By The conference comes amid debates about the moral legitimacy of military action and the responsibility of political leaders and service members to uphold the Church’s teaching on war and peace.
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A few hundred people — including active duty members of the military and veterans — attended the Catholic Military Conference this week, which featured talks and panels on just war doctrine, the duties of Catholic soldiers, and other subjects.
The conference, organized by the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, is being held in Chantilly, Virginia, from Nov. 9–11. It hosted speakers including the Military Services Archbishop Timothy Broglio, lay theologians Joseph E. Capizzi and Matthew Bunson, and military veterans.
A theme of the talks was the negative consequences of any war. Even though war can be permitted under certain circumstances, the speakers emphasized the duty of political leaders to ensure that every criteria of just war doctrine is met when launching a war and to avoid it if at all possible.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, war can only be justified to confront a grave evil, the evil caused by the war cannot exceed the evil it seeks to end, all alternatives to war must be sought before it is waged, and the goals must have a real chance of success.
Duty to seek peace
“Fighting involves killing,” retired Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik — a commander in the Iraq War who also served in Afghanistan and several other countries — said in his talk.
War, according to Dubik, is “not just killing the combatants” but also includes “the killing of the innocents who are always caught up in wars.” It “damages lives and changes lives” and has an impact on relationships, communities, and sometimes a nation, he warned.
Dubik, who holds a doctorate in philosophy and works as a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War and as a professor at Georgetown Universityʼs security studies program, said that “even when you do everything as right as possible” and even when the acts are “completely justified,” “the soul of the individual, the relationships, the communities, are damaged.”
Decisions to go to war and decisions on the battlefield, Dubik said, “can cost people their lives.”
“This is why wars should always be fought and waged prudently,” Dubik said. “They should be fought and waged sparingly, as a last resort.”
Due to the severity of war, he said society needs a “robust” and “coherent” just war doctrine that leaders follow. The decision to go to war, he said, “can never be an amoral or aspiritual affair.”
At the conference, Capizzi, director for Notre Dame University’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, and Bunson, vice president and editorial director of EWTN News, talked about how the Catholic teaching of just war doctrine seeks to offer guidance to political leaders.
Given the consequences of any war, Capizzi explained that this is why the Church rejects the notion of “realpolitik,” which analyzes the subject through a strategic lens as opposed to a moral one.
Capizzi cited St. Augustine’s letter to the Roman general Boniface, noting that it’s important to emphasize war “should never be desired for its own sake.” He said it should “never be motivated by vengeance, wealth, glory, or vendetta, but rather it has to serve justice, it has to serve the community.”
“The men and women who serve in our military must be and are peacemakers when they remember that,” he said.
Seeking peace with Iran
Although the conference speakers mostly avoided weighing in on justifications for the ongoing war with Iran, Broglio discussed the application of just war doctrine to the conflict.
President Donald Trump told CNN on Sunday, Nov. 8, that it is “highly unlikely” he will escalate the war with Iran but that this depends on “whether or not they sign a very strong agreement,” threatening to “hit them really hard” if a deal is not reached.
Speaking to EWTN News during the conference, Broglio said “everything should be done to encourage dialogue” between Iran and the U.S., with a goal toward peace. He said “everything should be done to avoid war.”
“War is always the last possible option,” he said.
If there is an escalation, Broglio expressed concern over rhetoric about hitting infrastructure that civilians depend on, saying “many of those structures … support the defenses of an enemy” but “also support the civilian population.” He said civilian harm “should be avoided at all cost.”
Broglio said decisions moving forward must keep in mind “the innocent person who is always involved in these situations … [who] frequently runs the risk of losing his or her life.” He said “the dignity of that person” must be a priority when making these decisions.
“If unfortunately there is an escalation,” the archbishop said, “then thatʼs really to be deplored, but certainly … [officials must] keep [civilian harm] as minimal as possible and on the lowest level possible.”
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About the error of analyzing “the subject [war] through a strategic lens as opposed to a moral one,” I suffer from an unresolved perplexity…
For background we can recall the classic von Clausewitz (On War) who distinguished between strategy and tactics, not living long enough to see that tactics can become strategy—as with the invention of the machine gun in World War I or the invention of air power and aircraft carriers in World War II (displacing the strategy of battleships).
So, the unaddressed question today, it seems to me, is what does one do before a jihadist regime transplanted from the premodern world is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon together with a ballistic missile capability. Nuclear blackmail works like this: If Washington DC does not do thus and such, or simply stand aside, then the bomb will land on either Paris or London. What now is the conjectural/real proportionality?
What would 5th-century St. Augustine say about total warfare and now a non-linear situation on steroids, or whatever it is?
In 19th-century traditional China the threat posed by the technological and expansive West was first met by insular academic contests on how better to construct the Confucian “eight-legged essay.” Why are we reminded of this possible parallel now in a world where doing nothing is also a moral/immoral alternative? (And where Western-culture dialogue is blasphemy, detached as it is from a totally inscrutable, anti-Trinitarian/non-relational, and even self-contradictory Allah)?
The intricate central question, perhaps, is whether or not Iran was within weeks of developing their own “gadget.” Sorry to say, yours truly in the back bleachers does not have that classified information. But, still, what else might have been done, and when, and by whom?
As for the drawn-out consequences, every war or military intervention is subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences. But it seems to me that for our consumer culture to simplify today’s hair-trigger conundrums into a spike in gasoline prices at the pump is a political and media distraction and not sufficient for our unprecedent situation.
Such is my perplexity, but who am I to judge?
“Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood. What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?” – Mahatma Gandhi