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 j... Read more on Catholic.com