The Church in War: George Weigel: "Pope Francis Waves a White Flag at Valdimir Putin" and the Battle for the Just War Doctrine

 

Pix credit Wall Street Journal here

After a dress rehearsal in the 1990s, one which gave Europe and its North America friends a measure of what proved to be false hope in its withering away in the way that early Marxist thought the state might wither, war has again come to Europe. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has altered the landscapes of war in Europe--and elsewhere.  One speaks not only of the physically battles among armies, nor of the advanced generation warfare that are  directed toward the destabilization of liberal democracy (on one side) and the economic viability and its collective will to fight of the invading State through sanctions (on the other). One speaks of that more abstract war over the conception of war itself.

There are many elements and perspectives to this war on war.  Post 1945 internationalists continue to work diligently to develop an ecology of legality that, when broadly and liberally enforced, could effectively make virtually all acts of war illegal--whether in the form of physical combat or any aggressive action with negative impacts on the population of a target State (or other enemy). There are others who see in combat the mechanics of risk--where the aversion to the list of human suffering, including the loss of life, approaches the absolute,  they might adopt as a paramount value the principle of prevent, mitigate and then remedy adverse impacts. Prevention may require the state eventually projected to lose o to suffer more, to sue for peace on whatever terms might maximize the minimization of adverse negative effects on human persons, their collectives, their goods and possessions. There are those who see in war, in virtually every aspect, as a contextually based obligation where it serves higher values and prevents the perpetuation of values and actions deemed morally repugnant.  Among these are responses to aggression, or to other projections of power that do harm as that is measured against a complex set of normative premises.

In both the Russo-Russian War, and in the Israel Palestine wars, these conceptual battlegrounds have served to shape the theoretical foundations of what eventually emerges as public policy--not so much within the institutional collectives of the combatants, but among their friends, allies and enemies. Te idea is that where friends, especially, fear that a state combatant cannot win (in the long or medium run certainly), then they serve their friends best by pressuring them to accommodate moral negative in order to save whatever they can for as long as they can (for a taste: Israel-Palestine see here, here; for Ukraine here and here). 

Now that war has come to the heart of the Catholic Church. It exploded in the aftermath of the publication of segments of an interview with Pope Francis.

On March 9, Radio Télévision Suisse published segments from an upcoming feature interview with the pope in which he discussed a range of issues. In one previewed sectioned, Francis was asked about global conflicts and his hopes for peace. “I believe that the stronger one is the one who sees the situation, who thinks of the people, who has the courage of the white flag, to negotiate,” the pope responded. “Today, for example, in the war in Ukraine, there are many that want to be mediators, no? Turkey for example. Do not be ashamed to negotiate before things get worse,” Francis said. (Pope Francis’ ‘white flag’ comments echo ‘Kremlin propagandists’ say Ukrainian Catholics)

Georege Weigel pix credit here

The global press organs and social media, of course, pounced on this, and the Vatican sought to reframe the message (see here). Most of the commentary ranged from the informative to the regrettable.  But underlying all this fuss is a much larger and deeper one--the long simmering battle over the Church's moral and theological position respecting just war e.g., Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part 3, Section 2, Art. 5 (the Fifth Commandment), §§2307-2317. It was perhaps not surprising that George Weigel, described by Wikepedia as "an American Catholic neoconservative author, political analyst, and social activist" and described in his own website as "Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, George Weigel is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies" found himself penning a quite strongly worded opinion piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal: "Pope Francis Waves a White Flag at Valdimir Putin."It is worth a careful read.  Whether or not one agrees with the substance of the strong critique of the Pontiff's remarks, he provides, quite succinctly, a window onto one of the more profound "conversations"wending its ways through the institutional organs of the Vatican. It forms part of a larger conversation in liberal democracies, as suggested above. And more importantly, for the Catholic Church at least, points to the riffs that will mark the inevitable conclaves yet to come. The text of the esay may be accessed HERE where it first appeared and follows below. 

Pope Francis Waves a White Flag at Vladimir Putin

In urging the victim to yield to the aggressor, he repudiates centuries of Catholic teaching.

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By

George Weigel

March 13, 2024 2:42 pm ET

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Pope Francis in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, March 6. Photo: Evandro Inetti/Zuma Press

The leaders of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church visited Washington this month to make the case for continued U.S. aid to their beleaguered but unbroken country. The bishops used rational arguments for national self-defense that drew on just-war theory, the ancient tradition of Christian moral realism that first took systematic form with St. Augustine in the fifth century. Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halyč and Archbishop Borys Gudziak—the head of the Ukrainian church and its senior U.S. prelate, respectively—also explained why Russia’s defeat in Ukraine is essential to peace in Europe and vital to the American interest.

Shortly after these serious adult conversations took place, Pope Francis erupted in another off-the-cuff interview, instructing Ukraine to have the “courage” to seize the “white flag” and negotiate with Russia: “When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate.”

In the interview, there was evidently no papal call to Russia to cease its aggression, which has cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and done a trillion dollars worth of damage. There was no papal demand that Catholics be allowed to worship freely in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, where Catholic rites are now banned. There was no papal insistence that Russia release the tens of thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children who are being “re-educated.” There was no papal condemnation of Russian war crimes in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and elsewhere. Nor did the pope denounce the Russian Orthodox Church’s relentless campaign of disinformation in support of Vladimir Putin’s war.

Pope Francis seemed wholly unaware of the carefully reasoned, just-war-informed statement the Ukrainian episcopate had issued a few days before the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion, in which the bishops summoned their people to continued sacrifice in defense of their freedom and sovereignty. The bishops also noted that Russia’s violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum the Kremlin had signed—in which Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of its territorial integrity—made any thought of “negotiations” with Mr. Putin’s regime risible. By contrast, the pope seemed to place the entire burden of finding a path to peace on the victim, not the aggressor.

Moral myopia of such severity should be beneath the dignity of the papacy. Yet the fecklessness Pope Francis urged on Ukraine is of a piece with his own practice of raising white flags when dealing with thuggish regimes. That weakness is most prominently embodied in the pope’s dealings with Mr. Putin’s “dear friend,” Xi Jinping. Thanks to the Vatican’s 2018 deal with Beijing and its subsequent extensions, the Communist Party exercises de facto control over the appointment of Catholic bishops in China.

Throughout Francis’ pontificate, Catholic progressives have lobbied for a papal repudiation of the just-war tradition as the normative Catholic method of moral analysis in facing the ethical challenges of international politics. Such a repudiation is impossible. The just-war tradition is so deeply rooted in both reason and revelation that a flat-out rejection of it would be akin to heresy.

To be sure, the tradition requires development to deal with new weapons technologies—including drone warfare—cyberwar, terrorism and nonstate aggressors. Unfortunately, the Vatican has been lax in facilitating the development of moral reasoning about the legitimate use of force, preferring to engage in “dialogue” with those calling for the sections on just war to be eliminated from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. A string of papal malapropisms in the past decade has also made it less likely that statesmen will look to the Vatican for guidance in navigating the wilderness of mirrors that is the new world disorder.

Francis’s pontificate parallels the deterioration of moral reasoning about world politics throughout the leadership of mainline Protestant denominations. A year before the 80th anniversary of the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, judicially murdered for resisting the Nazis’ perpetration and conduct of World War II, Christian leaders throughout the West wallow in a gelatinous liberal internationalism: unable to recognize the imperative of militarily deterring aggressive regimes, bewitched by the notion that weapons cause wars, incapable of grasping that totalitarians advance with genocidal purpose.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops are an exception. They stood in a line of theological continuity with St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Bonhoeffer and other Christian realists when, in a March 10 response to the papal call to raise the white flag, they declared that “Ukrainians cannot surrender because surrender means death.”

“Ukrainians will continue to defend themselves,” they wrote, because “recent history has demonstrated that with Putin there will be no true negotiations.” Any agreement with a dictator who has denied Ukraine’s nationhood wouldn’t be “worth the paper on which it is written.” Russia’s goal, as Mr. Putin has stated, is the eradication of Ukraine. Ukraine’s aim, the bishops declared, is the defense of “freedom and dignity to achieve a peace that is just.”

That is the appropriate Christian moral response to lethal aggression. Waving the white flag in the face of evil not only begets more evil; it betrays a millennium and a half of Christian tradition in the process.

Mr. Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author, most recently, of “To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II.”