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.

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.

It’s my pleasure to be here and I want to thank Mark and Mark and everybody who’s associated with Providence for putting this together. It’s really been fantastic. I’ve learned a ton. I feel a little bit like the number eight hitter in a lineup. I mean, the lineup has been so strong and I’m like the weakest hitter in the lineup, not including the pitcher or something like that. I’d make that comparison except I’m not sure what it says about Lobecki who comes after me. Anyway, I am talking today about Catholic teaching and as it bears on just war in particular, so I’ll just commence right there.

First, one and one and a half cups of sugar, four teaspoons cornstarch, four cups fresh tart cherries—oh, oh, I’m sorry, that’s Walter Russell Mead’s recipe for cherry pie. My apologies for that. Okay, so I’m going to do two things in my talk. I’m going to do two things. I want to talk to you first about the nature of teaching itself, right? So, I was, I don’t know if I ever got Mark a title, but so Mark sort of offered a title to me: Catholic Teaching and Just War. I’m going to begin by talking about teaching and sort of what teaching involves. I’m not used to being in the minority as a Catholic, you know, in talks like this but it seems as though I am today, so maybe dwelling a little bit on that actually might be a good thing.

And then second, I’m going to talk a little bit about the just war account itself and I really want to sort of get to very, very basic claims. I think too often the just war account becomes viewed as a kind of systematic approach to this, you know, a crisis situation and then it sort of breaks down into these very, very detailed points of analysis: jus ad bellum, jus in bello. Within, you know, ad bellum, you get anywhere from like four to eight different kinds of criteria and then, you know, maybe a couple in bello and it becomes, it sort of loses, you know, the forest for the trees. And I kind of agree with Oliver O’Donovan that even that distinction between ad bellum and in bello becomes a little bit, you know, it’s not load-bearing. It actually is not doing a lot of work. So I want to sort of take us back and just sort of focus on the essential commitment of the just war approach.

So let’s begin first with the notion of teaching, and I kind of rejiggered my remarks in consequence of some of the comments that were made yesterday by a friend and a person I’ve worked with many times, Keith Pavlischek. You know, Keith spoke to us about pacifism and he took a shot at one of my former teachers, which is all right, you know, I mean we’re all big, you know, we’re all adults, you know, we all can handle shots. But one of my teachers was John Yoder. I got my doctorate at the University of Notre Dame and Yoder of course is a Mennonite, or was a Mennonite theologian, and he did write a book on the varieties of pacifism and, you know, Keith kind of, you know, said well, you know, it doesn’t really matter, you know, he was, you know, you’re doing too much. But what Yoder, what his point was that there are different pacifistic approaches, right? And these have been represented in different communities, in different communities of Christians over time, and they’ve had certain kinds of influence. And he wanted to reject ultimately the Niebuhr-ian critique of pacifism by saying we are not the kinds of pacifists that you, Reinhold Niebuhr, think we are. You know, we’re a different kind of pacifist as Mennonites, as members of this Christian community. And that’s a kind of teaching, right? I mean the witness of a community like Yoder’s, or the community he represents, is itself a kind of teaching.

And Yoder used to also point out, again I was a wee student of his, you know, just a little grad student like many of you here in the audience, and of course welcome, and I’m so good to see your questions, been fantastic. But he would say to me as a Catholic, like look, Kaposi, your tradition doesn’t even really teach the just war thing. And I’d say like what are you talking about, Professor Yoder? You know, of course we do. And he’d say no, no, it’s not actually in your dogmas, right? It’s not actually embraced at the level of sort of right dogmatic instruction. So if you look or compare the Catholic way things are taught to like the Lutheran confession, like the Augsburg confession where you see pretty explicitly right an endorsement of military service, you don’t quite get that from Popes and bishops and things like that. So Kaposi, this seems to be taught a little bit differently, you know, than you might think it is. In other words, maybe Catholicism is not as committed to this position as you know you and all of the rest of you Catholics think. It was a great point and I think that one has not been sort of sufficiently dwelt on.

But as true as that might be, right? Nonetheless, the history of Catholic theological reflection on the use of force, on the relationship of people who call themselves Christians, followers of Christ, and from my communion of course not so much followers of Christ but members of the Church, right? Is one of reflecting on the ways in which we can serve in the military, right? So for Catholics, and really you guys are all indebted to this tradition of thinking at least in some ways, right? For Catholics, the question really became a kind of canon law question, right? A question of the confessional. The way this develops is precisely in terms of, hey, Father so-and-so, I serve in the military. Can I receive communion? Can I participate in the sacraments? I had to kill someone. And answering that kind of question as a priest, right? Involved, as it always does for Catholics, a kind of fine-tuned analysis. Okay, right? When you did that, you know, what was the context? Talk to me about the context in which you had to kill somebody. Was it as a soldier? Okay, it was as a soldier. Was it in war, right, that was rightfully authorized? Yes, it was. Did you bear hatred in your heart when you did this? No, I did not, right? And so, like, those kinds of questions, which are the kinds of questions this might seem, hey, you know, again, alien to many of you, were the kinds of questions that we as Catholics get every time we walk into the confessional, right? You know, hey, Father so-and-so, I, you know, right, I was mean to my wife or whatever, right? Or I smacked my kid a little bit too hard or something. Of course, I’ve never smacked my children, right? But, right, you know, you’ll get those same kinds of questions, right? And those questions over time express themselves in more systematic reflection by theologians, and then, of course, because we’re this kind of church, canon lawyers, right, who articulate this tradition over time. Are they teaching it? Clearly, they are, right?

Clearly, Christians, Catholic Christians are understanding that as authoritative for them, permitting them to engage in the military, in the military of the countries that they’re involved in, the militaries of, you know, the empires, right? Because, I mean, typically this was, you know, all prior to the development of nation-states, right? The empires, the kingdoms that they were part of, even, of course, the papal kingdom. And in all of these cases, and this might come as a, you know, a claim that you guys don’t really believe, the Catholic theologians are reflecting on the demands of Scripture, right? They are actually looking to Scripture. What does Scripture say about these kinds of questions? But it’s never, of course, simply Scripture itself. What is the received reflection on the claim in Scripture? How are we supposed to understand this text? Well, to understand the text, right, we don’t think, of course, you can just go to it itself. You go to other theologians who have been thinking about these issues, and you kind of, and you parse them, right? You exegete them over time, trying to avoid, as I think it was Colonel Mallard said earlier, a kind of eisegesis, kind of trying to avoid reading into it certain conclusions you’re trying to get.

Now, okay, you come to the, you know, early 21st century, late 20th century. This is in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. So, if you look into the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and you can google it, it’s online, right? You don’t have to do that now, please, but you can google it. You’ll find that there is a teaching in there on the use of force and the nature of politics, and you know it

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

It can make the judgment look that those people over there can’t defend themselves, we can step in, okay? Defining guilt and innocence among them, right? Pursuing the punishment or, you know, pursuing defense, punishment of the guilty, defense of the innocent in all of those kinds of cases, right? Again, very difficult, very hard to do, but nonetheless possible. And then of course, you know, as I mean, you can see the theory beginning to sort of express itself, right? It starts with very general claims but then, you know, you’re sort of ought to be in an open up to always being concerned, right? For those who are innocent.

Okay, innocent both in terms of we’re not aggressed against and then innocent, we’re not parties to the aggression, okay? Because of this, what the just war account argues, I think I’m gonna finish here, is when we pursue the use of force against an aggressor again, just as John was describing, right? With regard to Hezbollah, we have to be concerned with, right? Peace is our goal, the way in which we pursue that against those who have aggressed, right? We have to allow for the conditions of peace that is possibly even that are possibly even inclusive of our enemy, right? To have fertile ground.

If we regard our enemy again, this would be the first way of seeing the world, it’s simply disordered, right? Simply screwed up, right? If we regard our enemy as simply right somebody that, you know, we gotta crush and move on from, right? We cannot arguably build the conditions of peace, okay? So I’ll stop there and if there are any questions, I’ll take this, thank you. Applause.

How do people who do not support or flow on the just war tradition, so more much more like pacifist, how do they support a domestic vision of the use of force while negating any international vision or of legitimacy of the use of force, right? So how do pacifists justify domestic policing, for instance, right? While being reluctant to devoted question? They’re gonna be different ways, right? I mean, what sir, this is the portents of Yoder’s book, right? Certain kinds of pacifists are gonna say, you know, even that kind of use of force is bad, will have no part in it, right?

So we’ll form our own communities, we’ll separate from it, but most pacifists won’t opt for that. They’ll typically say something like war is different than policing, right? And it’s different in maybe a couple kinds of ways. One is orders of magnitude, right? 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, you know, and so on, right? And right, 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, right? Let’s say like the US government, right? And at all of its levels, they have very specified, right? Jurisdiction over their people. They don’t have jurisdiction, right? Or over other people in other places. So they can exercise force here, right? With regard to the jurist, you know, internal domestic jurisdiction, but they have no authorization over there, right? In another, you know, another state, another region, and so on. They can’t then, right? Right, sort of exceed the authority given to them as representatives of that jurisdiction.

So it’s a very kind of tight rigorous jurisdictional claim, difference in kind. So you have a kind of different in orders of magnitude issue and a difference in kind of question which raises, I mean, obviously lots of questions itself, other questions along those lines. It’s Catholic things a little bit different. They mean, it’s kind of alright, anybody want to ask a question about the Pope? No, I’m just a gentleman in the back. But not the woman with the yellow shirt after, yeah, yeah, Jonathan, Drew, I was studying at the Institute of World Politics until graduation this past May.

Um, I’ve heard I’ve been taught just worth hearing a number of different times and places, and I usually hear it opposed to either pacifism or a completely unstructured train of thought. And so my question is out of the West, has any major other system for looking at that same set of questions emerged other than just for theory that has become sort of an unstated norm because I always hear just where theory taught as this is a really rare thing to be understood, but I never actually, that was the first system that I was taught in an academic setting.

And so I kind of feel like a fish looking for where the water, everyone tells me everyone else is swimming in is right if I understood the question, right? You’re asking about like the realist approach, right? I mean, or what some might call like a kind of realist approach and it’s somebody even I think, I should, one of the students referred to Machiavelli, right? Yesterday, something like that, right? That in other words, look, all this talk about laws of war and ethical rules, you know, applying to war, you know, it’s great stuff, right? I mean, it sounds really, really cool, you know, who wouldn’t wish that there were rules when it comes to war waging? But, but it’s, I mean, they’re kind of bunk, right? When push comes to shove, both the American military and other militaries will do what is ever at their capacity to defend themselves against threats.

And sometimes they will, like Machiavelli would advise, sometimes they’ll abide the rules, right? Because it just makes sense, it makes political sense, okay? In this circumstance, we can win, we’ll abide the rules, we’ll look not only like the winner but also will look noble in the enterprise and so on, right? But if the situation gets particularly nasty, alright, we’ll take the gloves off, right? Because if, you know, the stakes are too high, so much for your rules, right? And there are different ways that you hear that expressed, right?

One is Michael Walzer, if you’ve ever read Walser’s book, just an unjust wars, he’s written some articles since this on the notion of supreme emergency. If a state or a people feels that its very existence, it’s threatened, right? An existential threat, then Walzer argues it might be okay then to sort of disregard the rules of war, let the state kill innocent people on the, you know, the other guys in his defense and he said, he points to England, I think around, you know, 1939, 1940, right? When it looks like, geez, you know, we may not win, he thought maybe they would have been justified at that point to fight a menace like Hitler, right? Under strict conditions, that’s one level.

he other level is talking to soldiers. I have a very good friend, a ranger, a wonderful guy. He’s the godfather to one of my kids, and he said, “Look, 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 sort of realism at play. There are people, like Kaplan, who defend a kind of realist position, and there are others as well.

Great question, thank you so much for the presentation. You’re welcome. My name is Agnes from South Sudan. I grew up as a Catholic, although I became evangelical later, but that’s a different story. I struggle listening to your presentation and trying to relate it to my life. Growing up as a South Sudanese in the former Sudan, Christians were being persecuted. Yes, the Bible says to love your enemy as you love 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 earlier a question you could ask 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 are people who want to wipe Christianity and others from the world. Here we are as Christians, rooted in the Bible, yet we struggle with the command to love them. Do I hate their ideologies? It’s a really 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 really tried my best”?

That’s a fantastic question. The tradition you’re pointing to says, again, Augustine in the City of God makes it clear: war is awful; it’s horrible. Nonetheless, he argues that 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 who do 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. For instance, 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 that you’re describing.

The tradition holds that this can be possible. If you’re doing it as an expression of love, the way you express that you don’t hate the person is by your actions. If the enemy throws up a white flag or drops their weapon and effectively surrenders, you don’t walk over and shoot them anyway. You’re trying to express something other than hatred at that point. But that’s the challenge; I take it, that’s where pacifists would say this is just not possible. They would argue that 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, such as the way we punish in the state or how a parent punishes a child. When you punish someone, you’re inflicting 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.

There’s a young woman in the back. 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 that 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 just necessary?

Great question again. We could probably discuss Machiavelli afterward; I don’t claim to be a Machiavelli scholar. Certainly, the realist position he’s often associated with argues that 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 be prepared, as Christians, to say there are certain things we couldn’t do in our defense? Augustine, of course, writes the City of God while Rome is collapsing. He loves Rome and makes a powerful statement about glory, emphasizing that even in dire circumstances, we must hold onto moral boundaries.

Roman loved Rome, and he has this wonderful phrase toward the end, which I think is in Book 19 or 20. He talks about the glory of Rome and how great that glory has been, emphasizing how the Romans’ pursuit of glory has been so animating for the greatness that is Rome. Yet, he acknowledges that ultimately, all that glory is just having your name on a dying man’s lips. It’s fleeting. As Christians, we know that Rome had its time, Constantinople had its time, and we assume Washington, D.C., will have its time, too.

It’s wonderful; we love our country. I always tell my kids that when you’re on the court, you fight like hell; it matters. You fight to win, and it’s so much fun. But on the other hand, it doesn’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things. If you lose, you shake hands and move on. That’s kind of how we should view our place in the world.

We should love our country and have patriotism; these are good things. I might even defend nationalism to some extent. However, as Christians, we must recognize there are certain things we could not do. We could not intentionally kill innocent people, even to protect a wonderful nation. Does that answer your question?

It’s a great question. Anything else? Yes, I met you yesterday.

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.

I think that’s a really good question, and I’m not entirely sure what to say. So, 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?

Yes, exactly. Listen, 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, of course, 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.

Speaking of nuclear weapons, can you talk about that for a little bit? The Bible speaks to the complexity here, as nuclear weapons are a different kind of weapon of mass destruction. They change the nature of war. For example, North Korea has not invaded South Korea yet, while the Viet Cong did not invade South Vietnam.

Sure, 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 even argue that nuclear deterrence has prevented major conflict among superpowers. While we’ve had lots of 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. 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?

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.