"In the life of the church, just war theories are a secondary element in Catholic teaching; the first is that we should not engage in warfare at all" he said in an interview with Vatican News.

Cardinal McElroy's comments come as global conflicts escalate, prompting fresh debate on the Church's role in conflict resolution.

The cardinal is a key adviser to the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, which will open in Rome on 29 September. Pax Christi International, a global Catholic peace movement, will launch the new institute.

McElroy's remarks align with the position often voiced by Pope Francis. In 2022, the Pope said it was "time to rethink the concept of a ‘just war'", stressing that resorting to war contradicts constructive dialogue. Francis has repeatedly called for reevaluating traditional Church teachings that historically justified certain wars under the ‘just war' doctrine.

Alternative ways to resolve conflict

In July this year, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin echoed these concerns, noting that the theory is being revised.

"There is a lot of discussion today because this ('just war') is a concept of social doctrine. There is just war, the war of defence but today, with the weapons that are available, this concept becomes very difficult" Parolin said.

Cardinal McElroy reiterated that violence in any form is contrary to the Gospel. He added "it's ever more important that the church be a witness to finding alternative ways to resolve these conflicts as they break out".

McElroy also highlighted that peacebuilding goes beyond merely ending conflicts; it involves promoting human dignity and solidarity.

Drawing from Pope Francis' 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, McElroy pointed out that the Church must adopt new perspectives, especially regarding marginalised regions.

"We have blinders in our minds about the peripheries, and we think some regions are less important" the cardinal said. "That is a poison and certainly contrary to the Gospel."

Sources

National Catholic Reporter

CathNews New Zealand

CathNews New Zealand

The Justice and Peace Commission of the Holy Land recently issued a document condemning the misuse of this concept which is deeply rooted in Catholic doctrine.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin echoed these concerns, noting that the theory is being revised.

Parolin said "We know that on the question of just war. There is a lot of discussion today, because this was a concept of social doctrine.

"There is just war, the war of defence, but today with the weapons that are available, this concept becomes very difficult" he said. "In fact, it's being discussed. I don't think there is a definitive position yet, but it's a concept that's in revision."

'Just War' theory being weaponised

The Justice and Peace Commission's document argues that political actors in Israel and abroad are weaponising the "just war" theory to legitimise the ongoing violence in Gaza.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church outlines strict conditions for a war to be deemed just:

• the harm caused by the aggressor must be severe and certain,
• all peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted,
• there must be serious prospects of success,
• the use of arms must not cause greater harm than the evil being addressed.

Cardinal Parolin stressed that with modern weaponry, the "just war" concept becomes increasingly difficult to justify. "It's never a just war." He emphasised that a war can be just only in the context of defence, a standard neither side meets in the Gaza conflict.

The Justice and Peace Commission criticised the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the disproportionate use of force. This has resulted in a catastrophic Palestinian death toll which has disproportionately affected women and children.

Cardinal Parolin reiterated that universal peace is a good that concerns everyone.

Even if diplomatic efforts sometimes seem to produce small results, "we must never get tired or give in to the temptation of resignation" he said.

"Peace is the duty of everyone" and begins "in our daily lives, in our cities, in our countries, in the world" Parolin remarked.

Sources

Crux Now

Vatican News

Agenzia Fides

CathNews New Zealand

When it is distant, it involves people whose nationality and culture we do not share, and wrongs of whose cause are disputed.

But it does not affect us at gut level.

When it is someone who has walked our streets, swum on our beaches, speaks our language as their own, and dies when helping victims of war, war becomes personal.

Israel and Hamas

The killing of Zomi Frankcom, together with other members of the Charity organisation World Central Kitchen, made the war between Israel and Hamas personal.

It has led many people to see the destruction of Gaza and its people as not only regrettable but intolerable.

For many Australians, of course, the war was already personal.

Many people of Israeli and Palestinian origin had already lost family members and friends and grieved for their fellows abused, wounded, driven from their homes and starved.

Yet other Australians did not take their suffering personally.

It was distanced by being set within the framework of international relations and military strategy.

Faces became numbers and the human destruction of war a regrettable necessity.

Now that the victims of the Israeli armed forces' invasion of Gaza have a human and Australian face, we shall be called on take a stand.

We ought to heed that call to pressure the opposed parties to end the war. War is the enemy.

Taking sides

To take a stand, however, is not the same as taking sides.

That is a fatal mistake.

Both sides contribute to the making and sustaining of war. To take sides is to perpetuate the war.

To take sides with the Israeli Government or with Hamas inevitably leads us to move away from the human, disfigured faces whose destruction is the business of war.

It leads us to see the dead and injured and homeless as statistics.

Their value then depends on the side to which they belong.

The deliberate killing of non-combatants associated with the other side will be called an accident or a mistake and their faces whitewashed.

The similar killing of people on one's own side will be seen as an atrocity and their faces weaponised.

Taking sides will deepen the hostility that led to war and will perpetuate the cycle of violence.

To take a stand against the war in Gaza demands focusing on the human faces of the persons destroyed by it.

To do that, of course, we must also engage in arguments whether the war and the actions taken in it are just. But we must not be trapped in them.

Justice and justification

Argument about whether a war is just is generally rigged to produce reasons why one's own side is justified in fighting the war and the other side is not.

It is also used to justify the strategies and actions that the chosen side adopts. It assumes that if God is on your side you can do anything you want to God's enemies.

Once again the human face of war, central in evaluating its justification, is disregarded.

If we reflect on whether a war is justifiable while at the same time attending closely to its human face, the classical rules for waging a just war are helpful.

Their starting point is that all human lives are precious.

For war to be justified, a number of conditions must be met both in its declaration (ius ad bellum) and in its conduct (ius in bello).

Today's wars

Classical rules envisage conflict between the armed forces of different and recognisable states, not military action against minority groups or with failed states.

Therefore, some of the traditional tests for declaring a war just are not applicable to situations today.

The two central rules, however, remain relevant.

Both must be satisfied for a war to be called just. The first is that war is unjustifiable unless it is fought in defence of a just cause.

This is most often self-defence, but it could also include responding to serious injustice perpetrated by the other side.

In Gaza, as in most military conflicts both sides claim that their continuing military action is justifiable because it is taken for self-defence and for the redress of injustice.

Even if a war is held to be for a just cause, however, it must also meet a second condition.

It must be proportionate.

This means that its goal of redressing injustice or defending the nation must be realisable and that the human good achieved by the military action must exceed the human harm.

It is difficult to see how the conduct of the war in Gaza by Hamas or by Israel satisfies either of these criteria. Nor does it satisfy the third test of a just war: that it should be waged only after negotiation to avoid war.

Just war theory

In just war theory a just cause and proportionate framing of the action do not alone make a war just.

The military strategies and actions adopted taken must also satisfy strict criteria.

First, they must be discriminating.

They must not target civilians.

The value of each human life demands that the loss of civilian lives must be coincidental to military action and not intended by it.

In Gaza, the huge number of deaths of non-combatants reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, and accounts of such things as the use of AI to identify suspected members of Hamas and of unguided bombs to kill both them and those around them, witness to a disregard for human lives in both strategy and in rules of engagement.

The second criterion for justice in the conduct of war is proportionality.

The human benefits achieved by military action must outweigh the human harm caused by it. It is difficult to see that the war in Gaza, and particularly the military action by the Israeli armed forces, satisfy this criterion.

The stated means to achieve the goal of self-defence is to destroy Hamas.

This is then taken to demand destroying the human habitat of Gaza in order to eradicate the presence and influence of Hamas within it.

The massive number of civilian casualties, the destruction of the necessary conditions for human life such as houses, meeting places, hospitals, health services and schools, and the starving of the civilian population deny the equal value of each human life.

They are massively disproportionate.

Furthermore, this strategy and the actions that flow from it will not lead to peace but to the hatred that will ensure future conflict and breed the soldiers who will fight in it.

Their logical endpoint is the destruction or enslavement of the people of Palestine.

Making a just peace

The present path is inconsistent with the conviction that each human being matters equally, the necessary belief for establishing a lasting and just peace.

These considerations explain why recent Popes have said that modern war can never be justified.

The destructive power of modern weapons inevitably leads to the denial of the unique value of human being and the consequent destruction of the conditions necessary for living with human dignity.

It also corrupts even in those whose cause is just the respect for humanity essential to its justice.

That moral corruption was evident in the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima and in the defences subsequently made for them.

Gaza is yet another demonstration of the injustice of war and of its power to corrupt human judgment. It must be met by seeing and feeling the lives of those destroyed in it as personal.

• First published in Eureka Street
• Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services. Reproduced with the author's permission.

Speaking on Sunday, Cardinal Pietro Parolin cited conditions stipulated under Catholic just war doctrine.

He said comments Pope Francis made in 2014 that it is "licit" to use force to disarm an unjust aggressor remain valid.

The cardinal said it is important that any military action enjoy international support.

He also indicated that the Vatican will not back any specific plan for action against ISIS.

"Our role is to remember these [just war] conditions, not to specify means to stop the aggressor," he said.

He called for a global mobilisation to root out terrorism and said the Muslim community must be part of any wider solution.

Continue reading

Earlier this year, for instance, Pope Francis tried to restart talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with a prayer service that included Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas.

That tradition of papal peace-making lends even more weight to the remarks this week from Pope Francis on the threat of ISIS and the genocide in Iraq and Syria.

Talking with the press on his plane as it left South Korea, the pope warned that "unjust aggression" had to be stopped and that action from the international community would be "legitimate."

The Associated Press immediately ran the remarks with a headline announcing that the pope had endorsed the use of military force against ISIS, later changing it to "Pope Oks Protecting Iraq Minorities."

Reuters' story carried the banner "Pope says legitimate for world to stop Islamist aggression in Iraq."

Has the Vatican abandoned pacifism? Not exactly.

While Vox and others hyperbolically suggested that Francis had issued a call for a new crusade, the pontiff hardly asked for a Western campaign of conquest.

Francis' remarks fall within what could be called a tradition of conditional pacifism, one that recognizes the limits of dialogue and negotiation in the prosecution of violent evils such as genocide.

Francis seeks the restoration of peace, which on occasions means the use of force for that purpose — and that purpose only.

It may come as a surprise to many that the Catholic Church still adheres to the "just war" doctrine, which applies to the gap left when negotiation and dialogue either fail or have no rational application.

The Catechism, which outlines the application of Catholic faith in the world, expressly notes the circumstances in which this occurs, as well as the strictures for operating within Christian morality when it occurs. Continue reading

Sources

• The Week
• Image: Activist Post

On Saturday, President Obama expressed his desire to "hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons." "Holding accountable," as so many journalists have rightly identified, is loosely-veiled language that disguises the purpose of an American-led military intervention: punishment.

The use of military force as punishment - in this case, for the alleged use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebel forces - was understood as a just use of force by one of the founding figures of western just war theory, St. Augustine of Hippo. Writing in the early-fifth century, Augustine believed that "just wars as defined as those which avenge injuries." Indeed, the view of punishment as a justification for war continued to be given salience in the Catholic moral theology, from which modern just war theories emerged, up until the seventeenth century, where it features in the writings of Hugo Grotius. The justification of these moral theologians' insistence on punishment as a legitimate use of force emerged from:

• the lack of a sovereign authority to pronounce on disputes between states and the need for states to defend themselves; and
• the divine authority of a sovereign to serve as, in the words of thirteenth-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, "God's minister" in punishing sin.

The first claim explains why states can use force while private citizens cannot. When an individual is wronged by another, "he can seek for redress of his rights from the tribunal of his superior," as Aquinas put it. However, prior to the emergence of international law, if a state sought redress for alleged wrongdoings by another state, it had no authority to turn to for justice. Thus, it had license to pursue its claim directly, exercising its own force in an effort to, in a sense, install itself as a sovereign who could pass (just) judgement over its enemy's wrongdoing. The second claim involves not only the existence of a deity, but a deity who might sanction or even directly command wars in some situations. Augustine held the wars of Moses against the Egyptians as an archetypal just war, for in obeying God's command Moses "showed not ferocity but obedience." Continue reading

Sources

• Religion & Ethics, ABC
• Image: PRI's The World

Indeed, it was so successful that it should force us to reconsider the presumption that the war in Afghanistan was necessary in the first place.

The logic is simple: if bin Laden was killed during a secret mission in Pakistan - a country with which America is not at war - could he and his followers have been captured or killed via the same strategy, without entering into a fully-fledged war in Afghanistan?

In just war theory, the relevant criterion of jus ad bellum - the right to wage war - is the requirement that war always be a last resort. If war may be precluded by some less violent, less catastrophic option, then we are obliged to take that option. If military raids and strikes against al Qaeda targets alone in Afghanistan were a feasible option, they ought to have been preferred over a full-scale war with the Taliban.

Instead, a decision was made by President Bush to:

"pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

Bush's attitude is understandable, but it constituted a departure from the just war criterion of "last resort".

Continue reading more of the Just War theory, Bin Laden and Afghanistan

Image source: 3AW