Pope Leo XIV and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were diplomatic after their recent meeting. But the conflict between the Vatican and the White House isn’t going to fade away. Both sides seem disinclined to reconsider their views on immigration, which are miles apart. While Catholic leaders have, in recent decades, been drawn toward Republicans by the abortion issue, President Donald Trump’s wariness about it has weakened that force.
And then, of course, there is the Iran war, which does not show signs of ending, despite the administration sometimes insisting it’s over. Leo’s opposition to the war isn’t some idiosyncrasy: It’s consistent with John Paul II’s opposition to the Gulf War and the Iraq War. But Trump isn’t going to take papal opposition in stride, as his predecessors did, and no amount of visits from Rubio will preclude the possibility of another presidential social-media eruption.
Another reason for conflict between the pope and the president: Trump has made next to no attempt to justify his Iran policy using the traditional criteria for just war, and sometimes he broadcasts contempt for the idea that war could be subject to moral evaluation. When he threatens to end Iran’s civilization, it can’t plausibly be spun as anything but placing large-scale war crimes on the table.
Though just-war theory is frequently associated with the Catholic Church, its influence extends to non-Catholics and it rests on no distinctively Christian premises. It holds that war is permissible when (among other conditions) it serves a just cause, is declared by a legitimate authority, has a reasonable chance of success and can be expected to do more good than harm.
There is plenty of room to debate when these conditions have been met, but they clearly rule out some wars. Smash-and-grab operations to conquer oil fields are certainly excluded, even though Trump has daydreamed in public about the possibility.
Leo has not spelled out why he thinks the Iran war fails the just-war test. The conclusion that it does is reasonable, however, in light of the arguments Trump has made for it. The president recently mentioned Iran’s undoubted offenses against “Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years.” The war, however, is by his own admission not designed to end the Iranian regime, nor to ensure that what follows would be better.
Nor can punishment for crimes starting in 1979 bear the weight of justifying killings today. Ending an imminent nuclear threat could meet the test — except that Trump has not outlined any plausible path to ending Iran’s nuclear program or provided strong evidence of that supposed imminence. As theologian Edward Feser writes, “We cannot justifiably attack any country simply because it might at some point in the future decide to harm us.” If we could, we would have to say that Pearl Harbor was a just act of war.
This war also cannot satisfy the moral requirement of being launched by a legitimate authority. In the United States, the authority to begin wars belongs constitutionally to Congress and not to the president acting alone. As Alexander Hamilton explained, the president can respond to acts of war committed against the country — but if the U.S. is not already in a state of war, Congress must decide whether to enter one. That doesn’t mean that Congress has to use the phrase “declare war,” but it does have to authorize the military engagement.
Even if Congress could delegate that power to the president, it has not done so. The War Powers Resolution explicitly restates the Hamiltonian understanding: Absent an attack on the U.S., the president needs congressional approval to go to war. Supporters of broad presidential power have suggested that congressional approval is unnecessary because Congress can always remove funding for military operations. But the Constitution does not treat the failure to legislate against a war as tacit consent to it. It requires a war to garner an affirmative majority in both houses of Congress.
Insisting on congressional authorization isn’t mere legalism. The purposes of the constitutional requirement are to restrain executive warmaking and to guarantee broad deliberation and support before going to war. Those purposes rule out relying on the Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress passed in 2001 in response to 9/11, even if you could stretch its language to cover today’s military operation.
Influential Catholic Bishop Robert Barron has pointed out that the just-war tradition leaves the determination of important questions that arise under it — such as whether a war is likely to do more harm than good — to “civil authorities” rather than to his fellow clerics. In the U.S., the relevant authorities are Congress and, indirectly, the citizenry as a whole.
To the extent that Leo has been trying to influence Americans’ thinking about the Iran war, he can be faulted for the occasional overstatement or lack of clarity: Surely his condemnation of “those who wage war” should not cover Allied soldiers in World War II. But his bottom-line judgment of the Iran war is correct — and the Constitution backs him up.
The post A rift between Pope Leo and the White House deepens appeared first on Washington Post.
