Nothing so much makes me feel my age more–as a member of the Generation that remembers growing up in the shadow of the great lawless totalitarian regimes of the 20th century–than the spectacular naivete of those who ask (after the murder of Brian Thompson, United Healthcare CEO), “Why should we not just throw law away and kill bad people in the street? Is murder really wrong?”
Sure, kid. Hand everybody a gun and a 007. That won’t end badly. We old people are stupid with our reverence for boring stuff like due process and the rule of law.
Fun fact: Richard Rich was, just like Brian Thompson, a wicked man. Thomas More, his prey, was not a fool though, and understood that cutting down all the laws in England to get after the devil was a catastrophically stupid course of action.
Those making a vigilante killer into a folk hero and proclaiming murder in the street “justice” tend to be the same people who ridicule the Church’s Just War teaching because they Just Know Better. Many imagine it was formulated to give the Church license to conduct holy wars.
Here’s the deal with Just War teaching: It is an attempt to restrain the human appetite for blood lust that grips our species from time to time. The alternative till the Millennium is not Just War vs. No War, but Just War vs. Universal Lawless Mayhem and the Extinction of our Species.
Just War teaching tries to make it as hard as possible to go to war by putting up a series of moral and prudential roadblocks, all predicated on the fifth commandment. In other words, the way the Church frames the discussion is not (as Righteous hotheads do) to ask, “When do we get to kill somebody?” but “When may we tragically have to kill somebody?” To wit:
1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
2. all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
3, there must be serious prospects of success;
4. the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.
This is the ius ad bellum part of Just War Teaching, all of which is common sense. It concerns whether a nation (and only nations) can go to war. There simply is no room at all for randos to declare themselves judge, jury, and executioner of others because Universal Lawless Mayhem and the Extinction of our Species are, y’know, bad. Hatfields and McCoys, Sharks and Jets, Hell’s Angels, your racist uncle, Lee Harvey Oswald, Luigi Mangione and any other lone Avenging Angel do not get to make that call. Always, always, always, the Church’s instinct for subsidiarity (meaning “the person closest to the problem should handle it”) is reversed in only one situation: the use of violence. You don’t get to sentence somebody to four years imprisoned in your closet for stepping on your property. Only the state can do that. You don’t get to kill people you think need killin’. Only the state can do that. And the bigger the act of violence, the higher up the deliberative ladder of the state the Church goes. So the Mayor of Seattle can enforce the law on citizens of Seattle, but cannot launch missiles at Kyoto if the Japanese offend him. Only the US government can do that. Indeed, if the Church had her way, even nation-states would not have the ability to declare war. It would be referred to the United Nations.
But wait! There’s more!
Even if all those hurdles are past and a war meets the criteria for a nation to wage it in self-defense, the Church puts up more roadblocks with still further hurdles called ius in bello criteria. These concern not whether it is just to fight a war, but the way in which the war is waged.
2312 The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. “The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.”
2313 Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.
Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions. Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse those who carry them out. Thus the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin. One is morally bound to resist orders that command genocide.
2314 “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons — to commit such crimes.
Astute readers will note that this means virtually no modern war can meet just war criteria. The Church has noticed that too, prompting Benedict XVI to wonder, given the destructive power of modern arms, whether there can be such a thing as a just war any more.
The Church also notes both that the arms industry sucks up vast sums of money that could have been spent on feeding, clothing, healing, and housing people and that
2317 Injustice, excessive economic or social inequalities, envy, distrust, and pride raging among men and nations constantly threaten peace and cause wars. Everything done to overcome these disorders contributes to building up peace and avoiding war:
Insofar as men are sinners, the threat of war hangs over them and will so continue until Christ comes again; but insofar as they can vanquish sin by coming together in charity, violence itself will be vanquished and these words will be fulfilled: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Again, astute readers will notice the stunning fact young lefties are not the first people in history to have discovered racism, income inequality, and all the other evils MAGA and Thompson and their ilk represent, nor to have given thought to how these evils should be fought, nor to have created a massive body of social teaching that is deeply, deeply rooted in the teaching of Jesus. Turns out the Old Girl may still have something to teach us if we will just listen and not rashly deputize ourselves the Tribunes of (in the words of the Insufferably-Full-of-Himself Elon Musk) yet another New World Order empowered cut down all the laws in England to get after the devil.
What the rising generation of New Revolutionaries applauding murder in the street have yet to discover is that when they talk of sweeping aside the rule of law so they can do whatever they Know in Their Hearts is the right thing to destroy those they hate and establish Heaven on Earth, they are not the Real Disciples of Jesus Unlike All Those Churchy Hypocrites.
They are Donald Trump. They are Elon Musk They are Mussolini. They are Stalin. They are Mao. They are Pol Pot. They are every murderous asshole who ever proclaimed themselves a god with the absolute power of life and death over everyone else in the world “for the greater good”.
Christ inaugurated the kingdom by dying for others, not by making others suffer and die. If we intend to follow him, we must take up our cross, not lay it somebody else’s back to “make them pay”.
675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.
677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.
None of this is to say,. “Killing is okay as long as as the state does it.”
The reason that the Church demands that killing be reserved to the state is not because all state-sanctioned killing is automatically good (it was the state that murdered the Son of God, after all), but because issuing a 007 to every rando in the world is worse. States can and have committed mass murder. But on the whole, the human race has (rightly) concluded that having many heads deliberate about the momentous act of taking a life is better than giving every individual a gun and a 007 and telling them to feel free to kill everybody you think should die. Paul, living under Nero (who would eventually murder him), concurred with this (Romans 13).
In short, the goal of limiting violence to the state is to try to restrain the human appetite for violence, not to promise that violence can eliminated by the state and, still less, to promise that the state is incapable of unjust violence.
This is only complicated if we want it to be. And I am horrified to see the surprising number of people who appear to want that in their lust for blood.
Advertisement
4 Responses
Something in the Bible about the weeds and the wheat growing together…Wish writing like this essay reached a wider audience.
“Those making a vigilante killer into a folk hero and proclaiming murder in the street ‘justice'”
There is, of course, nothing new under the sun here for human nature. Bonnie and Clyde were turned into folk heroes, too.
“tend to be the same people who ridicule the Church’s Just War teaching because they Just Know Better. “
Are they the same? I honestly haven’t been engaging in conversation with any of them, because it was just too discouraging, knowing that defense of moral precepts like “thou shalt not kill” would be interpreted as defense of wealth inequality.
My perception is there is likely to be some overlap, but I have a pretty distinct impression that those who seem to want to treat just war theory as “when do we get to kill people” tend toward the right end of the political spectrum, while those who get excited about the idea of class warfare as justification for killing tend toward the left end of the spectrum.
“Astute readers will note that this means virtually no modern war can meet just war criteria.”
I recognize your post is more focused on situations like the Brian Thompson murder, or on the international scale, the idea of pre-emptive war. But I would take a moment here to distinguish between “virtually no” rather than “absolutely no,” thinking in particular about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I assume you are not asserting that Ukraine’s self-defense could not be justified under these criteria? Of course, it is constrained by those ius in bella criteria even in the face of their aggressor’s intentional violations of those same criteria.
I support Ukraine.. Hence the “virtually”.
Thanks Mark, timely because misunderstandings of this are everywhere!