#353: Endless War—part I

EXCERPT:

This time my intention is to focus on a long-term tendency in US foreign affairs. Here, the very parties who are gridlocked on so many domestic issues show little if any disagreement on what strikes me as the central and abiding feature of US foreign policy.

That feature is what I call “Endless War.”

My analysis built on two key facts: (1) The Roman Catholic Church has in the last 50 years transformed itself into a “Peace Church” opposed to nearly all modern warfare; (2) during those same 50 years the US (under both parties) has been incapable of conducting its foreign affairs without nearly continual recourse to war.

The “Peace Church.” Over the centuries Catholic Social Teaching acknowledged three approaches to the morality of war. There was pacifism, rooted in the teaching and practice of Jesus and his early followers. There was the just war theory, elaborated first in the 5th century by St. Augustine and developed further by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, the Spanish Jesuits in the 15th century, and a number of prominent 20th century theologians. And, beginning in the 11th century, there was crusade (or holy war).

Pacifism committed to nonviolence in all cases, and rejected all armed conflict as a morally unacceptable option. The just war theory laid out key criteria that must be met in order for any recourse to arms to be “just” -- that is, morally lawful. Crusades depended on believing that war for a “great and noble” cause (such as recovering the Holy Land from the infidel, or eliminating heresy) could not only be justified, but could reap spiritual and material rewards (for example, indulgences and property) for the warrior.

By the mid 20th century, crusade was largely discredited, and for Vatican Council II (1962-1965) the just war theory was the dominant approach, with pacifism still an option but crusade rejected.

Thus, during the Vietnam War, the US Bishops made it clear that Catholics could claim conscientious objection against the war, or judge it by the criteria of the just war theory, but could not approve it as a crusade against communism to be won by any means necessary. Since Vatican II, Catholicism rejects the holy war notion that anything goes as long as one’s cause is just.

Moreover even the “just war” criteria are now more difficult to meet given the conditions of modern warfare, with its “total war” strategies and its weapons of mass destruction. Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the most conservative bishop of Vatican II, stated that the conditions of modern warfare made a “just war” impossible.

Vatican II reserved its sole outright condemnation for the manufacture, sale, stockpiling, threat, and use of nuclear weapons. And Pope Paul VI clearly put Catholicism on the peace platform in 1965 when, addressing the United Nations, he cried his famous plea “No more war! War never again!”