News — interesting news — is very often about conflict. Activists, criminals, bidders, ideologues, lawyers, policy-makers, executives, politicians, PACs, political parties, states, nations and alliances argue, yell, debate, connive, sue, sanction and bomb each other in a pursuit of whatever it is they want at the time: Whether at the auction block or the trading bloc, if it’s a big conflict, it’s newsworthy.
The past two weeks were no exception: Militants in Iraq claimed responsibility for killing two hostages Monday. Amnesty International charged Canada with “terrible official indifference and apathy” toward attacks against aboriginal women that AI described as brutal, citing at least 500 cases of vanishing and murders over the past three decades. Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla., requested a re-hearing in the case involving Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman whose husband has fought in courts to let her die. And, of course, President Bush and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry traded blows in last Thursday’s foreign policy presidential debate.
Of course, that conflict can be news isn’t, well, news at all. I’d like to spend this space, then, talking about conflict of a less philosophically consistent sort, one largely overlooked by the media in favor of stories more newsworthy but no more potentially instructive.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City — according to tradition the site of Jesus’ burial and crucifixion — priests of different sects traded punches Sept. 27 over whether a door at a nearby Catholic chapel should remain open during a particular procession, the priests presumably forgetting their Biblical obligation to “make every effort to do what leads to peace and mutual edification.”
That Greek Orthodox and Franciscan priests resorted to fisticuffsmanship — starting a fight that ultimately injured dozens — on what many consider Christianity’s holiest site suggests not only that a few clergymen’s moral compasses temporarily drifted away from commonsense north, but something deeper about human nature, too.
Despite the importance of the site — indeed, in part because of it — this isn’t the first time in the church’s history that clerics have curled their prayer hands into clenched fists over dogmatic minutiae.
Two years ago, a Greek patriarch and an Armenian clergyman traded blows over which of them would leave the building’s tomb last at the end of the ceremony. In 2003, Israeli police brokered an 11th hour deal among denominations arguing over which would lead an Easter service. But in the most recent spat, the day ended when Israeli police brandished clubs to break up the fight, arresting four priests in the process.
The point is this: It’s easy to get so lost in the details — like whether the door of a basilica should remain open when a particular religious progression passes — that one forgets about the important thing those details add up to — say, messages of peace, piety and goodwill toward men. People who operate under rules can become so preoccupied with them that those rules provoke behavior that conflicts with the reasons that they were established.
To offer an intentionally politically sensitive example (and one admittedly oversimplified here for the sake of space): Muckraker extraordinaire Bob Woodward argued in his book “Plan of Attack” that the Bush administration so fixated itself with presenting a case for war with Iraq that it failed to plan sufficiently for the post-invasion occupation. (The point here is not whether the war with Iraq was justified, but that an ill-timed preoccupation has plainly and unduly burdened the Coalition — and America in particular — with a strategic deficit that is now being paid for in lives. That shortfall and human toll surely leave the Coalition’s goals in Iraq more difficult, if not less popular, too.)
Instructively, if religious motivation, however misguided or antithetical to a given religion’s “intended” or “actual” values, is enough to push clerics to a brawl over something as innocuous as the closure of a door, it’s at least easier to see why the perception of a more dramatic conflict of values can drive misguided fanatics to much worse than a street scuffle.

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