By Anwesh Satpathy
The temporal and the spiritual are now clashing. Donald Trump is the first President of the United States to have openly and explicitly declared the occupant of St. Peter’s chair to be “weak on crime,” and worse, that he supports Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons. This is a plain lie that flies in the face of the Vatican’s consistent opposition to the use of nuclear weapons.
In fact, Pope Pius XII had warned of the evil potential of atomic energy years before the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In recent years, Pope Francis had reiterated the Church’s opposition by de nouncing mere possession of weapons as immoral. Pope Leo XIV has similarly continued the Church’s opposition by critiquing the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction as deterrence and calling for complete disarmament.
US Vice-President JD Vance, who claims to be a catholic, asked the Pope to essentially shut his mouth on matters of American foreign policy while insinuating that the Pope was ignorant of the Augustinian “Just war” doctrine. This is quite presumptuous and simply ridiculous, given that Leo is the first Augustinian Pope. The debate was started by Trump who asserted that he had God’s blessing for the war against Iran. Leo responded, albeit indirectly, but clearly, by calling out “delusions of omnipotence” justifying the war, adding that “God does not bless any conflict.” The “Just war” doctrine does not necessarily see a just war as ethical in the strictest sense of the term.
A just war may be necessary in a world that has fallen to a people who are expelled from the Garden of Eden, but it is never ideal. Can the Iran War be justified based on the criteria of “Just war” in the catechism? The first is the criterion of the “just cause.” The war must only be fought when there has been grave damage inflicted on the defending party.
As the catechism puts it, “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.” War is thus justified on the basis of being a response to aggression and only on the conditions that all peace efforts have failed (second criteria). One must understand the distinction between pre-emptive and preventive war to make sense of the just cause. In a pre-emptive war, the first country attacks the second on the basis that it has trustworthy information that the second country is going to attack it.
Most ethicists agree that at the very least one can make a legitimate case for pre-emptive war. If a country is preparing to commit a large-scale invasion and the only way of stopping such an attack is to strike first and thus ensure less people suffer than need be, then a preemptive war can technically be seen as morally legitimate and perhaps even as self-defence. A preventive war, on the other hand, is premised upon the idea that Country B would pose a threat to Country A at some point in the future when it strengthens its military capability.
In this scenario, Country B is not preparing for an attack and there are no indications that it poses an immediate threat to Country A. A war of this nature, as the Catholic traditionalist philosopher Ed Feser has argued, is not morally defensible. US war on Iran is preventive, not pre-emptive. It is premised upon the idea that Iran is going to drop nukes on US and Israel at some point in the future when they manage to acquire it.
The plausibility of the assertion is irrelevant to its moral legitimacy based on Catholic doctrine. The fulfilment of the second criterion is similarly, at the very least, questionable. Iran was negotiating with US even as US-Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran’s Supreme Leader. Both in February and in June, talks were in progress as Iran was attacked.
Just a day before Operation Epic Fury, Oman’s foreign minister (who was the media tor) announced that Iran had agreed to give up its enriched uranium, which was precisely the stated demand. The third criterion concerns the prospects of success. It is difficult to argue what “success” even means given that US has repeatedly shifted the goal post ever since it attacked Iran “preventively”.
The Supreme Leader was killed on the pretext of regime change and “saving” the Iranian people from the tyranny of the theocratic regime. When regime change did not happen, the US shifted its goal post again to stopping Iran’s nuclear programme. The fourth criteria, that the “use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated,” is the one that has been most gravely violated.
Catholic theology permits only accidental harm to civilians on the condition of proportionality and moral certitude. The US bombing of the Minab elementary school that left around 156 dead, most of whom were schoolgirls, is an unambiguous war crime. The war has left the whole region unstable. Economic consequences include the fact that 45 million people in Africa face acute hunger as a result of the war (WHO).
There will be long-term health consequences including the risk of cancer owing to the bombings. This is in addition to the fact that at least 6,000 civilians have died in the Middle East as a result of this war. The Pope is merely reiterating traditional Catholic teaching and helping restore the perception of the Vatican as a moral authority worth paying attention to.
The President, on the other hand, is destroying any semblance of moral legitimacy the US may have had once upon a time. The distinction that Vance makes between morality and realpolitik is not a distinction that the Church has ever recognized.
The writer is a columnist with a background in Global Affairs from Kings College London.