Ukraine Is Fighting, but for Francis No War Is Just

Sig. Magister looks at the problems with Francis's latest attempt at changing Catholic teaching, the teaching on just war theory.

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

Day after day, with a crescendo of indignation, Pope Francis is condemning as “unacceptable” and “sacrilegious” the “war of aggression” Russia has unleashed against Ukraine, albeit without ever calling by its name the aggressor state, nor its monarch.

Francis has also tacitly allowed his secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to acknowledge that “the right to defend one’s life, one’s people and one’s country sometimes also involves the sad recourse to arms,” and that therefore even “military aid to Ukraine can be understandable.”

At the same time, however, the pope continues to launch invectives against the manufacture and distribution of weapons by “the economic-technocratic-military power,” which he considers “madness,” “a scandal that dirties the soul, dirties the heart, dirties humanity,” the true origin of all wars. He even said he was “ashamed” to read that “a group of states have pledged to spend two per cent of GDP on arms purchases.”

So going by Francis’s logic the Ukrainians, the attacked, if they really wanted to continue to defend themselves, should do so with their bare hands. And so should the free states of Europe and the North Atlantic.

This one on peace and war is not the only unresolved contradiction that characterizes the current pontificate. But it is perhaps the one most fraught with political consequences, not least the growing irrelevance of the Holy See on the world stage.

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It is in the twentieth century that Catholic doctrine on peace and war had its most complete formulation. This can be read in the 1997 “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” in the 2006 “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church,” as well as - clearly ahead of its time - in such a classic of twentieth century Christian thought as “Les Chrétiens devant le problème de la paix” by Emmanuel Mounier, from 1939, just republished in Italy by Castelvecchi with the title “I cristiani e la pace” and with an introduction by Giancarlo Galeazzi, professor at the Pontifical Lateran University and a specialist in “personalism,” the philosophy developed by Mounier himself and by Jacques Maritain.

It is a doctrine that, under precise and stringent conditions, legitimizes the use of force. Going so far as to allow, in Pope John Paul II’s speech at the beginning of 1993 to the diplomatic corps, armed “humanitarian intervention” in defense of a state that has ended up “under the blows of an unjust aggressor.”

For Pope Francis, however, this doctrine has had its day. In his view war in defense of those who are victims of aggression may perhaps be fought as a lesser evil, but in any case no longer calling it and judging it as “just.” He also said this in the video conversation he had on March 15 with Moscow patriarch Kirill: “Once even in our Churches there was talk of holy war or just war. Today one can no longer speak like that. Wars are always unjust.”

Francis made the starkest break with the doctrine and formula of “just war” with the message for the January 1 2017 day of peace, entirely dedicated to non-violence “as the style of a politics for peace.”

But then, during the press conference on November 26 2019 on the flight back from Japan, he said he thought the time was not yet ripe, although he had laid the groundwork for this, to issue an encyclical dedicated to peace and non-violence, which would make the pivot official. He maintained that the question is open and must be re-examined. And he added that for the moment it still remains legitimate to resort to arms in the cases admitted by moral theology.

The fact is that this continual waffling on the part of the current pope also sends the Church tottering in one direction or the other.

The Community of Sant’Egidio, in particular, the so-called “UN of Trastevere,” has recently made itself promoter of a quite varied, and therefore faithful, application of Francis’s contradictory magisterium.

Mario Giro, a leading representative of the Community in international politics, wrote without admitting exceptions: “The popes tell us that war is an evil in itself, that every war is evil and that there is no such thing as a just war. It is she who is the absolute evil.”

Founder Andrea Riccardi launched an appeal, from the first days of the aggression against Ukraine, to have the capital of Kyiv declared an “open city” in order to spare it from destruction. Without making it explicit, however, that technically an “open city” is a city that by explicit agreement of the parties at war is left to occupation by the enemy, in this case Russia, without putting up any resistance. In other words, a capitulation to the new empire of Vladimir Putin.

As for Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna and cardinal, he too one of the founders of the Community of Sant’Egidio but also and above all papabile, in an interview with the newspaper “Domani” of Sunday March 20 that ran to two pages preferred to say in vague words a little of everything: both that “no war is just” and that “in a situation of open and tragic conflict like the one we are seeing, there is the right to defend oneself.”

Still much more straightforward - while awaiting the “re-examination” confusedly hinted at by Pope Francis - is the classical Catholic doctrine on peace and war, as outlined by Mounier in the essay now republished and as developed above all by John Paul II.

To get an idea of this, as applied to today’s war in Ukraine, here is a short excerpt from the preface to the French thinker’s book.

The author of the preface is Stefano Ceccanti, professor of comparative public law at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and senator of the Democratic Party, as well as student president of Catholic universities in his youth.

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THE UNEASY LESSON OF EMMANUEL MOUNIER

by Stefano Ceccanti

Despite the spread of radical pacifist positions in the bosom of the Catholic Church, ethically most admirable on an individual level, and the need for a diplomatic and ecumenical role of the Holy See that leads it, with the “pro tempore” pontiff in office, whoever he may be, not to take a hard line against aggressor countries, as in the case of Putinian Russia today, the complexity described in his time by Emmanuel Mounier, albeit with a few important updates, remains at the center of the Church’s magisterium today.

The 2006 “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church,” at number 500 (on the conditions of legitimate defense) re-proposes the four conditions set out by Mounier, with an addition of greater caution on the “power of modern means of destruction.” On the question of legitimate authority, number 501 recalls the UN Charter and the role of the security council. Paragraph 506 (on the duty to protect oppressed minorities) leaves open, under similar conditions, forms of humanitarian intervention within the individual state, thus bringing state sovereignty into question and commending the establishment of the international criminal court.

With respect to Mounier’s reconstruction, Catholic doctrine therefore seems to show greater doubt with respect to the canon of proportionality, since the destructive power of the means has grown, but it seems to extend the right intention to humanitarian intervention as well.

The two most relevant updates, in other words, confirm the complexity of the doctrine, because the one urges greater prudence while the other extends the purposes that can legitimize the use of force.

Paragraph 500 of the “Compendium” also makes the exercise of legitimate defense conditional on its reasonable effectiveness: it must be practiced when there are “serious prospects of success,” which is obviously aimed at averting extreme forms of attestation. However, this observation cannot be interpreted in a simplistic way, as if the evaluation were limited to the moment of an attack and its most immediate consequences: this would leave room only for unconditional surrender. Sacred Scripture, moreover, presents the case of Goliath, much taller and stronger but less insightful than David who defeated him. Those who see further know that the apparent loser in the short term is not necessarily so when all is said and done.

In any case, objectively, before and after there remains a great complexity of the criteria identified and the rejection of oversimplifying positions, as the 2002 Doctrinal Note of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had clarified a few years earlier, rejecting “certain pacifistic and ideological visions [of peace], […] which forget the complexity of the issues involved,” which it contrasted with “a constant and vigilant commitment on the part of all political leaders.” [...]

Far from putting history on ice, the end of the Cold War has constantly brought dilemmas on the tangles of peace and war back into view. With the conclusion of a period in which the balances were defined by two superpowers within spheres of influence that were well defined, even if they were not comparable with each other (the West of open societies, even with all its imperfections and contradictions, was and is in any case a “free world”), crisis situations have multiplied in which Western democracies have found themselves having to choose between mobilization for war and neutrality: from the first Gulf War decided by the UN, to the second one backed by Bush against the judgment of the UN, to the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo against the harsh repression of the Albanian minority by Milosevic, to those in Afghanistan and Lebanon, down to the sending of weapons to Ukraine.

These dilemmas lend themselves poorly to absolute certainties, and judgments can often change, because a full awareness of the impact of decisions can be had, for the most part, only after the unfolding of events. Moreover, not everything that is legitimate is in itself opportune and fruitful.

However, without falling into easy Manichaeisms, it is always useful to remember that an imperfect right is always better than no right at all. The approach of the democratic cultures, unlike the substantial resignation to the worst impulses of a warmongering will to power or to abstract pacifism’s search for perfection, makes its own the importance of the battle for imperfect causes as theorized by Emmanuel Mounier, who borrowed this from the philosopher Paul-Ludwig Landsberg.

As Mounier wrote, the “creative force” of commitment is born from the “profound tension it creates between the imperfection of the cause and absolute fidelity to the values that are at stake. Abstention is an illusion. Skepticism is still a philosophy: but non-intervention between 1936 and 1939 produced Hitler’s war. On the other hand, the restless and sometimes lacerated conscience that we get from the impurities of our cause keeps us clear of fanaticism, in a state of vigilant critical attention. […] The risk that we accept in the partial obscurity of our decision places us in a state of privation, uncertainty, and daring, which is the climate of great actions.”