What Makes a War “Just?”

With the conflict between Israel, Hamas and now the United States Bombing Iran, there is a lot of disagreement even among Catholics on whether these actions are just. Joe shows Church teaching on just war to help us break through the noise.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk about the concept of just war because there are a lot of conflicts going on in the world right now in places like Ukraine and Israel and the Palestinian Territories in Iran and probably many other places around the world that are not making the news to the same degree. And in many of these cases, the US is asked to be involved directly or indirectly or Christians just want to know who to root for, who to support and how we should respond. And there is an actual moral framework for answering these questions, but many of us aren’t familiar with it. So I want to explore the idea of what just war actually means because it gets misused or ignored quite frequently. But I want to first start by raising a challenge to it. So I’m going to do this in a few parts.

Number one, I’m going to look at an alternative to say, shouldn’t we just be pacifist? Isn’t the idea of just war contrary to the making of peace that is clearly taught by Jesus in places like the Sermon on the Mount? How do we get from turn the other cheek to yeah, you can wage war sometimes. And second, once we see why we shouldn’t just be strict pacifists that there is such a need for a doctrine like just war, I want to look at the different parts of it. So the beginning was sometimes called use at Bellum, the reasons for why you can go to war, what makes a just war at the outset, when is it just to resort to state violence? Second use in bellow, like, okay, once a war’s been declared, once you’ve decided, okay, we’re doing this war thing, that doesn’t end the discussion.

There’s still a morality to what you’re allowed to do even during a just war. So even if you say World War II is just, that doesn’t mean the atomic bombings or the bombing of Dresden automatically are just as well. And then I want to look at a third component that is not in traditional teaching of just war, but has been proposed by several leading Catholic thinkers and other moralists as well that I think we need to take very seriously in light of modern warfare, which is what do you do after the war? So with those three things in mind, let’s turn to the first question. Shouldn’t Christians just be pacifists? And I want to start by looking to the work of Elizabeth Anco or GEM Anco, who gave what I consider the best response to this question because it is tempting to say, obviously the ideal is peace and so shouldn’t we all just bite the bullet and agree to be pacifist?

And she says No, and it’s actually bad to teach that. And she does this pretty convincingly in an essay called War and Murder, which is part of a book from 1961 called Nuclear Weapons, a Catholic Response. She’s very clearly against the use of nuclear weapons. She spoke very strongly against the use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of atomic war, but she nevertheless is strongly to the idea of pacifism. And she gives what I think are sound philosophical and biblical reasons for why she begins it by posing this problem. She says, since there are always thieves and fraud and men who commit violent attacks on their neighbors and murderers, and since without law backed by adequate force, there are usually gangs of bandits. And since there are in most places laws administered by people who command violence to enforce the law against lawbreakers, the question arises what is a just attitude to this exercise of violent coercive power on the part of rulers and their subordinate officers?

So I like that she actually frames it this way before she gets into the question of war. She just raises the problem of state violence more broadly, which is to say there’s a reason that policemen carry guns. And so if someone is going to be a strict pacifist, you would have to say, not only can you not have soldiers, not only can you not have armed forces, you can’t have cops, or at least not cops who are armed or able to use violence including physical restraining violence in order to create social order. So the logical conclusion of pure pacifism would be anarchy because you wouldn’t be able to state power is always ultimately backed up by the threat of violence. And this is actually a point that libertarians and anarchists often make, and they’re right to make it that even a law is benign as the speed limit at the end of the chain of enforcement, there is the possibility of violence.

Think about it this way. You speed, you get a ticket, you refuse to pay the ticket, just hey, you’re just going to continue to break the law. So the milder enforcement mechanism of you get pulled over, you get a ticket, or maybe you just refuse to pull over at all and you just have a high speed chase at a certain point in that chain, if you just refuse to obey, refuse to cooperate, refuse to submit to state authority, the state can and will use violent restraint or force sometimes even deadly force against you. And this is true in every country on earth that has a functional state. This is what makes a state functional, is the fact that you can’t just violate it willy-nilly because the state is stronger than you and can physically stop you from doing the thing you want to do instead of obeying.

This is where jails come from. This is where guards at jails come from. This is where police come from, and so this is the state use of violence. Just recognize that at the outset. She’s then going to say there’s two ways of responding to that. One is to say that’s bad. The world is already an absolute jungle and this is just a manifestation of the total chaos and violence that we’re afflicted with. But the other response is to say, no, this is actually good, that it’s necessary and right, that the state should have this kind of power which makes the world less of a jungle than it would be otherwise. Like yeah, disorder and chaos and violence and all that exist, but this is on the good side that holds back a much worse outcome and therefore we should support this unless it’s being misused, the unjust exercise we should be against, but the exercise injustice we should be fine with.

So that’s the framework, and clearly she’s going to take the second position. She’s then going to, after talking about that for some period of time, she’s then going to turn to the issue of pacifism and she’s going to look particularly at Christian pacifism. And I think this is worth looking to as Christians because I think one of the convincing arguments for many people is the appeal to Jesus and to the Sermon on the Mount. And so she argues that a powerful ingredient in this passivism is the prevailing image of Christianity, the kind of vibe. And she said it commands a sentimental respect among people who have no belief in Christianity. So you’ll often find people who say like, oh, I’m a pacifist. I’m actually more like Jesus than you are as a Christian. So whether they believe in Jesus or are trying to follow him or just kind of have a vibe like Jesus is this kind of peacenik kind of hippie and we’re on the same team.

It’s this idea that what Jesus really taught the true Christianity of Jesus is this radical pacifism. And you’ll hear that a lot again, both from Pacifistic Christians and from non-Christians who are pacifists. And in any case, Anscombe says it’s therefore important to understand this image of Christianity and to know how false it is. So she’s going to say, this is not true. This is not true Christianity, and this is not faithful to what Jesus actually taught. This is going to, in her argument at least distort both the New Testament and the Old Testament, but she worries that something deeper is going on, namely that according to this image, Christianity becomes an ideal and beautiful religion, but one which is impossible to practice except for maybe a few rare characters like sure, maybe some people are privileged enough to live the life of radical poverty, radical peace, radical, everything else, but the overwhelming majority of society can’t actually live this out.

And so your model of Christianity is not something that is possible for the world. It is not possible to actually embrace that. A world where everybody endorsed this and everybody just became this radical pacifist wouldn’t actually be a functional world. You can see that kind of in practice it’s a preaching of Christianity as this sort of impossible ideal. And second, it’s a presenting of Christianity that puts it in contrast with the Old Testament that it treats the God of the Old Testament or Old Testament law as being fundamentally contrary to New Testament law. And it does this in both parts based on a misinterpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. So here we got to get technical for a second to ask a question that many people implicitly ask but maybe don’t have the language. So the question is this, when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek, when he commands you not to repay evil with evil and not even to resist when he was evil, is he giving what’s called a precept or what’s called a counsel?

In other words, is he giving a law that is required by everyone or is he pointing to an ideal path when possible? So here’s how the catechism distinguishes between those two things. Jesus gives us both. There are some universal moral laws that he gives us and other things that are not meant to be applied universally and everywhere. And we’ll have to look to see which kind of thing this is. So as the catechism puts it, the new law meaning the law of Christ or the gospel contains both precepts but also evangelical counsels. So the difference is the precepts are intended to remove whatever’s incompatible with charity. So everybody is commanded to love God and love neighbor, and there are certain behaviors that are always opposed to that and have to be rejected universally by everyone everywhere in every situation you can never murder, you can never steal, and you can never do things like that.

Those are often what are called negative precepts and they’re universally applicable. In addition, there are things that are universal positive precepts, but don’t apply always and everywhere give to the poor. There are also things that are counsels. These are things that not everybody’s actually called to. And so the kicker here is in paragraph 1974 of the catechism where quote, St. Francis to sales who says God doesn’t want every person to keep all of the councils. So in other words, not everybody is called to say celibacy. And if everyone on earth embrace celibacy, that wouldn’t actually be good because the human race would not continue to exist after a generation. And so it’s only for the person’s time, opportunities, and constraints. That is prudentially determined that some people are called to this. And there’s a really clear example of Jesus describing this, but unfortunately it’s often mistranslated.

So it’s when Jesus is talking about celibacy in Matthew 19 and he says, not all men can receive this word, this logos, but only those to whom it is given. So he is clearly describing it as a counsel for some, not as a commandment for all. And yet unfortunately that word logos, this word gets translated for whatever reason in the RSV as precept, which makes it sound like the exact opposite of what it’s, it is not a precept, it’s a council. The evangelical councils poverty, chastity and obedience. These are ways that monks and nuns are called to live in a different way than laypeople or even secular priests. So the question we have before us is when Jesus says, do not resist one who is evil, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him. The other also is this a universal law.

You are never allowed to engage in self-defense and even the state is not allowed to use self-defense or is this a counsel that some people are called to a radical non-violence and a radical act of foregoing even legitimate self-defense for the sake of the gospel? Well ans scum is going to suggest you can’t take this part as a universally applicable precept since literally the very next thing Jesus says is give to him who begs from you. And nobody basically thinks that everyone is required to give to every person who asks anything of them always that is completely unworkable as a universal precept. We are called to be generous. That’s true. There’s a counsel to be radically generous, but it is not a precept that it is immoral to ever say no to a beggar. And so taking the Sermon on the Mount as giving precepts when it’s giving counsels is actually really dangerous.

And this is what Anco Mar gives that pacifists are doing. They take the counsel of radical non-violence and treat it as a law, as a precept, and she warns the turn of counsels into precepts results in high sounding principles. But principles that are mistakenly high and strict are a trap. They may easily lead in the end directly or indirectly to the justification of monstrous things. In other words, it’s not just like, oh, you happen to have higher principles or higher ideals than I do, which still sounds really good. It’s that when you do that, when you set them implausibly high, you end up justifying much worse behavior than if you had a realistic and achievable moral standard. She gives the example of what Jesus says about poverty. So you can find in the history of the church people who took Jesus’ words about not owning stuff to mean literally Christians were not allowed to own anything.

There were a branch of radical Franciscans after the death of St. Francis of Assisi who argued it was sinful to own property at all and they were condemned by the church for this because it’s a dangerous and false teaching. It’s a heavy burden that it’s not fair to put on people, but more than that, as she puts it, people who believe that any property with theft would go about thinking swindling was unavoidable. Like if it’s wrong to own property and it’s impossible not to have some amount of property, even you own the food that you’re about to eat, then you just have to say, well, it’d be great if we lived in a world in which we could not swindle, which we could not steal, but everybody has to. So you’ve set this implausibly high ideal, but since you can’t live it out and nobody else can, you end up justifying theft the very thing you were trying to avoid.

And so she can imagine someone trying to live this out saying, absolute honesty, I can respect that, but of course that means having no property and well, I respect those who follow that course. I have to compromise with this sorted world. If one then must compromise with evil and heavy quotations by owning property and engaging in trade, then the amount of swindling one does will depend on convenience. In other words, you can no longer draw a line between moral and immoral trade. If you say engagement in capitalism is evil or property is theft or any of these things, you’ve taken the really clear line between theft and legitimate trade and you’ve eradicated it to say all of it is immoral like tricking someone or trading with someone, those are both sinful, those are both wrong. Those are both theft. And at that point you might as well just steal.

If you can’t avoid the sin of theft, no matter what you’re doing and you’re forced into it, then get the best thing you can get out of it, which would be to engage in the worst kind of behavior. And so this is what she’s worried about with pacifism that people who treat, oh, well thou shall not kill mean we can’t use the state to enforce violence ever. That in practice this is an absolutely unlivable ideal that you still have criminals, you still have invading armies. And so you end up having to just say, well, we’ve got to do the thing we were commanded not to do. And so then you go whole hog and wage war to the utmost. And you can see this in practice, I would suggest the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons will claim that the 10 Commandments literally prohibit all killing.

But because that’s impossible to live out and because God commands killing at times like war in the Bible, that therefore sometimes God can use command you to violate the 10 commandments. Now this is an incoherent view of God because it pits God against God, but in this view it allows them to say abortion might be okay sometimes if your LDS bishop says it is. That’s a good example of where you set the moral standard in practically high and then end up justifying actually immoral things. And so in response to that, Anscombe is going to say the truth about Christianity is that it is a severe and practicable religion. In other words, yeah, there are hard teachings in Christianity, but they’re realistic. They are achievable, they are possible. Jesus does not command the impossible. He does not tell you to do things he knows you cannot do.

It is not a beautifully ideal but impracticable religion. So if your standard of morality is impossible, then it’s not a Christian standard of morality. And then to answer the second point, this pitting of the old and New Testament against one another, anco makes the argument I think pretty convincingly that Jesus, even when he says you have heard it said and eye for an eye and a truth for tooth. But I tell you turned in cheek all of that, he’s not repudiating the Mosaic law. He’s repudiating a misinterpretation of it because if you look at the Old Testament context, the whole bit about the eye for an eye and tooth for a truth was about the state having proportionate response to violence. It was used and continues to be used by people who quoted out of context to justify vengeance. But if you actually read the Old Testament, which many of the people pitting the old, the New Testament against each other don’t seem to have done deeply enough.

There are warnings against violence that the New Testament builds off of rather than repudiate. So for instance, Leviticus 19 says, you shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus doesn’t repudiate that. He just says your neighbor includes people who aren’t ethnically the same as you. It includes Samaritans, it includes foreigners and so on. It includes the people who you’re inconvenienced by. But notice that the Old Testament is already saying, don’t go seek vengeance. Well, likewise, Proverbs says, if your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat. If he’s thirsty, give him water to drink. And then in a line that St. Paul will quote later for you’ll heap coals of fire on his head and the Lord will reward you. In other words, you were already in the Old Testament told Don’t seek personal vengeance.

Yes, the state has the ability to inflict violence in response to violence. You don’t have that permission that’s already there in Old Testament law. And Jesus is building upon not repudiating the kind of moral building blocks that we already find in the Old Testament. So that’s the Old Testament that she’s going to argue misunderstanding what God is actually doing. In the Old Testament, it’s pitting the two testaments against each other. But similarly in the New Testament, if you just take the Sermon on the Mount, you might think, oh yeah, well the New Testament teaching is radically pacifistic, but this is a pretty selective reading of the New Testament as well. So you have for instance in Matthew eight, Jesus encounters the Roman centurion and rather than rebuking him for being a centurion, he says, truly, I say to you, not even in Israel, have I found such faith?

Similarly, you have soldiers who come to John the Baptist, John the Baptist tells them what to do and it involves living out their vocation as a soldier justly, not repudiating the fact that they’re soldiers. Similarly, you have more direct statements in Romans 13, whereas St. Paul says, let every person be subject to the governing authorities. And then he goes on to warn that if you do wrong by them, you should be afraid because the governing authority does not bear the sword in vain. He’s the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrong door. That doesn’t sound like radical pacifism. And similarly in one Peter three we’re told to be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor or supreme or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right.

Now, look, I should just say this for the sake of making sure I’m not misunderstood here. It is not the case that we’re always obliged to do whatever the civil authority tells us to do. The civil authority tells you to do something contrary to the will of God. You obey God rather than men, but you are subject for the Lord’s sake to human institutions as long as they’re not teaching you to do something that is against the Lord. So that’s the first thing I’d just say. I think there’s sound biblical and philosophical reasons as anum highlights to say pacifism is not Christian teaching and in fact is not even a good teaching to put forward as an ideal. But I want to consider a second objection before getting into the nitty gritty of the principles of just war. And that’s didn’t Pope Francis change all this?

Because Pope Francis said some things that sound like just a repudiation of the whole idea of just war. But I think in context he’s making a different point than people think he’s making. And I think the point he’s making is a good one that we need to take seriously. So an example of the language he used that sometimes sounds like a total repudiation in speaking with patriarchal of the Russian Orthodox Church. He says, as pastors, we have the duty to remain close and to help all those suffering due to the war. He obviously has in view here Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He said there was a time even in our own churches when people spoke of holy war or just war, we can no longer speak like that today the Christian awareness of the importance of peace has developed. Okay, so you take lines like that and his other statements that sounds similar and it sounds like he’s just saying you can never defend yourself as a nation, but he is not saying that.

And in fact, in a 2022 press conference coming back from one of his trips to Rome, he clarified, he said, war itself is a mistake. It is a mistake. But then he said, but the right to defense, yes, that yes, but use it when necessary. So when he talks about just war, he’s talking about coming up with a list of reasons you can invade somebody else. He is not talking about lawful self-defense. And in this he’s reflecting what the catechism teaches. Catechism of the Catholic church in 2308 says All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense once all peace efforts have failed. So that in turn is a quotation by the way of the second Vatican Council.

Gotti met Spez, which then talks about how there are state authorities and others who share public responsibility, who have the duty to conduct such grave matter soberly and to protect the welfare of the people entrusted to their care. But it is one thing to undertake action for the just defense of the people in something else, to seek the subjugation of other nations. So you can’t just invade neighboring countries and use just war as a pretext for it. Now that is a shift, understand in the past there were Catholic theologians who argued on the grounds of just war. You could sometimes invade other nations that were not planning to invade you not as self-defense, but just for whatever other reason you had a just cause to invade them. And the church is saying, no, you can legitimately use the state defensively, but you cannot just go around attacking other nations even if you think they’ve got something that belongs to.

You say, and I think there’s a few reasons for this shift, but I think it’s a good shift. I think it’s also important to note that if this is right, there is in a certain sense no such thing as a just word. You’ll sometimes hear that kind of language. That does not mean the principles of just war don’t apply. It means that you can’t have a conflict in which both sides are legitimately involved in a just war. There can be just war on the side of one, but it’s an unjust war on the side of the aggressor, on the side of the one who is attacking without justification, this other party. Hopefully that makes sense. Just like you can’t have a situation where two people are fighting one another to the death and they both legitimately have self-defense. Nope, you don’t have that. Only one of them can justly claim to be acting in self-defense.

Maybe it’s hard to figure out sometimes, but those are the basic principles. So okay, with that said, what are the principles of just war? Because when you’re looking at a conflict and wondering who to support, there’s a few things you have to look at. And as I said at the very beginning, this is divided in a few parts. So first you have what’s sometimes called the use at Beum that I is sometimes a J, which just means the law to war. In other words, what are the conditions under which you can begin a just war, which again is not you invading, it’s you defending. And the catechism begins by saying the strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. But I want to focus on that line, legitimate defense for military force and ask, what about preventative wars? We just saw a situation where the US sent B two bombers in to attack Iranian nuclear facilities and depending on how one views it, Iran was either planning to build a nuke at some point in the future.

It always seemed like it was weeks or months away and has been for a couple decades now, either that or they were constantly threatening. Look at how close we are in order to bring the US to the bargaining table to get better deals. As we saw with the nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration that they were either using the threat of building a nuke as just a bargaining chip or they really were just about to build one and they just always get caught just in time. Now you can read that situation in either of those two lights based on who you believe, but it’s important to at least ask the question, is it ever valid to have a preventative war? Are you ever allowed to preemptively strike? This was one of the issues that came up very strongly in the invasion of Iraq where similarly we were told they were just about to get a WMD, and it obviously in that case turned out not to be true and a lot of the intelligence was false or people were lying.

What are the actual standards? So it’s a little nuanced. Think about it in terms of lawful self-defense. You can use lethal force to defend yourself. If someone is about to inflict lethal force against you, you don’t have to wait for them to shoot you first. If they lift a gun as if they’re about to shoot you, you can shoot them and you can shoot them to completely eliminate the threat. On the other hand, the mere fact that someone’s a gun owner would not be a reason you could go and kill them. So you have to have something more than that, something that looks like you’re under immediate and direct threat. Well, similarly, as the compendium of the social doctrine of the church, which is kind of a summary of the catechism, explains engaging in a preventative war without clear proof that an attack is imminent, is going to raise serious moral and dri questions, moral questions because it appears to violate just war and juridical questions because you don’t have clear legal justification morally or under international law to just invade someone else because they have weapons that could potentially hurt you because every nation on earth has weapons that could potentially hurt you.

And so you need something more than that. In fact, more than the fact that they have weapons and don’t like you, there is no shortage of people who don’t like, I mean I’m an American. There’s no shortage of people who don’t like Americans and countries that say nasty things about Americans. And so if that’s the justification for invading, you can invade a lot of countries and doing that is going to produce even more people who don’t like you and therefore you can invade more countries. So the fact that somebody doesn’t like you and has potentially deadly weapons is not enough by itself. Morally, you need something more. You need clear proof that an attack is imminent. That’s the moral standard because otherwise you end up opening up the idea of just war to almost any invasion, like find a country that gets invaded that didn’t have weapons capable of killing.

Well, if you have an army by definition, you could potentially, the Nazis are able to invade Poland, claiming Poland was about to invade them in 1939, and that’s obviously ridiculous. But the point there is, yeah, Poland did technically have an army. Now granted, they were still riding horses. They still had a calvary when the Nazis had tanks, but they did technically have deadly weapons. That’s not enough to justify preemptively invading. And so there’s a reason why the Vatican was very clear that the invasion of Iraq, for example, was not a just war. So okay, let’s go back to the catechism. The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force is going to be five things, four or five things that you have to all show. And as it explains, the gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy at one.

In the same time, you have to have all of these. This is not, you got 60% good enough, it’s not if you have one of these, you can do enough. No, you have to have all of these present to begin the fight. Number one, the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting grave uncertain, like it is not worth going to war over a trivial violation. There has to be a serious threat that would justify a proportionate kind of response. Two, all other means of putting an into it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective. War cannot be the first resort. You have to try other means like diplomatic ones, maybe economic sanctions, international interventions of various kinds. There are other ways of stopping conflicts that often work. You need to at least try those first.

Third, there must be serious prospects of success. Now, that’s a tricky one, but one thing that’s going to mean, and we’re going to get back to this in a minute, is you have to have a clear aim that you need to say, okay, we are fighting to eradicate this very specific threat, or we’re fighting to just repel these invaders from within our national borders. There has to be some way of knowing whether you’ve achieved your goal and some reason to believe that you might seriously achieve that goal. So in thinking about the serious prospects of success, that is presupposing an underlying thing, you have an idea of success, things like the war on terror, you have no serious prospect of success because it’s so amorphous that there’s no way of knowing if you have won. Fourth, the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders greater than the evil to be eliminated.

And then it warns here, the power of modern means of destruction was very heavily in evaluating this condition. So if you have been following the news, the US was willing to support to repel Russia’s invasion but didn’t want Ukrainian forces going into Russia. And that is sound because if there’s a risk of nuclear war, even if you have a just reason to repel people invading your country, if you have a strong likelihood of triggering these modern means of destruction on your side or the other side, the fight is probably not worth it. If going to war means you’re going to get nuked, then you should probably allow yourself just to be invaded. As unpleasant as that is, you should find a nonviolent means of resisting if the violent means just means that you’re going to be eradicated.

This reflects G Spez the second Vatican council document I referred to earlier, which points out that atomic weapons and now nuclear weapons change this dynamic pretty profoundly, and it makes it very hard to see how a war today can meet these criteria unless it’s very clear on both sides that neither side is going to use nuclear weapons or in a case where neither side has such weapons, but weapons of mass destruction that are targeting civilian population and all this, that sort of thing is going to make four a pretty tricky standard. Now, there’s a fifth criterion that the catechism doesn’t mention, but is traditionally part of just war, which they might just be taking for granted in their discussion of legitimate military defense, which is the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. Though Aquinas talks about this meaning that what might be a just war for one country might not be a just war for another country, and also the state has the ability to declare a just war the individual person.

But there are some things that the state can do, including the use of violence that individuals and even groups of individuals like mobs can’t do. This applies whether you’re talking about the use of force in law enforcement. It applies if we’re talking about death penalty, although this is very controversial, it applies certainly if you’re talking about just war, that I don’t have the ability to just unilaterally say, I’m going to go create a movement to fight against this country. So that’s the fifth criterion that you don’t see mentioned in the catechism. If you want to take just those four or you want to take all five, those are the things you’re looking at to know is this going to be a just for? And that’s actually not going to be the end of it, but this is the beginning to know whether a war itself is just so you can apply those standards.

I want to give a couple examples. So for instance, is the Israel Hamas War A Just War? And the church seems to be saying no pretty clearly. So for instance, Archbishop Katya spoke at the UN and reaffirmed the Vatican’s commitment to a ceasefire and ultimately to a two-state solution with a negotiated piece using international authority to help broker a lasting piece for the creation of an independent Palestine and a neutral adjudication or administration of the city of Jerusalem. Since Jerusalem is both an important city for Palestinians and for Israelis, the justice and peace commission of the Holy Land, which if I’m not mistaken, is organized by the bishops of the Holy Land, has also spoken on this last year in a document called Just War. And they say since the horrific attacks on October 7th on military installations, residential areas in a music festival in Southern Israel by Hamas and other militants in the catastrophic war waged in response by Israel Catholics, leaders beginning with Pope Francis have continuously called for an immediate ceasefire and a release of hostages.

So both sides have something they need to do. Catholic mor theologians around the world have also outlined how neither the attacks by Hamas on October 7th nor Israel’s devastating war and response satisfy the criteria for just war according to Catholic doctrine. Now, hopefully it’s clear why intentionally kidnapping and murdering men, women, and children who are unarmed is clearly a violation of just war. What is less clear to some people is why is Israel’s response not just war? Because there is a sense in which you’d say, okay, well, they have the right to defend themselves, but the justice and peace commission of the Holy Land argues that they kind of say briefly, it’s not their place to repeat the arguments already made, but they nevertheless argue that negotiations have repeatedly not been exhausted before the use of force. So the second criterion, they resorted to war too quickly.

They are not willing to seriously engage in peace talks, which is why both sides are resorting to violence and Israel’s lack of stated objectives make serious prospects of success and possible to measure what will it look like for Israel to win this war? Is it the eradication of everyone in Hamas? Is it the removal of all Palestinians from the Palestinian Territories? What does it look like to actually win this? If those things are not clearly defined, it’s very hard to argue that you have met the third criterion that you have a likelihood of success because what does success even look like? It’s not clear. So okay, that’s just an example to call it a case study. What does it look like for us to analyze if a war is just or not? This is not the end of the moral analysis. And I think this is where people sometimes go wrong because they can look at a conflict and say, Hey, I think all of these criteria are met and therefore we’re good to go.

But that’s only the beginning. Literally it is the beginning. The US add beum like going to war. Once you’re in war, just war theory still says there’s a right way and a wrong way of waging a war that if you’re, again, use the example of World War ii, I think most people would agree it’s a just war on the side of the allies on the side, at least of the people invaded. And so they are resisting with military force, an unjust invasion. There’s a serious prospect of success. They did in fact succeed. It seems like the consequences of surrendering in that case are going to be much worse than the consequences of fighting back. And so there also aren’t weapons of mass destruction at this time. So you can meet all of the principles of just war in terms of going to war. But there were still things done by both sides in World War II that violate what’s called the use in bellow the law in war.

So how do we wage a war justly? Now, the two traditional principles here are called discrimination and proportionality. Discrimination just means you distinguish between legitimate military targets and innocent civilians. And proportionality means that, well, just what it says, that your response is not disproportionate. If someone has a small attack on you, you don’t immediately respond with overwhelming force. The catechism talks about this, it doesn’t list it as just war, but it gives all of these kind of criteria. Beginning in 2312, it quotes Vatican two is saying that the mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes listed meaning lawful between the warring parties. So once you find yourself in a war, the moral analysis does not stop. Everyone involved still has to engage in use in bellow, not just the leaders but soldiers as well. That includes, as I say, versus principle of discrimination. Non-combatants wounded soldiers and prisoners have to be respected and treated humanely. If you kill unarmed people, that is a violation of just war, even if everything else in the war was just obviously, this also means that the extermination of an entire people nation or ethnic minority is mortally sinful, and you are morally bound as a soldier to resist orders that command genocide. I think that’s pretty straightforward.

But then you have proportionality and proportionality takes on a new urgency with nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction that every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation. And then they warrant a danger of modern warfares that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons, especially atomic biological or chemical weapons to commit such crimes. So you can’t target entire cities of men, women, and children in an indiscriminate kind of way. Even if there are legitimate military targets there, your response has to be proportionate. So wiping out an entire city is disproportionate killing a hundred thousand people because a hundred of your people were killed is, and that’s one of the other things, by the way, that was raised by the bishops in the holy land and their concern for why Israel’s response doesn’t meet the criterion of just war.

That even if you think, well, they’ve got the lawful right to defend themselves if they’re using disproportionate violence and killing a massive number of Palestinians in response, that is still not just war because it violates this use in bellow, okay, here ends the traditional treatment of just war, those two sets of principles. When can you go to war? How should you operate once you’re in a war? But there have been a series of proposals for what someone’s called use postbellum, and I think we’ve seen in renewed urgency of this after the Iraq war, what does it look like to treat another country with the dignity that they’re owed? If you invade them, what does post-war justice kind of look like? And so one of the archbishops, Archbishop Migliori, who was the permanent observer for the UN for a long time in 2005 amidst the Iraq War, pointed this out that we have traditionally looked at Usid beum us in bellow.

We also have to look at what he calls us Postbellum and other people have called this as well. And he just kind of points in it. It’s not carefully demarcated, but he suggests the time has now come to focus on and develop a third dimension of the law of war, namely how to achieve quickly and effectively the establishment of a just and lasting piece. So if you’re looking at is this a just war or not, you might say, okay, well, we justly resisted this invader and maybe it led to the downfall of their regime. Now what your moral duties are not over. If you choose to go this route, you have some moral responsibility for a nation that maybe you successfully destroy in the course of a war. You can’t just leave them with ruinous sanctions as in the aftermath of World War I happened to the central powers.

That’s not an acceptable kind of outcome. So we have to take seriously just war even after the fighting has stopped. So I want to close with this as sort of time to mourn that. On the one hand, we want to reject the absolutism of pacifism and say there are times and places in which you can defend yourself, but you have to do it in certain ways. But at the same time, this is not the best outcome. It is better to not have this violence at all. And I want to turn here to St. Augustine because I think his words are a good reminder. Now, this is from city of God where he is writing amidst a sort of exhausted Roman empire that is in its decline and is kind of coming to the close of the Pax Romana. And people are tired. They’ve been at war for a long time, and they’ve maintained internal peace through external war.

And he writes these words in book 19. He says, the imperial city has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language as a bond of peace. So that interpreters far from being scarce are numberless. This is true, but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed have provided this unity? In other words, yeah, it’s true. We’ve had internal peace, but it’s been a very bloody peace that the imperial peace where everyone is part of the same empire has come about through endless bloodshed. And though these things are passed, the end of these miseries has not yet come and right, it was going to get a lot worse for the Roman empire in the centuries to come. For though there have never been wanting, nor are yet wanting hostile nations beyond the empire against who wars have been and are waged.

Yet supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description, social and civil wars. And with these, the whole race has been agitated either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed outbreak. Okay, couple things that struck me in reading that number one around the borders of the empire will always be the people who hate the empire. This was true of the Roman Empire, which was by historic standards, a relatively benevolent one. It’s been true of every empire ever since. And you’ll always find people who say, cargo, Delinda, s Carthage must be destroyed, or you’ll find people who say death to America, you’ll find. And so if your idea is you’re going to engage in war until you get rid of all the enemies of the empire, you will always be at war.

But second, even if you succeed in conquering the whole world, in doing so, you’re just going to create a new set of internal injustices and strife. These social civil wars, that internal stuff is going to just come up instead. And so you will constantly have this threat of violence internally because people aren’t going to get along. Augustine goes on to say, if I attempted to give an adequate description of these manifold disasters, these stern and lasting necessities, I’m quite unequal to the task, but limit. Could I set? But, and here he anticipates the response, but say they, the wise men will wage just worse as if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars. If he remembers that he is a man for if they were not just, he would not wage them and would therefore be delivered from all wars.

For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party, which compels the wise man to wage just wars. And this wrongdoing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be a matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrongdoing. Okay, so unpack that. His argument is there is something to mourn, even if you can legitimately defend it as a just war, partly because if it’s legitimately a just war, someone is doing something gravely wrong. So one of the other reasons that we are not pacifist in a strict sense is you don’t want to just preserve radical acts of injustice. There are ways that one country can be horribly cruel and unjust and violent. And if our response just to say, yeah, but we’re not going to stop that because we’re radical pacifists, that is not really the outcome we’re looking for either. So Augustine acknowledges, yeah, there might be such a thing as just war, but this is still worth grieving over because it’s only just on one side.

Someone else is doing something radically unjust, something grievous, something worthy of grief. Let everyone, then he says, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if anyone either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling. And I want to leave with that because I don’t want us to become so numb to the tragedy and travesty of war and conflict and bloodshed that we just say, well, logically we can defend this as a just war, and therefore we’re good to go. No, it’s still horrible. It is still a cause of grief. Innocent men, women, and children will suffer and die even in a just war. And we need to take that very seriously. So because of that, I would say I think Augustine gives us very clear reasons why as the church has repeatedly stressed, particularly in the last say, 60 years, we need to be striving for peace.

We need to be striving for something better than a just war. And I think you can do that without falling into the error of saying, therefore, pacifism is what the Bible teaches. It is a narrower path than that to say, yes, there may be times where you have to resort to state violence, but this is never a good thing. This is always a failing, and we should look for every reason to avoid that if we can. And if we’ve lost sight of that, if war just seems like an easy way to achieve our goals and we lose sight to the people on the ground who are suffering and dying, then we’ve lost something of our humanity for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.