Just wars and when they are justifiable

Pope Leo’s style differs from that of his predecessor, Pope Francis, although they are concerned about many of the same issues.

Pope Leo has called two extraordinary consistories in his short pontificate. It is well-known that Pope Francis preferred to rely on his kitchen cabinet of nine cardinals, dubbed the C9. Pope Leo has employed the synodal format of small group discussions during the consistories.

The consistory, which concluded last week, focused on poverty, the family, synodality, and the Church’s social doctrine as well as Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope’s recent encyclical. The topic of just war was also discussed, or rather, whether just war theory has any place in a world of autonomous weapons, drones, and catastrophically high levels of civilian casualties.

Until Constantine declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire, the majority of Christians were pacifists”

St Augustine, patron of the Augustinians to which Robert Prevost belonged, was one of the first to codify stringent conditions for declaring and conducting war. Augustine was writing to show that a soldier could ethically take part in war. Until Constantine declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire, the majority of Christians were pacifists. It was also a time when armies gathered to fight on battlefields hand-to-hand, which could not be more different from today.

Augustine set out criteria, which St Thomas Aquinas developed further. The criteria cover both when it is justified to declare war and how a war should be conducted. Every military training academy in the world discusses them.

The cause of war must be just, for example, self-defence against an active invasion where predictable severe consequences will occur.

War can only be declared by a legitimate authority, by those who have responsibility for the common good, such as a sovereign state or a competent international authority.

The goal of the war must be to reestablish a true peace born of justice, and all other peaceful means of resolving the conflict, such as diplomacy and negotiation, must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective. There must be some reasonable hope of success, as the use of force cannot be a futile exercise in further destruction on the part of the party being attacked.

Outweighed

The good achieved by the war must not be outweighed by the evils produced by the use of arms.

When it comes to conducting a war, targeting civilians or civilian targets like schools and hospitals is absolutely forbidden. The use of force must be proportionate, not excessive.

If we look at the guidelines both for starting a war and conducting one, it is difficult to point to a single war that has met the criteria. Certainly, the war against Hitler’s aggression was arguably just, but the conduct of the war, from firebombing Dresden and Tokyo to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, could never be justified as proportionate.

Even in the war waged by Russia against Ukraine, where Russia’s lethal aggression is obviously unjust, Ukraine has targeted non-combatants. This is not to suggest an equivalence between the aggressor and the defender, but just that it is almost impossible to wage war ethically. Ukraine has been at the forefront of the development of drone technology, which delivers death from the skies.  There have also been constant allegations of profiteering and serious corruption by people close to President Zelensky.

Pope John Paul II insisted that negotiations and peaceful means should take precedence even when international law was clearly violated, such as in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait”

Pope Leo is not the first pope to explore whether just war theory can be applied at all in a world dominated by technological warfare and almost blatant disregard of the rights of non-combatants.

During the First Gulf War (1990) and the US-led invasion of Iraq (2003), Pope John Paul II insisted that negotiations and peaceful means should take precedence even when international law was clearly violated, such as in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He argued that nations have a moral obligation to resort to international institutions rather than self-justified military action because war can never be “just another means” for settling differences between nations.

In his 2020 encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis argued that because of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, war now possesses an “uncontrollable destructive power” that renders just war criteria effectively impossible to invoke.

He did acknowledge that nations had a right to self-defence, but in strictly limited conditions.

In his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo reiterated the inadequacy of the just war tradition. Instead, he declared that the “unarmed and disarming peace of Jesus Christ” should become the new Catholic default.

Focus

At the recent consistory, the cardinals suggested that the focus should move from just war to proportional defence and active peace-building.

Let no one underestimate either the importance or the difficulty of seeking to eliminate war. There is a vast international industry worth trillions that depends on war being waged in numerous theatres. Yet it has also never been more vital that humans learn better ways to resolve conflict than killing each other.