4 Comments

• 1. sleepygene  |  November 13th, 2007 at 11:25 am

  Benny is no JPII. I saw JPII give mass at Grant Park Chicago in 1979 when I was a kid.

• 2. bongoman  |  November 13th, 2007 at 4:34 pm

  Will be interesting to see if Pope Benedict has something to say about ‘preemptive war’ and where that concept sits in relation to Catholic theology.

  From http://www.cjd.org/paper/benedict.html:

  “As a Cardinal, the new pope was a staunch critic of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. On one occasion before the war, he was asked whether it would be just. “Certainly not,” he said, and explained that the situation led him to conclude that “the damage would be greater than the values one hopes to save.”

  “All I can do is invite you to read the Catechism, and the conclusion seems obvious to me…” The conclusion is one he gave many times: “the concept of preventive war does not appear in The Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

  Even after the war, Cardinal Ratzinger did not cease criticism of U.S. violence and imperialism: “it was right to resist the war and its threats of destruction…It should never be the responsibility of just one nation to make decisions for the world.”

  Yet perhaps the most important insight of Ratzinger came during a press conference on May 2, 2003. After suggesting that perhaps it would be necessary to revise the Catechism section on just war (perhaps because it had been used by George Weigel and others to endorse a war the Church opposed), Ratzinger offered a deep insight that included but went beyond the issue of war Iraq:

  “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war’.”

• 3. Bigfoot  |  November 13th, 2007 at 10:52 pm

  “the concept of preventive war does not appear in The Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

  If I’m not mistaken, neither does gay marriage or the right to an abortion. Will the left be willing to conform, or at least inform, their views on these matters to those of the Catholic Church?

• 4. Mark Noonan  |  November 14th, 2007 at 2:27 am

  Bigfoot,

  Of course not - quoting Popes out of context on the subject of the war is just a past time for lefties who wouldn’t subscribe to actual morality with a gun pointed at their head.

  Anyways, from Catholic Answers:

  Although these conditions can be formulated in different ways, they may be enumerated as follows: (1) the action itself must not be intrinsically evil; (2) the evil effect must not be an end in itself or a means to accomplishing the good effect (in other words, it must be a foreseen but undesired side-effect of the action); and (3) the evil effect must not outweigh the good effect. If these three conditions are met, the action may be taken in spite of the foreseen damage it will do.

  The law of double-effect would not have applied to the cases of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. In these situations though the act (dropping bombs) was not intrinsically evil and though it is arguable that in the long run more lives were saved than lost, the second condition was violated because the death of innocents was used as a means to achieve the good of the war’s end.

  Fortunately, despite these past, grave transgressions, the United States is now committed to the principle of sparing innocent life during military actions. It has repeatedly and sincerely expressed its intent to minimize civilian casualties and to serve as a liberator of captive populations in the War on Terrorism. The U.S. is now committed to the principles of the just war.

Matt Margolis on Twitter