We’ve been taking a couple of days to take apart Bishop Robert Barron grotesque attempt to silence the pope and teach that Caesar alone is the sole arbiter of justice in war (and, by extension, in all acts of murderous state violence).
This brings us to a last couple of points. Yesterday, we looked at just war doctrine insofar as it concerns ius ad bellum: the criteria by which the Church evaluates whether it is just to go to war. But that is not the only thing the Christian tradition considers in evaluating the justice of a given war. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2312) puts it:
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.”[1]
In short, even if a war meets all the criteria for ius ad bellum, there remains a second aspect of Just War doctrine: ius in bello. This refers to the way in which war is conducted once it is determined that there is just cause for war.
In other words, merely because you are justified in going to war does not mean you get to go apeshit and do whatever you like. You cannot torture prisoners or murder them in cold blood. You cannot wage a war of extermination or commit genocide. You cannot annihilate entire civilizations en masse. Nor can you, as Trump has done, threaten to do so. This is, in itself, a war crime. War does not give anybody the right to rape or threaten to murder a prisoner’s wife and children during an interrogation. Meeting the ius ad bellum criteria for Just War is not, in short, a license to commit war crimes. And the grave danger a country faces when it goes to war without just cause is that it is highly likely to prosecute that war without just means either.
Now the thing about Bishop Barron’s defense of Caesar’s absolute right to decree the justice of his war is that he thought it a genius idea to do so nearly two weeks after Trump had promised to murder the entirety of Iranian civilization which had drawn the response of Pope Leo condemning Trump’s war. And he did so despite the fact that Trump has, in fact, launched an illegal war since it is up to Congress, not a lone authoritarian Caesar to simply send men and women into harm’s way.
And that’s the thing about Bishop Barron’s attempt to sideline the Pope and give sole determination of the justice of the Idiot War to this one tyrannical idiot: we live in a democracy. It is, in the end, up to We the People, not one moron in the White House, to decide the justice of a given war. The argument that Bishop Barron makes for sidelining the Pope and granting sole authority to Trump is this:
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.
But the reality, in the real world, is that Trump and his toadies and sycophants have never been able to give a clear rationale for the war. On Mondays, we are to believe Iran’s ability to make nukes was “obliterated” last year. On Tuesdays, we are told they are “two weeks away” from a nuclear arsenal. On Wednesdays, we are informed that we did it to “liberate” the Iranian people. On Thursdays, we are told that our goal is annihilate the Iranian civilization. On Fridays, we are told we are doing it to help Israel. On Saturdays, we are told it is to “open the fuckin’ Strait of Hormuz” and on Sunday, we are closing the Strait in order to open it.
Or something.
Meanwhile, we are committing war crimes like murdering schools full of girls while Barron’s Sole Arbiter of Just War takes zero responsibility for it.
The clear moral of the story is that when the Holy Father and the Magisterium tell you that a war does not meet one single solitary criterion of Just War Teaching, the sane thing to do is listen to them and not to one profoundly compromised bishop in bed with an authoritarian regime.
If you want to go even deeper in depth to learn the clear and present danger of Bishop Barron’s opposition to the clear and obvious teaching of Pope Leo and the Magisterium concerning Trump’s disastrous, evil, stupid, and illegal war on Iran, I suggest you check out Deacon Steven Greydanus’ careful dissection of Bishop Barron’s shameful, dreadful argument.
[1] Gaudium et Spes 79 § 4. Available at https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html as of January 3, 2025.
Advertisement
One Response
I can’t imagine a circumstance in which it’s appropriate for a Bishop to say that his civil government has greater moral authority than the Pope regarding any Just War issue. And that’s leaving aside the disregard of Congress, the unrepentant slaughter of school children, and the threat to demolish an entire civilization.