Mr. Vice President: When pope discusses matters of war, he 𝒊𝒔 talking about morality
Catholic Church has long history in forming framework for evaluating armed conflict
U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s frustration with Pope Leo XIV couldn’t have been clearer: Responding to questions in an interview with Fox News on Sunday related to the pope’s admonitions against the war with Iran, the vice president said “that in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality.”
But there’s a glaringly obvious problem with Vance’s comment: Questions of war are inherently questions of morality, and they have been such in Christianity since its earliest days, when most Christians were pacifists even while facing severe persecution from the Roman Empire.
And more than any other Christian tradition, the Catholic church has literally spent centuries refining its official perspectives on war, developing what has become known as the just war doctrine. Development of the doctrine probably begin in the fourth century with St. Ambrose and arrived at something similar to its current form with St. Thomas Aquinas nearly a millennium later. A codification of the current understanding of the morality of war can be found in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.
It is not a pacifist approach. It finds that war can be justified when certain conditions be met, such as that better options aren’t available and that the damage caused by the war doesn’t cause more evil than the war is intended to eliminate.
Many other Christian bodies that have taken a stance on the morality of war have followed the Catholic approach. Much of the international law related to the waging of war, such as the required protection of civilians, correlates to Catholic teaching.
In other words, as much as Vance may think that Pope Leo has gone outside of his lane in addressing the U.S./Israeli/Iranian war’s morality, in criticizing the war Leo has been talking about what popes have talked about for centuries.
It’s understandable why Vance may find this fact inconvenient. The just war doctrine was never meant to justify wars of choice, wars such as the current war that are launched when the initiating belligerent faces no imminent threat, situations where the possibility of a negotiated settlement hasn’t been exhausted.
The frustrations of Vance, himself a Catholic with imminent plans to release a book detailing his conversion to the faith, are certainly heightened by the repeated criticism of Pope Leo and his predecessor, Pope Francis, to the two Trump administrations’ anti-immigration policies. But in neither case have the popes directly addressed strictly policy issues, such as how many immigrants should be legally admitted to the United States nor whether Iran should be permitted to develop nuclear energy source for civilian use. Doing so would indeed put a pope outside of his lane.
But calling attention to the suffering that war produces, to questioning the motives of those who may profit politically or financially, those are not merely the prerogative of the pope, they are among his duties.
And in this particular case, the world, and certainly the U.S. political system, would do well to heed Pope Leo’s counsel:
Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life.