By Cardinal Pietro Parolin also addressed tensions over the Traditional Latin Mass.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, said on Thursday that the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran does not meet the Catholic Church’s criteria for a just war.
“No, it does not seem to meet the conditions,” he told reporters on the sidelines of an academic conference at the Vatican Apostolic Library.
When asked by EWTN News about the decision of the United States to attack Iran, Parolin referred to recent remarks by Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, D.C.
In an interview with his archdiocesan newspaper, The Catholic Standard, McElroy said the intervention in Iran failed to meet several conditions required by the Church’s teaching on just war, including that the benefits of this war will not “outweigh the harm which will be done.”
“He explained this point very well,” Parolin said, referring to McElroy’s statement.
Parolin’s comments follow those of Pope Leo XIV in a statement given to journalists on Tuesday at Castel Gandolfo, the papal villa south of Rome, when he renewed his call for an unconditional ceasefire, saying that “death and pain caused by these wars is a scandal for the entire human family.”
Parolin was also asked about a letter he sent on behalf of the pope on Wednesday to the bishops of France, in which Leo encouraged them to be more inclusive of communities attached to the Traditional Latin Mass, which the pope said had become a divisive issue in the Church.
The debate over the Traditional Latin Mass has taken on fresh urgency in France in part because of the Society of St. Pius X, founded by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and known for celebrating only the traditional liturgy. The SSPX said in February that it plans to consecrate bishops on July 1 without a pontifical mandate, a step canon law says carries automatic excommunication for both the consecrating bishop and the one ordained.
“The liturgy must not become a source of conflict and division among us,” Parolin said, without pointing to any specific solutions. “It will be necessary to find the formula that can meet legitimate needs. But I believe that, well, this can happen without turning the liturgy into a battlefield.”
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There’s the criteria and arithmetic of reasoned Western Just War Theory, but also the calculus of dealing with embedded parts of Islam (self-understood as a “congregational theocracy”) wherein unreasoning Jihad and proxy wars are— by definition(!)— the Just War.
Not here to disagree nor to agree with Parolin’s prudential judgment that the war with Iran “does not seem[?] to meet the conditions [of a just war].”
Only to note what also seems to be the real-rime asymmetry between a pre-emptive strike/unjust war(?) and a fatalistic and aggressive alternative universe— transplanted from 7th-century tribal Arabia into the modern and overlaid political idiom of nation-states. And which is further entangled with the serendipity and transitory Western dependence on Middle East oil, and with the proliferated Western technology of nuclear weapons.
A time warp? Instead of camels and scimitars, now ballistic missiles and possible nuclear blackmail? The arithmetic of St. Augustine’s valid Just War Theory, but now in a compact, post- and anti-Christian world.
Beam me up, Scotty!
Cdl Parolin, who announced to the world that Pope Francis’ letter response to the Argentine hierarchal query on whether or not Amoris Laeitia teaches divorced and remarried can receive the Eucharist following discernment, “There’s no other way of interpreting it” – is binding doctrine, when that letter response was entered into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis.
A first in binding Church doctrine, unexplicit, not declarative of a specific doctrine. Another example, when asked about the justification of the Iran war, he referred to Cdl McElroy. Oblique like the above. Our Church has to do better than this.