Popes and wars in the contemporary era
As people return to speaking about a “just war,” it is worth recalling the teaching on peace of the Popes who have succeeded one another on the Chair of Peter over the past hundred years. This teaching has gradually been enriched and deepened, to the point of recognizing how increasingly difficult it is to claim that a “just war” exists. Reflections based on the theology of past centuries and possible justifications for war fail to take into account that when theologians of earlier times wrote about these issues, wars were fought with swords and clubs—not with deadly weapons and machine-guided drones, a reality that raises moral questions of dramatic intensity. There has been a growing awareness that war is not a path to be followed.
From the 1917 letter to the belligerent nations by Pope Benedict XV, which described the First World War as an “useless slaughter,” to the efforts of Pope Pius XII to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War; from the words of Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (1963), who wrote that “it is almost impossible to think that in the atomic era war could be used as an instrument of justice,” to the cry of Pope Paul VI at the United Nations,“No more war!”—and the often unheard appeals of Pope John Paul II to prevent disastrous conflicts in the Middle East: the Successors of Peter have consistently raised their voices with both prophetic insight and realism, though sadly they have often gone unheard.
The primary reference text is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which acknowledges the right to legitimate self-defense but places “strict conditions” even on defensive war: …
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