…I thought it would be good to take a look at his awful apologetics for that Tyrant’s ongoing act of mass murder known as the Iran War.
As it happens, I am busy writing a book called (tentatively) SEDUCTION: HOW THE “PRO-LIFE” MOVEMENT BECAME THE DEADLIEST HERESY IN THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH and I trace, among other things, how its leadership came to embrace apologetics for unjust war 20 years ago: apologetics they still indulge in today. Bishop Barron’s recent and egregious attempt to sideline the Magisterium of the Church and grant moral permission to conservative America Catholics to say, “We have no king but Caesar” was on full display, echoing the filth spoken 20 years ago and I reproduce it in full here as prelude to a two-day discussion which aims to show the gross falsity of his excuse-making for a war that meets not one single solitary requirement of the Church’s stringent Just War criteria:
There is a way past the absurd and deeply divisive “war” between the President and the Pope, which has been enthusiastically ginned up by the press. And it is indicated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2309 to be precise. After laying out the various criteria for determining a just war—proportionality, last resort, declaration by a competent authority, reasonable hope of success, etc.—the Catechism points out that “the evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.” The assumption is that the just war principles function, to use the technical term, as heuristic devices, designed to guide the practical decision-making of those civil authorities who have to adjudicate matters of war and peace.
The role of the Church, therefore, is to call for peace and to urge that any conflict be strictly circumscribed by the moral constraints of the just war criteria. But it is not the role of the Church to evaluate whether a particular war is just or unjust. That appraisal belongs to the civil authorities, who, one presumes, have requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground. So, is the war in question truly the last resort? Is there really a balance between the good to be attained and the destruction caused by the war? Are combatants and non-combatants being properly distinguished in the waging of the conflict? Do the belligerents have right intention? Is there a reasonable hope of success? The posing of those questions—indeed the insistence upon their moral relevance—belongs rightly to the Church, but the answering of them belongs to the civil authorities.
The Pope has said, on numerous occasions, that he is not a politician and that his role is not the determination of any nation’s foreign policy. But he has just as clearly said that he will continue to speak for peace and for moral constraint. In making both of these claims, he is operating perfectly within the framework of paragraph 2309 of the Catechism. If we understand that the Pope and the President have qualitatively different roles to play in the determination of moral action in regard to war, we can, I hope, extricate ourselves from the completely unhelpful narrative of “Pope vs. President.”
The core of the misdirection is here: “The role of the Church, therefore, is to call for peace and to urge that any conflict be strictly circumscribed by the moral constraints of the just war criteria. But it is not the role of the Church to evaluate whether a particular war is just or unjust. That appraisal belongs to the civil authorities, who, one presumes, have requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground.” It means, in English, “The Church can prattle on about whatever airy-fairy morals it likes. But Caesar and Caesar alone decides what is good and evil and he is therefore the only arbiter of what is just. We have no king but Caesar. Obey him always for he cannot sin since he alone decides what sin is.”
If you find such rubbish to be nonsense, you are not alone. If you find yourself at a loss to articulate you objection to this rubbish, read on, because this is not the first time this rubbish has been spouted. What follows is from my manuscript:
***
To get the hang of how the average “faithful, pro-life, conservative Catholic” was instructed by GOP social influencers to disregard and oppose the Church’s teaching as plans for war were laid 20 years ago, we need only look at the American “conservative, pro-life Christian” response to the Church’s teaching in 2002-2003.
Pope St. John Paul II (who had long been on record quoting Pope St. Paul VI’s demand, “No more war, war never again. It is peace, peace which must guide the destinies of peoples and of all mankind”)[1] bluntly declared, “No to war! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity” in his January 13, 2003 address to the Vatican Diplomatic Corps.[2] It was a call he repeated again and again as the US ramped up to war in Iraq.
In a typical response to the Church’s condemnation of war and urgent calls for peace, American “pro-life” conservative Catholic Michael Novak took a delegation to Rome, not to offer humble obedience to that call, but to attempt to get the pope’s backing for the invasion.[3]
Novak failed—badly.
Not only did the pope reject his appeal but the world’s Catholic bishops sided with the Holy Father in opposing the war. Their reason was simple and was summarized by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger—the future Pope Benedict XVI—when he stated flatly that the “concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”[4]
“Pro-life, faithful, conservative Christians”, terrified by the Bush Administration’s baseless claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and increasingly taking their guidance from conservative pundits did not, however, listen to the Church, but to the arguments of people like Novak. Staking their reasoning on the three myths discussed in the previous chapter, the bulk of “pro-life” conservatives noted that Just War doctrine was not included in the ranks of the Five Non-Negotiables. Therefore, they opined, the Church’s condemnation of the Iraq War was a “mere” prudential judgment and could be safely ignored in favor of the Bush Administration since opposition to abortion taketh away the sin of mass state-sponsored murder in far-off military actions ordered by “pro-life” GOP presidents. After all, didn’t the Catechism (2309) say:
“The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy [of war] belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.”
With one stroke, prudential judgment was successfully converted by American conservative propaganda into a metric for measuring whether, not how best, to obey the gospel by the “pro-life” movement—and on a matter that would directly result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, born and unborn.
This radical distortion of the Church’s teaching would issue in millions of confused Catholics in the US trying to square the circle of magisterial teaching and Bush Administration demands directly opposed to it. Indeed, it was altogether too common in those years to have conversations with confused Catholics such as the one who wrote me to ask:
“The other day one of my friends posted on Facebook that he couldn’t find a prohibition on pre-emptive war in Church teaching, and therefore didn’t think it was always wrong. I went to the Catechism and did a search at Catholic Answers to try to find the teaching, and I haven’t found it yet. I imagine it is in an encyclical or two, I was hoping you could point me in the right direction of where to find this teaching.”
The reason my reader was confused by his friend’s argument is because it relied on a strategy I call the “Semi-Permeable Membrane of Dissent”. The way this strategy works is this:
My reader’s friend was attempting Tactic #1 because he was looking for a way to justify something the Church plainly says is wrong: namely, preventive war, which is to say, unjust war. Why was he seeking to justify something the Church plainly says is wrong, and even more, why did his arguments seem reasonable to my reader? To understand this is to understand the increasingly grave damage the “pro-life” haereses began to do to the Faith and to itself as it exalted the GOP over the Magisterium in the early 2000s.
Of which more tomorrow.
[2] Available on-line at https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/2003/january/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20030113_diplomatic-corps.html as of October 13, 2023.
[3] John L. Allen, Jr., “In Rome, Novak makes case for war”, National Catholic Reporter, February 21, 2003. Available on-line at https://www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives/022103/022103i.htm as of September 6, 2024.
[4] “Cardinal Ratzinger Say Unilateral Attack on Iraq Not Justified,” Zenit, September 22, 2002. Available on-line at https://zenit.org/2002/09/22/cardinal-ratzinger-says-unilateral-attack-on-iraq-not-justified/ as of October 13, 2023.
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8 Responses
The Iraq War was a disaster of historic dimensions. There were no “weapons of mass destruction.” The war was based on lies. Thousands of people died for no good reason.
Here we go again. Another war of choice. More lies. We never learn. This will end badly. As W Bush would say Trump “misunderestimated” the Iranians, and this war will be longer and uglier than advertised.
Bishop Barron has hitched his wagon to Trump. He is named to various commissions and is regarded as some sort of representative of the American Catholic Church. He does not represent me.
His Grace Bishop Barron (it kills me to think of how much I once admired him) apparently thinks it is consistent with Just War Doctrine for a government official to exercise prudential judgement by threatening to annihilate an entire civilization. Some Conservative apologist is free to explain to me how extermination of civilians is appropriate.
We’re used to Hegseth reveling in the notion of “lethality” — even when practiced upon little schoolgirls. I’d rather be on the side of the Popes.
That fact that Barron and Dolan were both listed on the “Re-dedicate 250” platform is all I ever need to know about either of them and allows me – as thoroughly reductive as this is – to dismiss anything either of them says. Both captured. Both glamoured. I’ll pray for them.
Bishop Barron is a very intelligent man. He knows who Trump really is. Why is he such a sycophant? Does he actually believe the horse manure he shovels?
The MAGA cult that currently passes for American Conservatism, reminds me of the malevolent entity inhabiting the hotel in Stephen King’s “The Shinning”. It has consumed countless souls which show up as disembodied ghosts, and they try to present themselves as a part of an exclusive, elite club, enjoying perpetual bliss and comfort. But the truth is that they are trapped in a hell of their own making, and the entity is trying to disguise the fact that it continually needs to consume fresh bodies in order to get them to do its bidding.
I think that is an apt metahpor for the current Republican Party.
As far as gaining any traction goes, it has no use for the people who are deep in the cult and dutifully regurgitate all their talking points. That’s why it continually seeks to attract those on the edges, so they can serve as a bridge to normals. People like Dave Rubin served that role for a while; the same thing could be said for Bishop Barron. However, once they have become fully consumed by the cult, they lose the very thing that made them useful and gave them any semblance of credibility.
At this point, I don’t think many people look at Bishop Barron as anything other than a cautionary tale.
And now Mark, it’s time to take off our kid gloves and discuss Zionism. None of this makes sense without these rather large and disturbing pieces of the puzzle. This time last year I had no idea it was a co-opted, fake religion made up by a bunch of quasi atheists that seem to have morphed into something far, far darker.
If Trump is the antichrist, (who just posted pictures of himself nuking the world) what does that make Netanyahu?
I’m glad some people are talking about it. (I never thought I’d see the day, that the odious Tucker Carlson would redeem himself.)
Tucker Carlson has not redeemed himself. He’s smart enough to notice that the winds of change are blowing in a different direction, as more and more Americans are uncomfortable with Netanyahu. Carlson is an opportunist. Do not trust him!
@MaryS,
It’s not that I trust him, it’s that Carlson *seems* to have his heart in the right place. When he confessed to his sins of racism some years ago, I didn’t trust him–but I hoped. The fact that his son worked in the White House up until a few weeks ago gave me pause, but is it possible that he had the religious conversion that he says he had?
A part of me is wondering if Trump, whose ego is more monstrous than any I’ve ever witnessed –has people like Carlson, working behind the scenes to try to take down his handler, Netanyahu and this “Israel” that specializes in blackmail and murder. He must be apoplectic that Netanyahu leads him around by the nose.