Is the Catholic Church’s just-war theory obsolete?

War is hell. For more than 1,000 years, though, the Catholic Church has used just-war theory to bring the light of heaven to humanity’s ugly conflicts. The doctrine creates moral guardrails for when nations choose to fight and how their armies conduct themselves in combat. Now the church, under the guidance of Pope Leo, is having second thoughts.

Just cause, just means?

“There is no such thing as a holy war: Only peace is holy,” Leo said last month at a religious conference, per Christopher Hale at Letters from Leo. The pope sparked the ire of President Donald Trump earlier this year by criticizing the U.S. war against Iran. Leo’s continued anti-war messaging shows “he means it,” Hale said. The church is now reviewing its “outdated” just-war doctrines, a reaction against “every leader who has tried to draft heaven into a bombing campaign.”

The theory says a war is justified only if waged for a “just cause” and with “just means,” said Luis Parrales at The Atlantic. The guidance has influenced instruction at military academies and the development of human-rights laws. But there is a sense the doctrine is “prone to abuse” by national leaders who have twisted and bent its tenets to dubiously assert their chosen conflicts’ morality. The church’s current task is to create a “successor theory that better addresses the many moral challenges that modern-day wars pose.”

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‘Necessary and therefore just’

Just-war theory “fails to adequately train peacemakers,” said Eli McCarthy at U.S. Catholic. Leaders must “cultivate strategic nonviolent practices” and build institutions that make “sustainable peace” possible. Existing theory only makes wars “more likely to continue.”

Critics suggest that abandoning just-war principles would risk “dangerous passivity in the face of aggression,” said the National Catholic Register. It is true “all wars are bad,” said John Rist, a church historian and philosopher, to the outlet. But sometimes it is “necessary and therefore just” to fight. It is an “unhappy truth” that must be acknowledged rather than “appeasing the wicked.”