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Squandering moral capital

Where is the moral challenge to tyranny? Where is the summons to heroic resistance?

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro speaks at Fuerte Tiuna military base in Caracas, Venezuela, Jan. 10 after his swearing-in for a second presidential term. The Venezuelan bishops' conference has labeled his new government "illegitimate" and called for a "change in government." (CNS photo/Adriana Loureiro, Reuters)

The morality of tyrannicide is not much discussed in today’s kinder, gentler Catholic Church. Yet that difficult subject once engaged some of Catholicism’s finest minds, including Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, and it was passionately debated during the Second World War by German officers — many of them devout Christians — who were pondering the assassination of Adolf Hitler. (Their efforts were known and tacitly approved by Pius XII, but that’s another story.)

What about today? Were I back in the classroom, I’d ask my students to construct a morally defensible argument for killing a tyrant. If the student followed Aquinas’s reasoning, the case for tyrannicide would involve a leader who was doing grave evil, who could not be removed from power except by being killed, and whose assassination would not make matters worse. Were those conditions met, Aquinas argued in his Commentary on Peter Lombard, a citizen might even be “praised and rewarded” for being the “one who liberates his country by killing a tyrant.”

With the 30th anniversary of the Revolution of 1989 coming this fall, we’ll all be reminded that there are alternatives to killing tyrants or surrendering to evil: awakened consciences can discover nonviolent tools of resistance to tyranny, tools preferable to assassination. And consciences are awakened when men and women hear a summons to moral heroism — to living in the truth, which is the greatest of liberators. That is why the current stance of the Holy See toward Latin American tyrannies is so disconcerting. For rather than calling the people of hard-pressed countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to effective, nonviolent resistance against tyrants on the model of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, the Vatican is constantly bleating about “dialogue” with murderous thugs who’ve demonstrated for decades that they’re only interested in maintaining their power, masking their gross personal ambition and greed with a fog cloud of gibberish about “the revolution.”

Now, however, 20 former Latin American heads of state and government have said, politely but firmly, that enough is enough. In a January 6 letter to their fellow-Latin American, Pope Francis, the signatories, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, acknowledged the “good faith” and “pastoral spirit” of Francis’s Christmas blessing Urbi et Orbi [to the city and the world]. But they also reminded the pope that Venezuelans “are victims of oppression by a militarized narco-dictatorship which has no qualms about systematically violating the rights to life, liberty, and personal integrity,” a corrupt regime that has also “subjected [Venezuelans] to widespread famine and lack of medicine.” As for Nicaragua, President Arias and his colleagues noted that the Ortega regime has recently killed 300 Nicaraguans and wounded 2,500 others in a “wave of repression” against nonviolent protesters.

In these contexts, the former leaders concluded, the papal “call for harmony….can be understood by the victimized nations [as an instruction] that they should come to agreement with their victimizers.” Which is why the majority in Nicaragua and Venezuela received the Pope’s Christmas message “in a very negative way.”

In 2013, the Church’s moral influence in world affairs was at its modern apogee. John Paul II was widely recognized as a pivotal figure in the nonviolent collapse of European communism and a significant player in the democratization of Latin America and East Asia. Drawing on John Paul’s social doctrine and his own penetrating insights into political modernity, Benedict XVI had made powerful statements about the moral foundations of the 21st-century free society in lectures at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, London’s Westminster Hall, and the Bundestag in Berlin.

What has the world seen since then?

It has seen a papal initiative in Syria that, however well-intended, provided cover for the Obama administration to back off its “red line” about Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people. It has seen a Vatican that refuses to use the words “invasion,” “war,” and “occupation” to describe Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss in Crimea and his war in eastern Ukraine, which has killed more than 10,000 and displaced more than a million Ukrainians, many of them Ukrainian Greek Catholics. It has seen a Vatican deal with China that is widely regarded as a kow-tow to ruthless, aggressive authoritarians.

Where is the moral challenge to tyranny? Where is the summons to heroic resistance? Great moral capital is being squandered, in a world that desperately needs a moral compass.


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About George Weigel 520 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

4 Comments

  1. Right wing dribble that has nothing to do with the Catholic church America Britian France Israel and Saudi Arabia have caused millions of deaths and around the globe with their greed for oil and world domination not to mention the many millions of injured and homeless. Shame on you who does twist these facts to your liking and repent for you must prepare to meet your maker.

  2. I was just a little disappointed that Mr. Weigel didn’t carry his commentary through to a full analysis about tyrannicide, as he decided to use the subject as an example of one method in a discussion about the Catholic methodology in bringing about the fall of tyranny. Mr, Weigel’s insistence on “effective, nonviolent resistance against tyrants” is understandable, however it is unlikely the bishops will put forward a plan of resistance that is never guaranteed as “effective” since resistance can sometimes (against tyranny) go very bad for the resisters. To Aquinas’ reasoning on assassination we might add that the people would have first tried peaceful means (including non-violent resistance) while measuring the government’s reaction to this. Also, to the principle that the assassination not make matters worse: one indication of this would be that the vast majority of a just (and gravely injured) people are in full agreement before the action is attempted so as to avoid a competition between new aspiring tyrants. Consideration as to history should also be made – how many assassinations in history have effectively led to a conversion and continuance of peace and justice – which should be the ultimate goal of any revolution.

  3. I’m glad that Mr. Weigel and CWR sees fit to spread some articles advocating murder in American foreign policy – lest we forget where his/their sympathies lie! We very well can’t legislate our own country’s domestic politics. Better instead to use our “moral capital” to tell another country whether or not its election was legitimate. Maybe there are some “moderate rebels” we can arm while we’re at it.

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