by Cindy Wooden
National Catholic Reporter
“The time has come to say an emphatic ‘no’ to war” and state decisively “that wars are not just,” Pope Francis said in a message to the UN Security Council.
In his message, read by Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister, Francis said he accepted the invitation to address the meeting June 14 because “conflicts are growing, and stability is increasingly put at risk. We are experiencing a third world war fought piecemeal, which, as time passes, seems to become ever more widespread.”
The pope’s speech was part of a Security Council ministerial-level briefing on the theme of “the values of human fraternity in promoting and sustaining peace.”
Organized by the United Arab Emirates, which is presiding over the council in June, the briefing at the UN headquarters also included António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, and Sheikh Ahmad el-Tayeb, grand imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar mosque and university. Francis and the sheikh signed a document on human fraternity during a meeting in the United Arab Emirates in 2019.
Gallagher read the pope’s message in a video link with the meeting because Francis was still in Rome’s Gemelli hospital after undergoing surgery to repair a hernia.
In his 2020 encyclical “Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship,” Francis questioned whether with modern warfare any conflict could be judged a “just war” because proportionality and the protection of civilians seem difficult if not impossible to guarantee.
The pope was even more critical of traditional just war theory in the text he prepared for the Security Council briefing…
Pope Francis enjoys the support of thinking, nominally progressive Catholics and non-Catholics until he crosses a certain line in the sand such as refusing to acquiesce to the oxymoronically named just war theory. Then all of a sudden he’s labeled misguided because he dares to dispel the myths many of us as young Catholics were indoctrinated with and which many of our own clerics still embrace, namely: USA is God’s favorite country; war is good if waged or abetted by us; winning is the name of the game in warfare; capitalism is closer to God than any other system; murder is evil unless the murdered are Russians.
Let’s try to reach some kind of mental puberty before we’re all blown to bits in a nuclear Armageddon.
Stella Maris ora pro nobis.
David-Ross Gerling, PhD