tell anybody about
it or it would have been career-ruining -- that I couldn't do what subs
did. So I quietly made the decision I wouldn't be a nuclear
submariner."
In time, he decided to leave the Navy career behind. Soon
after becoming Catholic, he had thought of becoming a priest, but a
priest adviser told him, "That's the zeal of the convert. If it's still
there in three years, then you can do something about it."
He went back to serve in the Navy following Oxford, "and
three years later it hadn't gone away, so I said, 'Maybe I need to do
something about this.' "
Ultimately, he managed to convince the Navy to allow him to
pursue the priesthood while still owing the service several years for
his time at the academy and at Oxford.
Time to reconsider
Now as a Catholic, a priest and an educator, the questions
continue to press. What may have been justified in the 1980s at the apex
of the Cold War seems excessive now.
By the end of that decade, a major
symbol of the war, the Berlin Wall, had fallen and the Soviet empire
soon collapsed. What didn't collapse was U.S. spending on defense.
"The timing is perfect," he said, to reconsider the U.S.
Catholic church's tolerance for deterrence as outlined in the U.S.
bishops' 1983 pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response."
Swetland said he understands "why they pulled their punch"
amid the Cold War and because "Pope John Paul II said, 'Well, if you're
moving toward disarmament' " then deterrence was at least temporarily
acceptable.
There's no need to reinvent the church's position, he said.
"All of the moral teaching is there in that document. We just pulled
our punch [and allowed for deterrence] in the end because we didn't want
to make the logical conclusion from what had been said."
He also would urge the church to push selective
conscientious objection. While the military recognizes conscientious
objection of religious groups that oppose all war, "one of the things
that the American military has never accepted that Catholic social
teaching and the standard ethic on war and peace demands," he said, "is
the ability of individuals to make selective conscientious objection."
He would also like to see an examination of the role of
military chaplains, a rethinking of the American "formal policy
requiring unconditional surrender," something the just war theory "has
never recognized as a just demand that you can make upon your enemy."
It is difficult terrain, he has come to understand, even
when popes are in agreement. His objection to the Iraq War as unjust,
for instance, brought stinging rebuke from conservative quarters.
More recently, when he weighed in to counter a disparaging
characterization of Islam from some Catholic quarters, he ended up in a
debate on Relevant Radio, where he has his own daily show, "Go Ask Your
Father," and generated a fair internet storm over the position.
The submariner for a summer who had contemplated the worst
case believes the United States could send a strong message to the world
by reducing military spending. He notes the familiar statistic that the
United States spends more on the military than the next six countries
combined and that most of those countries are allies.
"China is building up and North Korea, so it's probably
Pollyanna-ish to think we can get to an abolition of nuclear weapons,
though that would be my dream," he said. "And it's the dream of every
pope, conservative, liberal and in between, from John XXIII to Francis. I
think our bishops could take a lead on this if they would say, 'Enough!
Basta!' "
The influences keeping the military industrial complex
functioning at a high level have as much to do with the Pentagon
spending that occurs in almost every congressional district as it does
with foreign threats. The complex, said Swetland, is aimed at keeping a
strong triad -- missiles on subs, missiles on land, and missiles on
bombers in the air.
"And now, of course," he adds, "we can launch cruise missiles from almost any platform."
If the U.S. is intent on keeping the triad intact "that's a
huge chunk of the budget, just to start with, because these things are
not inexpensive to maintain, and we've got a modernization issue coming
up. A lot of these weapons systems are getting to the end of their
planned usefulness. We have to either update them or refurbish them."
The timing is right, he said, for us to ask, "Do we really need this kind of deterrent, and is it the moral thing to do?"
He asks whether the condition that John Paul II placed
on deterrence has been met -- that it is tolerable only if the country
is moving toward disarmament.
"Let's be honest. Let's get the best minds
we have in moral theology, the military, etc., and let's do what we did
with the peace pastoral. Let's have a discussion: Is it moral to
threaten to kill those we know it's wrong to kill?
"I think I know the answer to that question," he said, "but
if we examine that honestly, you know. If we're really serious about
being a pro-life church, let's be pro-life and get to the bottom of the
question."