Just War and Fratelli Tutti

First Things, 28 October 2020

Fratelli Tutti appears to suggest that military defeat of tyranny should be replaced with diplomatic dialogue.

Nobody expected the Church’s just war tradition to be a key part of the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, but another of Pope Francis’s footnotes has engaged the issue. At the same time, a recent argument over the decision to use the atomic bomb in Japan seventy-five years ago has revisited a similar question. 

Four years ago in Amoris Laetitia, the Holy Father dealt, by means of an ambiguous footnote, with the vexed question of whether those living in invalid marriages could be admitted to the sacraments. Later, aboard the papal plane, he said that he did not recall it. Now there is something similar in Fratelli Tutti: In note 242, he writes that “we no longer uphold” the teaching of St. Augustine on just war.

What that means is not developed, and there are no airborne press conferences now at which to ask the Holy Father about it. Yet the gist of the encyclical is clear enough. The conduct of modern warfare is such that just war criteria are difficult to meet. Thus it may be that war itself needs to be rejected as “inadmissible”—to borrow the language employed by Pope Francis for the death penalty. He does not say that war is inadmissible, but may be headed in that direction.

The just war tradition gives criteria for jus ad bellum (the decision to go to war) and jus in bello (the conduct of the war). The former deals with unjust aggression, last resort, likelihood of success, and declaration by the proper authority. The latter deals critically with the issue of distinguishing between combatant and non-combatants and the issue of targeting civilians. 

Here the decision by President Harry Truman to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is relevant. Writing seventy-five years after that decision, George Weigel said that while the mass killing of civilians is an intrinsically evil act that cannot be justified by the teaching in, for example, Veritatis Splendor, Truman’s decision was “correct” on strategic and political grounds, in that it created the conditions for the possibility of a just peace.

Is it possible for a military decision to be correct in practice but fail the moral test in principle? Weigel argues that it was in Truman’s case, given that all the viable military options involved the mass targeting of civilians. Early on in World War II the distinction between combatants and civilians had been abandoned by Axis and Allies alike. Edward Feser wrote that Weigel had “terrible arguments,” perhaps conflating Weigel’s judgment of military strategy with a judgment of moral theology.

Continue reading at First Things.