Audio only:
Joe reviews the backlash against the Just War portion of Pope Leo’s “Magnifica Humanitas.”
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk about the fight over just war that’s being fought right now in the aftermath of Pope Leo’s new and cyclical. I want to start with a little bit of context. On Memorial Day, Pope Leo released Magnifica Humanitas on safeguarding the human person and the time of artificial intelligence. It’s being called the popes uncyclical on AI, but that’s a little bit like Calling Rarem Navarum, Leo the 13th and cyclical on the Industrial Revolution. The reality in both cases is about something much bigger than that. It’s about all of the ways that the dignity of the human person made in the image of God is being threatened today. And so one of the ways that Leo addresses this is what he calls the normalization of war. Leo argues that our current media and digital landscape promotes fragmentation and that we now live in an age of algorithms which reward conflict and that the result of all of this is that we live in an age marked by increasing polarization, resentment and propaganda.
I think many people share those critiques, but this then leads Leo to say this critical passage that has been very controversial. “It is in this context that humanity is slipping into a violent culture of power where peace no longer appears as a responsibility to be taken on, but as a fragile interval between conflicts. Today more than ever without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the just war theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war is now outdated. All right, to say that those words have been controversial would be a bit of an understatement. Pope Leo has gotten a lot of pushback and not just from human beings actually. The Catholic philosopher Michael Pacalik announced that within a few minutes after its release, he says he had read the New Encyclicals entirety because he can speed read, but then because he saw what he’s claimed were many problems in the uncyclical, for fun, he thought he would ask Claude to review it critically and then to rank them from most to least egregious.
So according to Claude, this LLM, this large language learning model, the Pope’s teaching unjust war is the most egregious problem. It is the gravest problem in the document because it means that the just war doctrine is effectively repudiated. Now I’m going to focus my response on Claude, partly because it’s a soulless entity that has no feelings to hurt also because I saw people pointing to this as an important critique to take seriously. In any case, a lot of the arguments made by this robot are also arguments made by human beings as well and this is closely related to another recent controversy involving Pope Leo. On Palm Sunday and his Palm Sunday homily, Pope Leo said that Jesus, king of peace, rejects war and that he does not listen to the prayers of those who age war but rejects them saying,” Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen.
Your hands are full of blood. “Now in context, the pope seems to be referring to those who start wars, those who wage wars, not simply those who fight in them. And he’s quoting scripture. In fact, he’s quoting Isaiah 1:15. “Nevertheless, people like Matthew McCusker at LifeSight News argue that this proves that the Pope must reject the inerrancy of sacred scripture and that he must reject the consistent teachings of the fathers and doctors of the church. Ultimately, Muscusker suggests this shows Pope Leo is a public heretic and calls into question the legitimacy of his election and whether he was ever Pope to begin with. Now, I think critiques like this are badly misinformed. I think they are misunderstanding both the history of just war doctrine, but also what it is Pope Leo is doing here. So let’s just start with this. What is the actual truth?
What is the status of just war doctrine today and is it really just liberal Catholics or heretics who think that it might be time to update our moral framework in context of war? And I’ll tell you quite honestly, the more I dug into this question, the more I was surprised. The more I realized that the voices arguing along very similar lines to Leo include not just people like Pope Francis, you’ve got Pope Benedict the 16th, but you also have figures like Cardinal Otaviani, a beloved figure within Catholic traditionalism. But it’s not just the kind of who’s who of who’s making the argument. I think once you understand the reasons behind the argument, you’ll see that this is a serious question we have to grapple with, that it’s not a question of repudiating prior church teaching, but it is a question of responding to a new situation in the world without suddenly turning into pacifists.
So with that said, I want to start the meat of Leo’s argument because many of the critiques I’ve seen, they’ve been acting as if he’s arguing for strict pacifism when he explicitly is not. For instance, here’s what Claude says. The present uncyclical goes materially further than its cited source and in doing so contradicts the catechism and the entire moral tradition. A Catholic reader must ask,” Is the church now a pacifist institution? “But this is absurd. Leo explicitly leaves untouched the right to self-defense in the strictest sense. A strict pacifist would not do that. Leo’s point is narrowly focused on offensive wars. So what is his actual argument as distinguished from the kind of straw man version that you see in a lot of critiques? Well, Leo quotes Pope Francis from Francis’s encyclical for Telli Tootie. In recent decades, every single war has been ostensibly justified.
The catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the possibility of legitimate defense by means of military force, which involves demonstrating that certain rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy have been met, yet it is easy to fall into an overly broad interpretation of this potential right. In this way, somewhat also wrongly justify even preventative attacks or acts of war that can hardly avoid entailing evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. Now, I get a lot of people are critical of Pope Leo, Pope Francis. Maybe they don’t care for these Popes personally, but my question is more simple. Are the Popes wrong on this? So if you’re somebody critical of the Pope on this question, my first question would just be, is this argument wrong? Because certainly as an American, I can name a long list of wars declared and undeclared that my own country has gotten into and seemingly every time it’s easy to find a long list of American Catholic theologians and leaders ready to explain why it totally counts as a just war this time.
In response to this argument, Claude argues that this is a two quoque without philosophical weight. That’s a nonsensical assertion, but what the robot means seemingly is that virtually every moral doctrine can be misapplied, which is true and that this by itself doesn’t render a doctrine outdated or incorrect or anything like that also true. But remember, the whole point of just war theory is that supposedly this is a useful tool to delineate between just and unjust uses of military force. And if it’s not reliably doing that in the modern context, it is worth asking if we need a different set of tools in the toolbox. And the deeper issue here is that modern war simply has changed. Pope St. John the 23rd pointed this out in 1963 in his encyclical Potchman terrorist. He said that men in his day were becoming more and more convinced that any disputes which may arise between nations must be resolved by negotiation and agreement and not by recourse to arms and that this was chiefly because of the terrifying destructive force of modern weapons, such that in the atomic age, it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice.
Notice, this is not an argument that war is never justifiable in any world under any circumstances, but just that in the modern age with how deadly and dangerous weapons are, then it no longer makes sense to turn to war as a way of repairing injustice. Similarly, when asked about the Iraq war in 2003, Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out first that Pope St. John Ball II had opposed the Iraq war on the grounds that it didn’t meet the criteria for just war, but then Ratzinger asks, “Given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant group, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still listed to admit the very existence of a just war, and it’s not just that the last several Popes have all raised this or similar questions. It’s also this question has been raised by theologians of unquestionable fidelity and unimpeachable Orthodoxy.
The most famous of these is Cardinal Alfredo Otaviani. I really enjoy Joseph Trappek’s description of him as the epitome of intransigent pre-Vatican II Catholicism. He’s being lighthearted about that, but it is nevertheless true that Notaviani’s code of arms bore the motto, Semper Edem, always the same. And he was a powerful figure in the mid 20th century and cracking down on progressive theologians. He’s nobody’s progressive. And yet in 1949, he writes an article in the Dominican Journal Black Friars called The Future of Offensive War. And he makes a really simple argument that just war theory was meant for a different set of facts and that the difference between war as it was and war as we know it is precisely one of nature. He then describes six different ways that a 20th century war is markedly different and kind from wars and centuries past. So what is it that makes modern warfare so different?
Now, some of that is going to be obvious the predictable stuff you could come up with immediately. It’s easier than ever to engage in the wide scale destruction of civilian populations. We now have things like weapons of mass destruction and so on. But the first point he made is, one, I don’t hear a lot of people making, and it involves communication what we would now call globalization. On account of the great development of communication in modern times and the desire on the part of nations to extend their interest to all parts of the world, excuses for war are now all too frequent. To my ears, that sounds quite a bit like Leo’s own argument. It’s easier than ever to push a country into war, not just because of military infrastructure, but also because of modern communications and modern propaganda. But modern technology poses another challenge as well.
And this one, I don’t see people factor in as much as they should. It’s really hard these days to know how strong your opponent really is. Just war doctrine requires that a nation can only go to war if there are serious prospects of success, but as Otavianoi observes, a regime may be under the impression that it can engage in a just war with hope of success, but in fact, secret weapons can be prepared to such effect nowadays that they being unforeseen can upset and utterly thwart all calculations. Think about something like World War II, which Otaviani is right in the midst of, thinking of the state of technology at the beginning of the war and how unthinkably different technology is at the end of the war with things like the atomic bomb, advances and aviation and everything else, that even calculating how likely you are to win is almost impossible just because the world is changing so quickly.
I think you have a related issue with something like the war in Ukraine. Early on it looked like Russia might win that war within a few weeks, but with a huge amount of money infused from the West and the creation of new drone technology and everything else, that war has now dragged on for more than four years and it’s not clear what reasonable hope of success exists on either side of the conflict. In any event, after laying out these six different ways that warfare is different today than it was in the past, Otaviani concludes that no conceivable cause could ever be sufficient justification for the evils, the slaughter, the destruction, the moral and religious upheavals which war today entails. And here I want to add something I didn’t really explain before. One of the reasons Otaviani is concerned about modern warfare is not just the obvious stuff that civilian populations are killed and people die in wars and it’s really disruptive and everything else, but that it has this really bad spiritual consequence, that being in a country ravaged by war is really bad for the morality of the people.
I don’t mean like the morale, I mean like the spiritual wellbeing of the people and that this is also true if you’re part of a country that is constantly waging war, that there are real spiritual consequences that need to be factored into this equation as well. And practice Senataviani says, a declaration of war will never be justifiable. He acknowledges a defensive war could be, but he says a defensive war should never be undertaken unless illegitimate authority with whom the decision rests shall have both certainty of success and very solid proofs that the good accruing to the nation from the war will more than outweigh the untold evils, which will bring on the nation itself and on the world in general. And Otaviani points out this is not just his own personal view. This is also the view of many of the great theologians of his day.
People like Father Mariana Cordovani, who was one of Popias II’s most trusted advisors and who had argued back in 1939, the conditions which theology requires to justify a war no longer app. So his argument is not just Germany can’t invade Poland. It’s that seemingly no country can launch an invasion of another country these days. None of these guys are saying just war doctrine was a mistake. It was a wrong turn, anything like that. They’re just saying the bar for just war doctrine is high, that you have to really have good reasons to engage particularly in offensive war and it’s not clear how any modern offensive war is going to be able to meet those criteria given the destructiveness of modern warfare, given all these other consequences. And so I want to just really stress here. This is not about a change in Catholic doctrine. This is not saying we made a mistake, we should all be pacifist, noth like that.
Let me illustrate that a little bit. Imagine self-defense. Somebody’s coming to rob you and take your wallet or your purse. In Catholic theology, there’s a legitimate right to self-defense. You’re morally permitted to repel force with moderation, but I want you to think now how that equation changes if it turns out that the person trying to steal your purse or your wallet has a gun trained on you or maybe has a gun trained on some member of your family. In that case, you might choose dostility. You just hand over your money, not because you’re a pacifist all of a sudden, but because to do otherwise in those particular contexts would be reckless and imprudent. What I understand these Popes and these theologians to be saying is that this is essentially the equation we find ourselves in today. We are surrounded with people not just with guns, but nuclear weapons pointed at us on our families.
And so even if in the military and economic and social conditions in the 13th century, you might be able to justify small scale active military aggression for the common good, you no longer can do that today because things have changed so dramatically on the ground. If that’s the case, the question I’m left with is where does that leave us? And I post it like this. The 20th century saw the creation of enormous weapons of indiscriminate destruction, weapons that necessarily entailed lots of innocent people being killed, but it seems to me that the 21st century is seeing or might see the creation of increasingly accurate weapons that can actually help avoid civilian casualties and it might be tempting to say, “Well, how does that change the calculus for a just war? Because it seems like it might.” But Pope Leo is quite clear in this encyclical that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense, that the danger is war might become more tempting the less destructive it feels.
So again, this is not an endorsement of pacifism. This is not a repudiation of Catholic tradition, but it is a good principle for us to stand on. If we are going to be serious about being peacemakers in the modern world, we should really be believers in war as a last resort war in cases of legitimate self-defense rather than being warmongers. Finally, I want to really contrast this with the view other Christians sometimes take. I’m thinking in particular here of, for example, Christian dispensationalists who seem to really eagerly and aggressively promote the state of Israel, not simply preserving its right to exist, but encouraging an expansionistic and militaristic kind of approach that is likely to lead to conflict and which seems to be supported by some of the most prominent Christian dispensationalists with the express intention of trying to start World War III. I highlight some of the main figures involved in that and how Christians should properly respond to that kind of theology in this video right here.
For shameless popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.