The following lecture was recorded during Providence’s 2017 Christianity and National Security Conference. Joseph E. Capizzi discusses the nature of teaching, the essential commitments of the just war account, and how they relate. The following is a transcript of the lecture.

Mark Tooley: And our next speaker will be Joseph Kaposi from Catholic University and the head of the Institute on Human Ecology there as well as a contributing editor to Providence Journal, a wonderful thinker and writer with whom this has not been publicly announced but since we’re all friends in this room we’ll be collaborating with Joe and his Institute on a conference on Just War teaching sometime next year which perhaps some of you will be able to attend but we’re very, very grateful for the insights and Christian thinking that Joe brings to public policy issues here in Washington DC for Catholics and for the wider Christian community. So, Joe, thank you.

Joseph Capizzi: It’s my pleasure to be here, and I want to thank Mark, Mark, and everyone associated with Providence for organizing this event. It’s been fantastic. I’ve learned a great deal. I feel a bit like the number eight hitter in a lineup. The lineup has been so strong, and I’m like the weakest hitter—though maybe not as weak as the pitcher. I’d make that comparison except I’m not sure what it says about LiVecche, who comes after me.  

Today, I’m speaking about Catholic teaching as it pertains to just war, so let’s get started.  

First, one and a half cups of sugar, four teaspoons of cornstarch, four cups of fresh tart cherries—oh, my apologies. That’s Walter Russell Mead’s recipe for cherry pie. Let’s move on. I’ll be doing two things in my talk. First, I’ll discuss the nature of teaching itself. I don’t know if I ever gave Mark a title, but he suggested “Catholic Teaching and Just War.” I’ll begin by exploring what teaching involves. Second, I’ll address the just war tradition, focusing on its most basic claims.  

Too often, just war theory becomes a systematic approach to crisis situations, breaking down into detailed analyses: jus ad bellum, jus in bello. Within ad bellum, you might find four to eight criteria, and then more within in bello. This can obscure the fundamental commitment of the just war approach. Oliver O’Donovan has argued that even the distinction between ad bellum and in bello isn’t always useful. I agree and will focus on the essential principles.  

Let’s start with the concept of teaching. I revised my remarks after hearing from Keith Pavlischek yesterday. Keith critiqued one of my former teachers, John Yoder, which is fair game. Yoder, a Mennonite theologian, wrote on varieties of pacifism. Keith dismissed some of Yoder’s distinctions, but Yoder’s point was that different communities practice different forms of pacifism. He aimed to rebut Reinhold Niebuhr’s critique of pacifism by arguing that Mennonite pacifism is not the kind Niebuhr critiqued. This, too, is a form of teaching—the witness of a community is a kind of instruction.  

Yoder also used to challenge me as a Catholic. He’d say, “Your tradition doesn’t really teach the just war doctrine.” I’d protest, “Of course it does.” He’d reply, “Not in your dogmas. It’s not enshrined in your official teaching at the level of doctrine.” Unlike the Augsburg Confession, which explicitly endorses military service, Catholic teaching is less direct. Yoder’s point was that Catholicism might not be as committed to just war as we often think. It’s a compelling argument and worth more attention.  

Despite this, Catholic reflection on the use of force and military service is extensive. The just war tradition evolved through questions brought to the confessional: “Father, I serve in the military. Can I receive communion? I had to kill someone.” Priests would ask, “In what context? Was it as a soldier in a just war? Did you harbor hatred?” Such pastoral questions developed into systematic theological reflection and canon law.  

Catholic theologians, drawing from Scripture and tradition, have articulated the just war tradition over centuries. While it may seem alien to some, this process—engaging with Scripture, theologians, and canon law—has informed the Church’s teaching on military service.  

In the modern era, the Catechism of the Catholic Church includes a section on the use of force and the duties of political authorities. It outlines conditions under which governments may defend their communities. However, the Catechism hesitates to use the term “just war.” In English, it appears in quotation marks, suggesting some ambivalence. The Latin text similarly implies “so-called just war.” There are good reasons for this caution.  

Oliver O’Donovan has argued that “war” might not be the right term. In international law, “war” is a technical term that doesn’t encompass all uses of force. This hesitation doesn’t undermine the traditional mode of analysis developed in the confessional and taught over centuries.  

As a Catholic theologian, I was taught just war by a Methodist ethicist and later studied with John Howard Yoder. This tradition of Christian reflection on military service transcends denominational boundaries. While it has Catholic roots, it has expanded, engaging thinkers like Paul Ramsey, Michael Walzer, and Oliver O’Donovan.  

For Catholics, just war principles are rooted in natural law. They are accessible to anyone reflecting rightly on the rights and duties of states. It’s no surprise that influential figures in just war theory include not only Catholic theologians but also thinkers like Walzer, a Jewish philosopher, and O’Donovan, an Anglican theologian.

Because it’s of the natural law, the just war approach breaks down to a kind of fundamental question. There are essentially two ways of seeing the world. The Augustinian Christian way of seeing things can help account for this. The first way is to see the world as completely screwed up, where the use of force by government is an expression of the world’s flawed nature. It’s just power, and power beats power; it’s that simple. If you have the opportunity to use force, you use it as hard and fast as you can.

That perspective can explain certain kinds of pacifistic responses, wanting nothing to do with that. The world is indeed messed up, and the use of force by those in power expresses that messed-up nature. In this view, there’s no expectation of a moral order arising from this dynamic. The second way to see the world agrees that the world is screwed up, but power can often bring some measure of order out of that disorder.

Power can produce some measure of order from the chaos. While we recognize that the world is not as it should be, we can strive to make it more like it should be when given the opportunity. The capacity to do so serves as a limit on how we act, as we measure our actions against a vision of what the world ought to be. This understanding means that while the world is disordered, our judicious use of force can help make it more livable.

The explanation for this account is Augustinian. It ties into the concept of original sin, indicating that this is not the way the world was supposed to be. We have fallen from a state of goodness, and while we no longer experience it as such, our actions can witness to the way things are meant to be. We hope that by our actions, we can make the world more like it ought to be, though there are no guarantees.

If you accept that the world is screwed up, you will be driven to a way of understanding governance. Governance encompasses not just government but also the broader context in which governments operate. The use of force is an element of their power, playing a role in pursuing order amidst disorder. Political action must aim at creating that order, and when it doesn’t, it becomes unacceptable.

This approach fundamentally claims that political activity always aims at order or something else. When it aims at something else, it becomes something we cannot support. The name we give to that pursuit of order is peace. Augustine uses the term “tranquillitas ordinis,” referring to that kind of peaceful order we experience as a taste of the peace we are promised.

However, this peace is always fragile and contingent. There’s no sense of a progression in time towards greater peace; instead, peace is relative and always needs defense. We must fight for this order, but we shouldn’t confuse it with a perfect kingdom or a kind of progressivism. Generally speaking, pacifism cannot be reconciled with this point of view.

As Catholic Christians, the Church can respect individual pacifistic expressions, but it cannot adopt pacifism as its position. Instead, the Church must defend a certain kind of order where people can flourish, which sometimes requires the use of power, including force. This perspective doesn’t dismiss pacifism, but it ultimately views it as incompatible with the need for a just order.

Stanley Hauerwas, a follower of John Yoder, has criticized this view by suggesting it commits me to a kind of “bourgeois” understanding of politics. However, I can’t conceive of another way of seeing things. The theological reflection on Scripture over time commits us to the understanding that power is essential in the political realm. Christ’s victory is complete and universal, and He claims the capacity to use power.

This perspective allows us to make judgments about relative expressions of order in the world. While judgments may be biased and oversensitive, they can also be accurate. This capacity to judge enables us to distinguish between categories of guilt and categories of innocence as I think Heath said yesterday. That’s really complicated. There’s much to add to that, but the important point is that point of judgment is exactly what we’re always supposed to do. Governance is always supposed to be judging guilt and innocence. It does it domestically. We’re familiar with that, and it fails often as well; we’re familiar with the failure. But we also know it’s necessary to civil society. For order for us to flourish and live, governance has to make these kinds of judgments.

The Catholic Christian tradition has said, just as it does that, makes those kinds of judgments, punishes the guilty, rewards the innocent, so too can it do this internationally when governments are attacked by other governments. And here’s the rub, at least from the Catholic perspective, that makes it a challenge. It can even theoretically do it when it’s not attacked. So sometimes governments can stand in for other governments that cannot protect themselves against unjust aggression.

It can make the judgment that those people over there can’t defend themselves, we can step in. Defining guilt and innocence among them, pursuing the punishment or defense of the innocent in all those cases. Very difficult, very hard to do, but nonetheless possible. And then, as you can see, the theory begins to express itself. It starts with very general claims, but you ought to always be concerned for those who are innocent.

Innocent both in terms of not being aggressed against and innocent in not being parties to the aggression. Because of this, what the just war account argues, when we pursue the use of force against an aggressor, as John was describing with regard to Hezbollah, we have to be concerned with peace as our goal. The way in which we pursue that against those who have aggressed, we have to allow for the conditions of peace that are possibly even inclusive of our enemy, to have fertile ground.

If we regard our enemy, this would be the first way of seeing the world, as simply disordered, simply screwed up, if we regard our enemy as simply somebody that we have to crush and move on from, we cannot arguably build the conditions of peace. So I’ll stop there, and if there are any questions, I’ll take them. Thank you. 

Q&A

Question: How do people who do not support or flow on the just war tradition, much more like pacifists, support a domestic vision of the use of force while negating any international vision or legitimacy of the use of force? How do pacifists justify domestic policing, for instance, while being reluctant to devoted questions? 

Capizzi: There are going to be different ways. This is the importance of Yoder’s book. Certain kinds of pacifists are going to say even that kind of use of force is bad, will have no part in it. So we’ll form our own communities, we’ll separate from it, but most pacifists won’t opt for that. They’ll typically say war is different than policing, and it’s different in a couple kinds of ways. One is orders of magnitude. War is just so much bigger, so much more destructive than policing typically is, that we just avoid it. It has its own logic, it gets out of control, and so on. That’s a kind of reasonable position to make. Another one would be to say it’s structurally different, it’s different in kind.

It’s not an order of magnitude question; it’s different in kind. So it’d be something like the people who are in authority, like the US government, and at all of its levels, they have very specified jurisdiction over their people. They don’t have jurisdiction over other people in other places. So they can exercise force here, with regard to the internal domestic jurisdiction, but they have no authorization over there, in another state, another region, and so on. They can’t exceed the authority given to them as representatives of that jurisdiction.

So it’s a very tight, rigorous jurisdictional claim, difference in kind. So you have a kind of difference in orders of magnitude issue and a difference in kind question, which raises obviously lots of other questions along those lines. It’s Catholic; things are a little bit different. Anybody want to ask a question about the Pope? No, just a gentleman in the back, but not the woman with the yellow shirt after. 

Question: Jonathan, Drew, I was studying at the Institute of World Politics until graduation this past May. I’ve heard and been taught Just War Theory a number of different times and places, and I usually hear it opposed to either pacifism or a completely unstructured train of thought. My question is, out of the West, has any other major system for looking at that same set of questions emerged other than Just War Theory that has become an unstated norm? I always hear Just War Theory taught as this is a rare thing to be understood, but that was the first system I was taught in an academic setting.

Capizzi: I feel like a fish looking for where the water everyone tells me everyone else is swimming in is. If I understood the question, you’re asking about the realist approach. Or what some might call a kind of realist approach, and somebody even, one of the students, referred to Machiavelli yesterday. In other words, all this talk about laws of war and ethical rules applying to war is great stuff. It sounds really cool; who wouldn’t wish there were rules when it comes to waging war? But, they’re kind of bunk. When push comes to shove, both the American military and other militaries will do whatever is in their capacity to defend themselves against threats.

Sometimes they will, like Machiavelli would advise, abide by the rules because it makes sense, it makes political sense. In this circumstance, we can win, we’ll abide by the rules, we’ll look not only like the winner but also look noble in the enterprise and so on. But if the situation gets particularly nasty, we’ll take the gloves off because the stakes are too high. So much for your rules. There are different ways that you hear that expressed.

One is Michael Walzer. If you’ve read Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars, he’s written articles since this on the notion of supreme emergency. If a state or a people feels that its very existence is threatened, an existential threat, then Walzer argues it might be okay to disregard the rules of war. Let the state kill innocent people on the other side in its defense. He points to England around 1939–1940, when it looked like they may not win. He thought maybe they would have been justified at that point to fight a menace like Hitler under strict conditions.

The other level is talking to soldiers. I have a friend, a Ranger, a wonderful guy. He’s the godfather to one of my kids. He said, “I never saw anybody surrender in Iraq. I never saw a flag.” When you ask him why, he says, “Because I’m not sharing my rations with anybody.” We have to leave someone behind to watch, and it becomes dangerous and challenging to take prisoners. According to the rules of war, if someone surrenders, they’re supposed to be protected under the Geneva Conventions. But if you talk to soldiers, they’ll say, “That sounds great,” and on the record, they’ll say it’s all good, but in reality, it’s different.

So there’s some realism at play. People like Kaplan defend a kind of realist position, and there are others as well. Great question.

Question: Thank you for the presentation. My name is Agnes from South Sudan. I grew up Catholic, although I became evangelical later. I struggle to relate your presentation to my life. Growing up in South Sudan, Christians were persecuted. The Bible says to love your enemy as yourself, but you find yourself in a dilemma. Your enemy wants you dead, and at the same time, you develop a passion for revenge against them.

You mentioned a question for someone in the army or organized forces about seeking forgiveness: “Did you bear hatred when you killed that person?” For me, it must be beyond hatred; it could be a conviction, for example, in the issue of ISIS. These people want to wipe Christianity and others from the world. We are Christians, rooted in the Bible, yet we struggle with the command to love them. Do I hate their ideologies? It’s a difficult situation. How do you emerge beyond that while executing your duty using the methods of just war, knowing the enemy might be able to sleep at night saying, “I tried my best”?

Capizzi: That’s a fantastic question. The tradition you’re pointing to says, Augustine in City of God makes it clear: war is awful; it’s horrible. Nonetheless, he argues the evil of war is not simply that people will be killed. The evil of war is the hatred that often arises in the hearts of those doing the killing. People since Augustine have argued that sometimes killing someone can be an expression of love, particularly love for the neighbor you’re protecting. If a fellow Christian is threatened by someone about to execute them, how can it not be an expression of hatred towards the person you’re about to kill? This raises a powerful psychological problem.

The tradition holds this can be possible. If you’re doing it as an expression of love, you express that you don’t hate the person by your actions. If the enemy throws up a white flag or drops their weapon and surrenders, you don’t walk over and shoot them. You’re trying to express something other than hatred. But that’s the challenge; pacifists would say this is impossible. They argue you can’t love someone you’re defending while choosing to kill someone else without hating them. I think you can.

The tradition has made comparisons to punishment, like how we punish in the state or a parent punishes a child. When you punish someone, you inflict harm on them. You might physically hurt them by denying them something they want, but you’re doing this not because you hate them but because you love them. This analogy extends to the difficult situation of killing someone.

Question: Hello. My name is Anne Carmen, and I’m studying philosophy, politics, and economics at King’s College. I was asking about Machiavelli yesterday and want to clarify your position. Are you suggesting Machiavelli’s tactics imply there are no boundaries to the type of force we inflict, or are there some things that, as Christians, we should absolutely refrain from, like considering torture? Are there any boundaries, or are some things necessary?

Capizzi: Great question again. We could probably discuss Machiavelli afterward; I don’t claim to be a Machiavelli scholar. The realist position he’s often associated with argues there are no boundaries. Like Walzer, the argument goes that if things look like they’re going to collapse, all rules are out the window, and we’ll do whatever we can to survive. The Just War claim, however, is that there are certain things you can’t do, even when faced with an existential threat.

This is the hardest thing for us to wrap our heads around. If the United States were faced with an actual existential threat, would we, as Christians, say there are certain things we couldn’t do in our defense? Augustine writes the City of God while Rome collapses. He loves Rome and makes a powerful statement about glory, emphasizing that even in dire circumstances, we must hold moral boundaries.

Rome had its time, Constantinople had its time, and we assume Washington, D.C., will have its time too. We love our country. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme. If you lose, you shake hands and move on.

We love our country. Patriotism is good. I’d even defend nationalism to some extent. However, as Christians, there are things we couldn’t do. We couldn’t intentionally kill innocent people, even to protect a wonderful nation. Does that answer your question?

Great question. Anything else? Yes, I met you yesterday.

Question: I’m McDonald, the Religious Liberty Director at IRD. What would Just War thinking or Just War thinkers say about a situation where a country is trying to defend itself militarily and the West, particularly the U.S., is doing things that prolong that conflict? This involves having a morally equivalent view of the aggressor and the sovereign government.

Capizzi: That’s a good question, and I’m not entirely sure what to say. Let me get the scenario right. It’s a situation where a country is legitimately defending its sovereignty, but other countries are meddling and prolonging the conflict. Are we talking about Ukraine

Question: Yes, exactly. 

Capizzi: That’s not so much a question for Just War as it is a question about why some people suffer evil. The nature of politics is that there are more and less powerful nations. The less powerful nations are effectively less sovereign. They are sovereign by law, but their sovereignty is constantly challenged by the financial, military, and political meddling of stronger countries. They should use the instruments of politics available to defend themselves.

This is why countries want missiles that can threaten the United States. If you have nuclear weapons, it gives you another instrument as a smaller power to maintain a certain kind of sovereignty. It’s not right to justify what they’re doing; it’s just to understand the situation. Yes, it’s unfortunate.

Question: Speaking of nuclear weapons, can you talk about that? 

Capizzi: They change the nature of war. For example, North Korea has not invaded South Korea, while the Viet Cong did not invade South Vietnam. Nuclear weapons change a lot in the game. Historically, many people who defended the right of states to use force have said that in a nuclear age, that could no longer be the case. The stakes are too high. It’s another kind of total war argument. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate counterpopulation weapon, making it difficult to wage wars as we traditionally understood them.

On the other hand, we’ve had many wars in the nuclear era. One could argue that nuclear deterrence has prevented major conflict among superpowers. While we’ve had many conflicts, including proxy wars, we haven’t had direct conflict between nuclear powers. These powers typically also have massive armies. I don’t think the Just War account has anything definitive to say about nuclear weapons, except that clearly, most of them are counterforce weapons. Some might even be strategically considered not to be counterforce.

I see an enthusiastic hand in the back. I’ll take that one before I’m pushed off the stage.

Question: What does Just War Theory have to say about hybrid warfare? For instance, the proverbial little green men that appear in Ukraine. Is there any opinion on that regarding actors that don’t necessarily represent a state?

Capizzi: Any time you have military forces or elements within militaries that are eluding authoritative structures, they are going to be problematic. This isn’t just about war; it’s about politics. Any use of power can be analyzed through the principles we’re discussing. When there are uses of power that are not authorized in appropriate ways or that do not seek order and peace, those actions will be questionable.

This extends beyond fighting; even when engaging in voter manipulation or inciting dissent in other nations, those actions are questionable. They can lead to forceful interventions involving professional soldiers and other military elements. It’s a fantastic question and perhaps a great one to end on. Thank you.