War and peace according to Pope Francis

“The use of force must not be worse than the evil to be eliminated”.

In August 2014, in the face of the genocide taking place in Iraq and Syria and a Third World War playing out one bit at a time from the Middle East to Africa, Pope Francis called for an armed intervention under the aegis of the UN.

Answering a question by reporter Alan Holdren of the Catholic News Agency on his flight back to Rome from Seoul, the pope had invoked the legitimate use of self-defence and the need to stop the IS militants’ slaughter of innocents on specific terms: a UN-backed joint intervention that would involve no bombing of helpless civilians and especially children.

A few days later, the pope sent a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reiterating his call for a military intervention in Iraq “through the norms and mechanisms of international law … to do all that can be done to stop and prevent further systematic violence against ethnic and religious minorities”. 

This was viewed as a reversal of the Argentine pontiff’s pacifist convictions; after all, in September 2013 he had held a vigil at St. Peter’s to ward off a NATO military intervention in Syria. Others wrote that the pope had discarded the concept of the ‘just war’ relying, in true Jesuit fashion, on international legal positivism, as Norberto Bobbio had before him. Others felt the pope was taking politically convenient stances depending on the situation and the presence of Catholic populations, as in Croatia when under attack by Serbia in 1991.

In reality, the modern-day Roman Catholic Church has always invoked the authority of international law to solve disputes between nations and maintain a global order for the purpose of keeping, restoring or establishing peace.

One example should suffice: Pope Paul VI’s speech at the UN in New York in 1965 in which he described international law as “the obligatory path of modern civilisation and world peace”. Not to mention the many encyclicals, such as Pope John XXIII’s Pace in Terris drafted during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Vatican has permanent observers at the United Nations for a reason. And the eminently Jesuit Bergoglio has always followed in the footsteps of his predecessors: no revolutionary stance here.

“War is the road of no return”, cried Pope John Paul II on the eve of the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, echoing the “useless massacre” label applied by Benedict XV to the First World War. But this hadn’t stopped Wojtyla from invoking a “humanitarian intervention” by the UN or other global authorities in all those situations where “the survival of populations and entire ethnic groups is seriously compromised”. Pope John Paul II had said as much at the FAO International Conference on Nutrition in 1992 and would say the same during subsequent crises.

Moreover, Pope Francis has taken on the name of the saint devoted to peace who sought a dialogue with the sultan. As contradictory as it may appear to call for an UN military intervention to stop an aggressor when all other attempts have failed, as Pope Francis has, it is perfectly in line with the Church’s pacifist stance. Over the course of its long history it has always found ways of reconciling its prophetic entreaties (by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Don Mazzolari or Don Milani) with political necessity, which contemplates the legitimate use of force.

This theological tradition harks back to St. Augustine and St. Thomas, the works of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (author of a little treatise In Praise of the New Militia, devoted to the Templars, the fighting monks par excellence), and has come down to our own modern popes’ day.

Indeed, the Church has always married ‘prophetic’ pacifism with ‘political’ pacifism, with the former providing guidance and direction to the latter. Article 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church reads as follows: “The strict conditions for legitimate defence by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy”. So very specific conditions must be met to justify military action. The following must be established: “The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition”.

History offers many examples. UN peacekeepers could have probably prevented the genocide in Rwanda and countless other massacres in the Balkans or the Horn of Africa. It is this spirit that informs Italy’s international missions. “Those who are sworn to serve their country in the armed forces are servants of the security and freedom of nations. If they carry out their duty honourably, they truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of peace”, as the next article of the Catechism, no. 2310, states. The legitimate use of self-defence is considered a “grave duty for whoever takes responsibility for the lives of others and the common good”, noted in the Catechism, no. 2321.

All the above conditions exist today right where the satanic violence of IS militants advances, sparing no one, Christians, Shiites, Yazidis or other peoples south of Mosul, and promising a martyrdom of biblical proportions.