Deacon Kyle Eller: Grappling with war and peace in a war-weary world

Mere Catholicism 

In a recent issue of the Loaves and Fishes newspaper, put out by the Catholic Worker community in Duluth, I found an essay by a person named Drew Anderson really moving. In the column, Anderson described his internal conflict as he has concluded that he supports Ukraine in its military defense against Russian invasion, even as he lives in a community committed to pacifism. 

Full disclosure: Within Catholic belief on war and peace, there is a fairly broad spectrum of licit opinion, and my own sensibilities lean strongly toward the “dove” camp within the just war framework. Prior to my conversion to the faith, I’d have simply described myself as a pacifist. Everything in me recoils at war, and almost always has. 

But what I admired was not so much Anderson’s particular conclusions as it was his courage and candor in the way he grappled with the moral complexity of it. Often, in many difficult moral questions, we turn our eyes from the full implications of what we’re saying, almost placing a little asterisk next to our principled stand that means “… unless something really terrible will happen, of course.” 
Buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes are seen in Gaza City Oct. 10, 2023. Israel launched airstrikes on the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the Oct. 7 assault on the country by Hamas militants that killed 1,200 people in Israel. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, in a letter to the faithful Sept. 26, 2024, called for a day of prayer and penance on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack and the start of the Israel-Hamas war. (OSV News photo/Mohammed Salem, Reuters) 
But in debates about war and peace, there are no choices without difficult consequences. The absolute pacifist is saying, in effect: “Even if my country faces a war of aggression from an authoritarian enemy ready to bomb our cities to rubble and massacre my innocent friends and family and commit unspeakable war crimes in order to conquer us, I will not take up arms to stop them. I will only use nonviolent means of resistance.” 

And as Anderson grapples with in his essay, to support war also has consequences. It necessarily means human beings made in the image of God slaughtering other human beings made in the image of God, and the almost endless, seemingly incalculable evils that attend it: the dead, the maimed, the traumatized, the widowed, the orphaned. It means disease and poverty and people displaced and destitute on a massive scale. It means uncounted bodies buried under the rubble of what were once homes and schools and hospitals and places of worship and shops, and the squandering of perhaps generations of work building a community. It means partaking of the world’s massive war machine of more and more powerful and expensive weapons and the inconceivable sums of money spent on them. 

Anderson also alludes to the one of the reasons there can be a certain unreality to our debates over these things in America: We have the privilege of living in a place where attacks on our soil are very rare. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, hit major landmarks in two cities in our country, destroying one of them and killing more than 2,000 innocent people. It’s not too strong a statement to say these events scarred the American psyche. I still tear up more than two decades later when I look at news clips from that day, and I was more than 1,000 miles away when it happened. 

But if you go on the Internet and search for images of any of the war-torn parts of the world, it’s unfortunately easy to find places where bombed and destroyed buildings of all kinds are a regular occurrence. In some places that used to be cities, there seems to be nothing left but rubble. I admit that I find it hard to even conceive of what life must be like in such circumstances. I recently had a long conversation with a Catholic friend where the conversation turned to war, and I was momentarily surprised at his vehemence when he spoke of the evils of it, but of course he was absolutely right. We don’t think or talk about this truth nearly enough. 

All of this is, in fact, why I find the just war framework of the church so compelling. It grapples with all of those realities head-on, in situations that often seem to admit no good solution, in the light of divine revelation and natural law and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, with a result that I believe reflects something deeper than human wisdom. 

Make no mistake: Hewing seriously to the church’s just war teaching has serious consequences too. It calls us to seek by all legitimate means to avoid going to war but admits at least the theoretical possibility that war, with all the evils it entails, could be a legitimate last resort. Taken rigorously, as the church calls us to do, it limits those occasions severely, to only the strictest matters of self-defense in cases where there is a legitimate hope of success. 

And even if this high bar is met, rigorous application of the just war teaching significantly constrains how war can be waged, forbidding the targeting of civilians or mistreatment of prisoners or anything that would be disproportionate — even when one’s enemies do not observe the moral law in these matters. 

Although a common trope holds that this approach of the church is an ivory tower affair that doesn’t survive contact with the real world, for all the reasons above I believe precisely the opposite is true. It reflects the best of human wisdom earned through real-world experience, purified by the light of faith. It’s our purely human ideologies that fail to see things as they truly are. 

May Jesus, the prince of peace, bring true peace to our war-weary world. 

Deacon Kyle Eller is editor of The Northern Cross. Reach him at [email protected].