Fallet Vance: När påven måste få kritiseras

Här återfinner du min kommentar till Cameron Bertuzzis välgjorda Youtube-inlägg om JD Vances uttalanden om påve Leo och kriget i Iran.

JD Vances uttalande:

Cameron Bertuzzi: The Pope was right. Vance is wrong

Min kommentar:

I appreciated this! But I still think Cameron is wrong on many levels. As a fellow convert, I share doubts about the Iran war, mostly regarding the prospects of success (a criterion of Just War doctrine).

First, I don’t think Cameron is doing Vance justice. Vance never claimed that the Just War doctrine supports the Iran war. His problem was with the very broad and pacifistic sounding statement by Pope Leo that “God is never on the side of those who wield the sword.” On its face, this contradicts that there even exists such a thing as a just war. Now, Cameron says that we must understand this in the context of Isaiah, where it means to be the initiator of war. But this is not at all clear from Pope Leo’s homily. On the contrary, Pope Leo had just said that “Jesus rejects war”. This was interpreted by many as a pacifistic statement.

During his first year as pope, Leo has made similar remarks on several occasions, all sounding like wielding the sword is always wrong. During the Gaza war, as an example, he criticized Israel on X by quoting “Thou shalt not kill”. To my knowledge, he has never mentioned the possibility of a just war or referenced the Just War doctrine. The contradiction between a plain reading of what the pope was saying and the Church’s teaching on Just War was obvious. And there’s nothing wrong in gently correcting the Pope.

Second, Cameron isn’t steelmanning the case for the war enough. It’s not just that Iran has been using proxies to fight Israel. Iran itself attacked Israel twice during 2024, with large swarms of cruise and ballistic missiles and drones. Furthermore, in January it killed tens of thousands of its own people. So Iran is like the neighbor who hires hitmen, shoots at you directly, kills his own family members and then shops for a bomb while shouting death threats. I’d say we have the right to react with force against this guy. In Just War terms, Israel and the US had a just cause to attack Iran.

A lesser point could also be made about the statement from the USCCB. It’s not correct to say that Pope Leo “carefully references” the Just War theory. He’s not referencing it at all! It is also not correct to say it’s a “constant tenet” in its 1,000-year tradition that a nation may only take up the sword in self-defense. Just read Aquinas. He said that a just cause could involve the following: avenging a wrong, restoring what was unjustly seized, and defending the innocent from harm. This is not self defense in the strict sense. It is rather a reaction against some injustice. In fact, it was the Second Vatican Council which first restricted the just cause to self defense, a very modern development indeed. This restriction makes the whole theory a bit empty as the criteria are mostly relevant for deciding when to launch a war as a reaction to some injustice, not to defend yourself from an attack.

Last, I hope that Cameron won’t get into the habit of defending each statement by a pope. Many tried during the Pope Francis pontificate, but eventually gave up. We just have to accept that the popes get it wrong sometimes.