Too bad we didn’t have a preventive war when Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 1936. The world would have likely been saved a lot of grief. Wars rarely come like thunder out of a blue sky. For those paying attention you can see the building blocks leading to a confrontation down the road. To say that no preventative war may ever be morally licit is to give a great gift to every tyrant building up to a war when he chooses. The Catholic Faith is not, and never has been, a suicide pact, and clerics are outside their lane when they attempt to set rules as to when a war should start.
You Don’t Have to Wait Until An Enemy Pulls off a Pearl Harbor
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
“Given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups”
Hasn’t this *always* been true of war???
The crops untended or destroyed, the trade interrupted, the outright blockade and siege, inflicting misery, hunger, and death on civilian populations.
Civilian populations were being bombarded since before Ratzinger was born.
It ain’t the weapons, boys.
The steady march of secularism from time of the French Revolution, through the Bolshevik one and on down, has discounted and diluted the fear of God in mans conduct everywhere, not just in war. Liars convinced us that we are our own, not God’s. As such, we make bold to treat the man next to us as something equal to ourselves, forgetting that he is God’s vassal- whether he acknowledges his Lord or is a renegade like us. We must respect the man next to us out of respect for his Lord’s dignity, not his own.
Thus, it is not the weapons that are more dangerous – it is the men.
On this issue Ed Feser is a hybrid of Mark Shea and Mike Lewis.
Quite correct about the Rhineland in 1936. Would have corrected the problem of the failure to properly end WW I at Versailles 1919. This would have also partially corrected(ex Russia) the start of the most useless and harmful war, WW I, in the history of Europe.
I get the feeling Ratzinger had the indiscriminate nature of aerial bombardments in previous wars in mind when he said this (particularly the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden during WW II), and from that angle it’s somewhat understandable, albeit flawed due to not taking technological advances into account.
That said, he also made a point of stating in his role as head of the CDF that support for the Iraq war wasn’t a sin that would bar someone from the Eucharist. So his position was far more nuanced than Feser (and Ratzinger’s papal successors) would make it out to be.
And they would be the first to complain when we get conquered.
“…[If] today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.’
Remarkably narrow-minded thinking from one who ordinarily was a very profound thinker.
And his successor was worse, trying to impose his personal opinion as though it were official Church teaching.
A just war is self-defense.