By Brian Stewart
Friday, May 20,
2022
Christopher Hitchens used to say that in
modern culture a person’s character is judged by their reputation rather than
the other way around. He further noted that this odd phenomenon was
particularly acute when considering figures in religious garb. The leniency of
the public is never in greater supply than when a witless remark is uttered by
a prominent man—or woman—of faith. This may help to explain why Pope Francis enjoys a reputation
as a man of peace. Any doubts about whether or not he truly merits that
honorific will not be allayed by his useless response to the Russian invasion
of Ukraine. On the contrary, his utterances on the subject make nonsense of the
idea that the Church of Rome has any special expertise—much less unique moral
standing—on matters of war and peace.
Scrutiny of the papacy’s position on the
place of power in international relations would reveal that the pristine
reputation Roman Catholic authorities enjoy on this critical subject is
thoroughly undeserved. Pacifists who abjure any recourse to violence are, by
definition, dismayed by the aggressor and the victim as long as both are
fighting. Those concerned with peace, on the other hand, are careful to draw
moral distinctions between various applications of force, investigating both
the means employed and the ends sought. They also care deeply about the natural
competition for power because, as Clausewitz taught us, war is simply the
resort to arms in that competition.
Many seem to have been unduly impressed by
the pope’s perfunctory condemnations of Vladimir Putin’s renewed war of
conquest in Ukraine. But how much moral credit does the pope warrant merely for
protesting an unjustified resort to arms? However one answers that question, it
must be weighed against the staggering offense of protesting Ukraine’s
justified resort to arms.
More than once in recent months, the pope
has approvingly cited Mahatma Gandhi’s advocacy of nonviolent resistance. Many will
agree that this is a noble example to invoke, but it is seldom recalled that
Gandhi failed the straightforward test of moral clarity offered by the Second
World War. Not only did he declare in 1939 that Jewish non-compliance with Nazi decrees might be enough to
“melt Hitler’s heart,” but in a 1940 letter addressed “To Every Briton,” he offered this abject example of
moral equivalence and appeasement:
I appeal
for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but
because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it
by its indifferent adoption. Your soldiers are doing the same work of
destruction as the Germans. The only difference is that perhaps yours are not
as thorough as the Germans. ... I would like you to lay down the arms you have
as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and
Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your
possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many
beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your
minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If
they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman and
child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.
The Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
dissected the immorality of the pacifist position nearly a century ago, but
Pope Francis shows no sign of having profited from his wisdom. In Niebuhr’s
time as in ours, pacifists claimed that war was the supreme evil. But they
neglected to explain how a measure of justice in the world might be secured
when peaceful methods had been exhausted. In effect, Niebuhr argued, their
answer was to abdicate responsibility and surrender to injustice, leaving countless
multitudes to endure the horrors of tyranny and oppression.
In Niebuhr’s view, the “political”
pacifism of a great many Christians was a ghastly distortion of the Christian
ethic. It failed to recognize the tragic elements of the human condition: the
persistence of power and self-interest, the imperfectability of man, and the
contested and contradictory nature of moral and material progress. In short,
anyone responding to the premeditated mass violence of a brigand empire by
invoking this wretched school of thought has forsaken all credibility before
the profound responsibilities of power in a fallen world.
This much has been demonstrated by the
pope’s pronouncements on Ukraine. As a European democracy defends its territory
and population from the lethal onslaught of Russian imperialism, the pontiff
intones that weapons aren’t the solution. (Every time I encounter this non-proposal, I
imagine how much more pathetic it would sound if the pope spelled out the
precise nature of the problem.) He has denounced the “madness” of the West funneling military aid to an embattled
democracy. He has chastised NATO for “barking” at Russia’s door. And he has refused President Zelensky’s invitation to visit Ukraine in a show of
support, at least until he has had a chance to meet with Putin in Moscow (an
audience the Russian autocrat has so far refused to grant).
This is not the place for a prolonged
exegesis on the complex roots of Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine or the terrible
war it has chosen to prosecute there, let alone about the nature of war itself.
Suffice it to say that Putin has long denied Ukraine’s status as an independent state, and that his decision to
go to war was not “perhaps facilitated” (in the pontiff’s words) by the
eastward march of the Atlantic alliance. In its long history, Russia has rarely
enjoyed greater security on its western flank than it has since the end of the
Cold War, which is probably why Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has
greeted news that Finland and Sweden will join NATO with a shrug.
Utopian masochism appears in both secular
and religious form, and needs to be resisted in both. It is detached not only
from history but from human nature itself. The notion that some things are
worth fighting and dying for has dominated human relations and the order of
states since antiquity, and the defense of hearth and home from brutal conquest
and despotism has always been foremost among the justifications. Since the
outbreak of this latest round of hostilities, Ukrainian forces have been armed
and trained by the West, and these advantages have helped them to inflict
grievous losses on Russia’s invading forces. They understand what the pope in
his transcendent wisdom evidently does not—that the best chance of a viable peace
lies not in surrender but in the continued refinement and demonstration of
military prowess. Only that can teach Putin and the Russian elite a lesson in
deterrence they will not soon forget.
One might have thought that the head of
the Catholic Church wouldn’t require patient instruction in this matter. After
all, Catholic “just war” doctrine holds that nations may legitimately employ
armed force under certain conditions. But Francis has heaped calumny on that
option throughout his tenure, especially as it pertains to the defense of Pax
Americana. In 2013, as President Obama weighed launching airstrikes to punish
the Syrian regime for murdering civilians with chemical weapons, the pope led
100,000 people in a prayer vigil for peace in St. Peter’s Square. Asked about the US-led campaign
against Islamic State in Iraq in 2014, the pope argued that “it is licit to
stop the unjust aggressor” before unhelpfully adding that “one nation alone
cannot determine how to stop an unjust aggressor.”
In his 2020 encyclical, “Fratelli tutti” (“Brothers, all”), Francis asserted
that “it is easy to fall into an overly broad interpretation of this potential
right” to armed self-defense, especially given the threat posed to civilians by
modern weapons of mass destruction. “It is very difficult nowadays to invoke
the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the
possibility of a ‘just war,’” he wrote. Perhaps this is why he has not dared to
set foot in Ukraine since the siege of Mariupol and the slaughter of Bucha.
For Francis, like the Corbynite Left,
salvation lies in the UN, an institution he appears to regard with mystical
reverence. “The Charter of the United Nations,” he wrote, “when observed and
applied with transparency and sincerity, is an obligatory reference point of
justice and a channel of peace.” This is the same charter that grants rogue
regimes free rein to violate human rights with impunity so long as they do so
within their own borders. He did not pause to consider that, without Allied
power, the United Nations would never have been established in the first place.
Nor did he mention the UN’s uniformly dismal record in preventing armed
conflict—in Ukraine and innumerable other places.
None of this represents a sophisticated
rendition of just war theory, to put it mildly. One can scarcely imagine this
litany of puerile bromides being recognized, let alone extolled, by the likes
of Augustine or Aquinas. Papal support for military aggression was once
commonplace. Medieval pontiffs called for crusades against Muslims and
(invariably) Jews in the Holy Land, Pope Julius II led knights into battle
against rival Italian rulers, and the Vatican retained its own armed forces
until the late 19th century. Rome’s last full-throated endorsement of a war was
when it sanctified General Franco’s invasion of Spain, an enterprise armed and
aided by Hitler and Mussolini.
This vicious chauvinism is plainly no
longer the danger at a time when the Holy See exhibits a reflexive and
near-absolute renunciation of violence. But that the Vatican has ceased to be
dangerous doesn’t mean that it has ceased to be deplorable. Writing for the
website of the Italian daily, il Fatto Quotidano, Marco Politi, a
Vatican expert, distinguished this approach from that adopted by Pope Pius XII
in the early years of the Cold War. Unlike the staunch Cold Warrior of
yesteryear, Francis does not aspire to be “the military chaplain of the West.”
To be mistaken for the military chaplain of the Kremlin, however, is evidently
a separate matter.
The 19th-century historian and politician
Thomas Babington Macaulay once said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved credit for its ability to
contain the “enthusiasm” that so often flowered in its ranks. Today, the
church’s problem is no longer violent zealotry (which is progress of a kind)
but an astonishing unseriousness and moral vacuity about earthly affairs. The
only organized violence that Francis seems unable to condemn unambiguously is that of religious fanatics whose prophet has been
pilloried. Taking up arms in defense of one’s native soil is intolerable, but
murdering civilians on behalf of an impugned icon is somewhat mitigated by the
principle that “one cannot make fun of faith.”
In his 1949 essay on Gandhi, George Orwell advised that “Saints should always be judged guilty
until they are proved innocent.” The reverence with which Pope Francis’s
pronouncements on the war in Ukraine are reported and discussed indicates the
opposite—that his reputation as a man of peace is not about to be capsized by
the appalling vapidity of his ideas. The kind of pacifism he espouses will not
bring peace, it will only inflame the confidence and appetite of aggressors. If
Ukrainians are paying no more attention to the pope today than Britain paid to
Gandhi in 1940, it is because they understand that peace is not capitulation
and appeasement but the most legitimate object of war.
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