The nuclear order has changed, as has Catholic teaching on war and peace. To assess the value of Catholic teaching today—particularly in light of Pope Francis’s more pluralistic understanding of the ethical issues involved—we must first understand the changes to the political and strategic context.
First of all, great-power politics has returned to the scene. But the new paradigm neither resembles the Bismarckian era of the nineteenth century nor the more familiar Cold War order of bipolar relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Walter Russell Mead offered an early assessment of the new great-power politics in 2014, after the Russian invasion of Crimea. His essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Return of Geopolitics,” cited moves by Russia, China, and Iran as evidence that “old-fashioned power plays are back in international relations.”
While the consequences of this return cut across war, politics, trade, and finance, the principal reality is the interlinked relationships among three, rather than two powers: the United States, Russia, and China. These are certainly not equal powers, but each has a strong conception of the role it should be playing in world politics. For eight decades, the United States led and supported the rules-based international order; presently, U.S. policy in word and deed promises a naked pursuit of its perceived self-interest. Meanwhile, President Putin cultivates a nostalgia for the imperial Russian and Soviet eras and a determination to return to global leadership. Finally, China, now established as a major political and economic power, seeks greater recognition of its strategic influence.
The return of great-power politics is not a welcome development. As it has in the past, this pattern in international relations promises to drive benefits to the few at the cost of the many. From a moral perspective, these politics call on us to attend even more closely to Pope Francis’s call to protect those on the periphery.
The new geopolitical structure extends to the nuclear arena, leading some analysts to dub this a “New Nuclear Age.” The massive volume of strategic literature developed over the first eighty years of nuclear weapons maintains a basic core of accepted ideas along with multiple adaptations. But many analysts now argue forcefully that, in the post–Cold War environment, the thinking about nuclear strategy must change. In an issue of the journal Daedalus devoted to “Meeting the Challenges of a New Nuclear Age,” Steven Miller writes that “it is unclear whether the solutions and verities of the bilateral era will be adequate in today’s more complex nuclear environment.” Still, others, like Joseph Nye, writing in Ethics and International Affairs, caution against overemphasizing the change. While the major powers and their strategic relationships have shifted, “the basic nuclear dilemma has not changed.” However, the basic dilemma coexists with new complexity, a fact that challenges strategic thinking and may also, in turn, influence moral reasoning about nuclear weapons.
Every pope since Pius XII has addressed the nuclear age to some degree; the three key papal interventions have come from John XXIII, John Paul II, and Francis. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in terris (Peace on Earth) established the foundation for his successors, calling for disarmament and an eventual ban on nuclear weapons. John Paul II, a scholar and philosopher, built on the legacy of Pacem in terris with a careful casuistry that opposed the destructiveness of modern war and reinforced John XXIII’s objectives, while acknowledging a narrow role for deterrence. Pope Francis has relied on his predecessors but clearly moved beyond them in his judgments on war and nuclear arms, and in his condemnation of deterrence.
Writing in 1959 on the morality of war, John Courtney Murray, SJ, could identify the Catholic position completely with the just-war tradition. But Pope Francis leads a Church that now includes a plurality of positions on war and peace. This pluralism is mostly a postconciliar reality, manifest in papal teaching since the Council and in the Catholic community as a whole. Nonviolence is now more well-represented, both among pacifists and others who may support nonviolent strategies even if their principled position lies elsewhere. For example, in response to tragic intrastate post–Cold War conflicts in the Global South, the leading school of moral analysis has been peacebuilding. Still, because these struggles can involve outside intervention, just-war analysis is often deployed in tandem with peacebuilding strategies.
Addressing ongoing conflicts in both social teaching and the Holy See’s diplomatic efforts has been a priority for Pope Francis. His first response has been to condemn the very concept of war as a way to resolve conflicts between or within states. This has led to criticism from countries like Ukraine, who have balked at Francis’s statements about peace negotiations with Russia. Francis has also raised doubts about the ability of just-war theory to respond to modern war. In the encyclical Fratelli tutti, he writes, “It is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’” In a highly publicized meeting with the Russian patriarch Kirill, he said bluntly, “Wars are always unjust, since it is the people of God who pay.” Still, he has also asserted a legitimate right of national self-defense even though such a right is usually thought to be rooted in a just-war approach.
On the nuclear question, Francis moved quickly to establish his own position. Behind him lay the Second Vatican Council, which neither endorsed nor condemned deterrence but strongly criticized the arms race, and John Paul II’s finding that nuclear deterrence is narrowly acceptable as a step on the way to nuclear disarmament. Francis advanced the Holy See’s increasingly stringent critique of nuclear policies, using multiple forums to articulate a new position. Reporting on a major conference at the Vatican in 2017, Gerard Powers writes that “Pope Francis became the first pope to condemn explicitly not only the use of nuclear weapons but also ‘the threat of their use as well as their very possession.’” In a statement to the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in 2014, Francis said, “Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for our ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence among peoples and states.” And, in an interview, Francis said: “I’m convinced that we are at the limit of licitly having and using nuclear weapons.” At the same time, Francis has emphasized that his positions are open to debate and discussion in the Church.
To my mind, the classical just-war tradition still offers the most effective framework for addressing great-power conflict and new nuclear challenges in all their danger and complexity. First of all, one does not have to be a prisoner of realism to acknowledge its basic premise is true: the world as it exists promises conflict and war to come. Secondly, the range of criteria with which the just-war ethic tests proposals to use military force is an abiding strength. It first tests the purpose, motivation, and intentions of actors. Then it uses a mix of deontological opposition to the direct killing of civilians and a consequentialist evaluation of specific tactics and strategies. Finally, this framework provides a bridge between Catholic teaching and other leading traditions and thinkers.
Francis’s diplomacy has complemented his teaching. He has continued traditional Vatican advocacy for arms-limitation talks and disarmament, but with a modified rationale. In the 1980s and 1990s, debates focused on the justice of targeting nuclear weapons at various sites and on distinctions between military and civilian casualties. Francis has focused less on those discrete questions and more on the general loss of life involved in a nuclear exchange and the widespread humanitarian and environmental damage from nuclear use of any kind. Finally, as Powers emphasizes, the Holy See’s position during Francis’s pontificate invokes the idea of “integral disarmament,” which holds that disarmament should open a path to an international ethic of solidarity that extends beyond national-security concerns. This ethic would provide a basis for addressing questions of poverty and inequality, using funds moved from nuclear defense budgets.
Francis has expanded the Catholic resources for combating nuclear weapons and responding to a new era of great-power politics. We now have at our disposal a pluralistic ethic with a greater emphasis on nonviolence that nevertheless does not reject just-war theory entirely. While clearly opposing the possession of nuclear weapons and condemning deterrence as currently practiced, this ethic maintains traditional resources for meeting a diverse range of conflicts. It also recognizes that its diplomatic objectives will require long-term vision and must be built, as all political agreements are, out of existing conditions. With these resources at hand, those who oppose deterrence can remain part of the strategic debate and outline a path away from prevailing policy.
It’s true, however, that Catholic teaching does not fit into conventional diplomatic discourse. In non-nuclear states, the Church’s position may find strong support, as it did when the Holy See became one of the earliest signatories to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. But in states with nuclear arsenals the Church’s position is on the periphery of the debate, not near its center. Being on the edge should not silence us, but rather compel engagement. The Vatican’s diplomacy is rooted in a universal Church with members in both nuclear and non-nuclear states. Its purpose, according to Pope Francis, is to be a voice for the voiceless on this question of life and death.
This article was published as part of a symposium titled “The Path Toward Disarmament.” The other contributions to the symposium can be found here:
Archbishop John Wester, “A First Step”
Raymond J. Juzaitis, “The Need for Deterrence”
Maryann Cusimano Love, “The Promise of Peacebuilding”
