Right intention. The ultimate end of a government in waging war must be to establish peace, rather than to use a “just war" as a pretext for its own gain.
Last resort. A governing authority must reasonably exhaust all other diplomatic and nonmilitary options for securing peace before resorting to force.
Reasonable chance of success. A government may not resort to war unless its prospects for success are good. In this way, lives will not be needlessly wasted in the pursuit of a hopeless cause.
Proportionality. A government must respond to aggression with force only when the effects of its defensive actions do not exceed the damage done by the aggression itself.
For determining justice in bello, two values are key:
Noncombatant immunity. An authority waging war is morally obligated to seek to discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. While civilians may sometimes come in harm’s way, a government may never deliberately target them.
Proportionate means. This criterion pertains to specific tactics of warfare and seeks to restrict unnecessary use of force. It is intended to ensure that the military means used to achieve certain goals and goods are commensurate with their value, particularly when compared to the loss of life and destruction that could also occur.
Under the pressure of world events since the first Gulf War, the Holy See has been forced to clarify how it applies these principles to a new international situation in which nonstate actors such as terrorist networks have become threats and the role of old security alliances is not clear. Four moments have been key:
In 1991, the Holy See opposed the Gulf War.
In 1999, The Holy See supported an international intervention in Kosovo to stop the violence against the civilian population in that former Yugoslav province, although it expressed reservations in bello, especially with respect to the NATO bombing of Serbia.
In 2001, the Vatican gave basic support to the U.S.-led strikes against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
In 2003, the Holy See opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq with a ferocity that few issues in the recent past have aroused.
In all of this diplomatic activity, the Holy See has worked out a new understanding of when the use of force is morally legitimate. A single state, in its view, has the right to use force only in self-defense, meaning in response to a direct attack. A group of states, such as NATO or the ad-hoc coalitions cobbled together by U.S. administrations in recent conflicts, may have the right, even the duty, to engage in “humanitarian intervention" to end a crisis in which civilians are being persecuted by an unjust aggressor. In all other situations, the only legitimate use of force—such as a preventive war to disarm a potential aggressor—is that sanctioned by the international community working through the United Nations. In all cases, morally legitimate use of force is a response to violence that is already in act. The Holy See’s bottom line is that no state is ever justified in striking first.
This view is contested by the Bush administration, which argues that sometimes rogue states are determined to skirt the will of the international community on disarmament, and their stockpiles of weapons pose a threat to the security of the United States and the rest of the world. The possible links between such governments and international terrorism make that threat all the more serious. When the United States has intelligence that an attack against American interests is imminent, it reserves the right to strike first, even without the approval of the United Nations—a process whose potential political complications make it too cumbersome to be feasible in some real-life situations. It would be irresponsible of any American administration, the Bush team argues, to ignore credible information regarding possible hostile activity and thereby put American lives and interests at risk. Moreover, this is not just a matter of defending America, but the West and, for that matter, global civilization.
In many ways, this is less a dispute over principles than over prudential judgment. No one in the Holy See would deny that a man facing someone pointing a gun in his face has the right to use force to disarm him. One does not have to wait for the assailant to shoot. Nor would anyone in the Bush White House seriously argue that the United States has the right, or for that matter the desire, to invade any country whatsoever that might one day pose a threat to its security interests. The question is, where on this continuum does a particular case fit? The clash over Iraq seems to suggest that the Holy See sets the bar much higher than the White House in terms of how much evidence there must be, and how convincing that evidence must appear, before force can be considered.
International Law
As outlined in chapter 1, the Holy See has long been a supporter of the construction of a strong system of international law. Beginning with Pope John XXIII in Pacem et Terris, every pope of the late twentieth century has called for a strengthened United Nations with real enforcement powers to make international law stick. The argument is that the international community must be governed by the force of law, not the law of force.
In July 2002, as a concrete expression of this attitude, the Holy See gave a symbolic contribution of $3,000 to a trust fund established by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to support the new International Criminal Court. The Vatican had long been a proponent of the court. In 1998, John Paul II said that the international court “could contribute to ensure the effective protection of human rights on the worldwide scale." The Pope’s statement included a caution that the new court should be firmly based on the rule of international law. He added that, “Crimes against humanity should not be considered as the internal affair of one nation." This backing came despite the fact that conservative Catholic critics of the court complained that it is “permeated with feminist ideology" and warned that it could force through legal recognition of a “right" to abortion, or even put the Pope himself on trial.
The Holy See believes in the rule of international law in part as an antidote to a unilateral world in which strong nations impose their will on the weak. An additional, more realpolitik motive for the stance is the conviction that the growth of international law, and especially the concept of universal human rights, offers the best prospect for protection of the religious freedom of Christians where they are a minority, such as India and the Islamic world. This Vatican conviction leads to resentment of the United States when it is perceived to be obstructing the construction of an international legal order. As noted above, a May 17 editorial in Civiltà Cattolica excoriated the United States for holding prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba without guaranteeing them the procedural rights specified in the Geneva Convention or other relevant international agreements. Under the same logic, the Vatican has strongly supported recent international treaties on a host of other matters, from the Kyoto Accords on the environment to the agreement banning land mines and the UN treaty on the rights of the child.
Given the Bush administration’s well-known reluctance to subject Americans to the jurisdiction of international courts out of a fear of politicized indictments, and its generally lukewarm attitude toward the concept of a binding international legal order, this is a difference that seems destined to endure. As the United States prosecutes its war against terrorism, it is increasingly likely to adopt strategies that sometimes place it outside commonly recognized international standards in terms of how a state is supposed to conduct intelligence, treat the citizens of other nations, and so on. Since much of the terrorist threat currently preoccupying the United States emanates from the Islamic world, this may exacerbate anti-American sentiment in the Islamic street. The Holy See is deeply concerned that anti-American Islamic anger not become anti-Western and anti-Christian. It will feel increasing pressure to be critical of the United States, in order to put public distance between itself and measures deemed to violate international law. In other words, it will be increasingly difficult for the Holy See to look the other way when the United States takes action in contravention of international standards and agreements.
United Nations
While some Americans, including the key tacticians in the Bush administration, are leery of surrendering power to the United Nations, the Vatican believes strongly in a reformed UN with real decision-making authority. John Paul II, in his message for the 2003 World Day of Peace, put it this way: “Is this not the time for all to work together for a new constitutional organization of the human family, truly capable of ensuring peace and harmony between peoples, as well as their integral development?" In a statement on the role of the United Nations in July 2003, Cardinal Renato Martino expanded on this point, calling the UN the only forum “that, by its representativeness, can offer a platform of dialogue at the world level. The Holy See is convinced, and this is not something recent, that the worldwide common good must be pursued with adequate structures of universal competence," he added. Martino advocated reform in at least two areas: the first would aim to “empower the functioning of the Security Council." The second would aim to ensure that the international body could “guarantee order and security better, not only from the political and military point of view, but also in the economic and social field. For example, the new problems relating to protection of the environment and health require urgent measures that are respected by all."
This position strikes some observers as curious, since in other contexts the Holy See has been an ardent critic of the United Nations, especially on issues of the family, sexuality, and reproductive health policies. In September 2000, for example, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger writing in L’Avvenire rejected UN proposals for a New World Order targeting for special criticism the UN’s goal of depopulation. Ratzinger wrote that the philosophy coming from recent UN conferences and the Millennium Summit “proposes strategies to reduce the number of guests at the table of humanity, so that the presumed happiness [we] have attained will not be affected." He criticized this philosophy for “not being concerned with the care of those who are no longer productive or who can no longer hope for a determined quality of life." Ratzinger argued that “at the base of this New World Order" is the ideology of “women’s empowerment," which erroneously sees “the principal obstacles to [a woman’s] fulfillment [as] the family and maternity." The cardinal advised that “at this stage of the development of the new image of the new world, Christians—and not just them but in any case they even more than others— have the duty to protest."
Pressed to explain this seeming contradiction, Vatican officials generally say that in itself the United Nations is merely a tool, and as such may be applied for ends that are either morally legitimate or morally destructive. In order to build a more just world, however, they see it as an essential tool and support augmenting its powers and responsibilities. They offer three arguments in support of this position. First, a strong United Nations would have a unique capacity to promote the common good on the global level, ensuring that global economic structures do not simply enrich elites at the expense of the rest of the world. The UN would be able to promote the “globalization of solidarity" that has been a cornerstone of the Vatican’s international vision since the collapse of the old Cold War system. Second, a reformed UN would help ensure that strong nations do not simply impose their will on the weak. Third, Vatican officials believe that a UN committed to multilateral decision-making, in which small and medium-sized states have real possibilities to shape policy, would be less open to manipulation by powerful nonstate actors such as corporations and NGOs (think Planned Parenthood, for example). The Vatican learned from the battles at the Cairo and Beijing conferences in the mid-1990s that sometimes its most serious opposition in the UN system comes not from states, but from representatives of civil society. Vatican officials argue that a UN in which states counted more and these special interests counted less would actually be more democratic and less susceptible to the imposition of values such as those described by Ratzinger above.
The Bush administration and mainstream political sentiment in the United States find it hard to reconcile with this vision of the United Nations. From the dominant American view, the United Nations is a forum for international cooperation, useful when states can agree to a common effort to address some problem, but inessential to the legitimacy of the actions any individual state might take. While the Holy See would understand the United Nations in terms of sovereignty, the United States would see it rather as a means of cooperation among individually sovereign states, each of which retains complete liberty of action. Given that the post–September 11 world situation is witnessing a highly activist and interventionist approach from the United States, this difference with the Holy See and much of the rest of the international community would appear set to become steadily more serious.
The American Role in the World
In the end, the Holy See might be less concerned about unilateralism if it had more faith in the world’s lone superpower to foster a world order conducive to the realization of Christian virtue. In fact, however, at the deepest level of analysis, there is serious doubt in many quarters in the Vatican that American culture is an apt carrier for a Christian vision of the human person and therefore of the just society. Many of the more reflective minds in the Vatican would agree with theologian David Schindler of the Communio school that “the religion of Americans contains within it a largely unconscious logical framework consisting of notions of the self, of human being and action, drawn mostly from Post-Enlightenment, democratic-capitalist institutions." The core values of this culture would include liberty in the form of individual autonomy; economic, social, and political liberalism; utility and modern progress; pragmatic morality and the work ethic. All have fueled America’s spectacular success on the world stage, but from the point of view of Roman Catholic anthropology and social ethics, which stress being over doing, all these values are at least potentially dangerous.
Though no Pope and no Vatican diplomat will ever come out and say so, the bottom line is that despite great respect for the American people and their democratic traditions, the Holy See simply does not think the United States is fit to run the world. As a country it is too rich, too narcissistic, too shortsighted and voluble, too young, to be entrusted with the quasi-unfettered power that twentieth-century history entrusted to it. To be sure, there aren’t many countries around that the Holy See would approve for such a role. It should be said, too, that if the Vatican had to choose between a world run from Washington, D.C., and one run from Islamabad, or Beijing, there’s little doubt they would opt for Washington. Yet that doesn’t strike most Vatican thinkers as an especially appetizing choice. Thus the Holy See’s diplomatic energy in coming years will have as a central aim the construction of a multilateral, multipolar world, which will necessarily imply a limitation on the power and influence of the United States. For that reason, and despite strong agreement on a host of issues, the relationship between Rome and Washington seems destined to be complex and sometimes strained.
APPENDIX
Resources for Understanding the Vatican
For readers seeking to follow Vatican news, there are a number of good resources both online and in print. This appendix will list several. Some represent a rather conservative view, some are institutional and moderate, a few rather liberal. The principle of selection here, however, is not ideology but utility. Whether you agree with the point of view or not, you will learn things from these resources that you didn’t previously know.
ONLINE RESOURCES
The Word from Rome, John L. Allen Jr. (American): www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/
Daily news bulletin of the Holy See (official Vatican site, in multiple languages): www.vatican.va/news_services/bulletin/bollettino.php?lang=en
Catholic News Service (sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a subscription service): www.catholicnews.com
WWW.Chiesa: News, Analyses, Documents, Sandro Magister (Italian, but also available in English): http://213.92.16.98/ESW_lista_chiesa/english/
Settimo Cielo, Sandro Magister, a blog service on Church affairs (Italian):
http://blog.espressonline.it/weblog/stories.php?topic=03/04/09/3080386 Union of Catholic Asian News (sponsored by the Federation of Asian Bishops Conferences, a subscription service): www.ucanews.com/html/uca/main.asp
Catholic World News (American, a subscription service): www.cwnews.com
Zenit (Italian): http://zenit.org/english/english.phtml
Noticias Eclesiales (Spanish): www.eclesiales.org/index.htm
Katholische Nachrichten-Agentur (sponsored by the German bishops, a subscription service): www.kna.de
Independent Catholic News (English): www.indcatholicnews.com/headline.htm
Katholischer Nachrichtendienst (sponsored by the Austrian bishops, in German): www.kath.net
CathNews (Australian): www.cathtelecom.com
Ansa (leading Italian news wire, a subscription service): www.ansa.it
Servizio Informazione Religiosa, SIR (Italian): www.agensir.it/sirs2/s2magazine/index.jsp?idPagina=1
Fides (official news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, in multiple languages): www.fides.org/eng/index.htm
PUBLICATIONS
English
Catholic World Report (American, monthly): www.ignatius.com/Magazines/CWRCurrentIssue.asp
First Things (American, monthly): www.firstthings.com
Inside the Vatican (American, monthly): www.insidethevatican.com
The National Catholic Reporter (American, weekly): www.natcath.org
The Tablet (English, weekly): www.thetablet.co.uk/index.shtml
Italian
Adista (twice-weekly news bulletin): www.adista.it
Corriere della Sera (leading daily in Italy): www.corriere.it
Jesus (monthly): www.stpauls.it/jesus
L’Avvenire (official daily newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference): www.avvenire.it
All the Pope's Men Page 42
