To Reach Peace, Teach Peace!
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Essay Introduction
Essays of a Catholic
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As early as 1891, Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum asserted the need for a new international order in which peace would be based on justice rather than military defense.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pope Benedict XVI immediately declared the neutrality of the Holy See, condemning the war for its futility, calling it a “useless massacre” and “the suicide of civilized Europe”. In his encyclical, Ad Beatissimum, he outlined the causes of wars and methods of attaining peace. He devised and offered peace plans to both sides based on reconciliation and forgiveness, not revenge. (His peace plans were dismissed in favor of another approach at Versailles, to which he was not invited.)
Pope Pius XII declared in his Christmas message of 1944 that: “There is a duty, besides, imposed on all, a duty which brooks no delay, no procrastination, no hesitation, no subterfuge: It is the duty to do everything to ban once and for all wars of aggression as legitimate solution of international disputes and as a means towards realizing national aspirations.” He said it was our supreme obligation to make “war on war”.
In 1963, Pope John XXIII wrote in Pacem in Terris that “…in an age such as ours that prides itself on its atomic energy it is contrary to reason to hold that war is now a suitable way to restore rights which have been violated.”
In Gaudium et spes (1965), Pope Paul VI wrote: “We should fervently ask God to give these men the strength to go forward perseveringly and to follow through courageously on this work of building peace with vigor. It is a work of supreme love for mankind. Today it certainly demands that they extend their thoughts and their spirit beyond the confines of their own nation, that they put aside national selfishness and ambition to dominate other nations, and that they nourish a profound reverence for the whole of humanity, which is already making its way so laboriously toward greater unity.”
As the first Pope to visit and address the United Nations in 1965 Pope Paul VI said: “No more war, war never again.”
In the message of Pope Paul VI on the inaugural World Day of Peace, on January 1, 1968, he said: “We extend the invitation … that of dedicating to thoughts and resolutions of Peace a special observance on the first day of the civil year… for, the meditation upon, and the fostering of the great and yearned-for gift of Peace, of which the world has so much need.”
In 1983, the U.S. Bishops wrote in The Challenge of Peace that “offensive war of any kind is not morally justifiable.”
In the speech he gave upon his departure from Sarajevo in 1997, Pope John Paul II said: “… allow me to repeat the words: Never again war!”
In 2003, John Paul II said in his message to American military chaplains: “By now it should be clear to all that the use of war as a means of resolving disputes between States was rejected, even before the UN Charter, by the consciences of the majority of humanity, except in the case of legitimate defense against an aggressor.”
That same year the United States invaded a country that had not attacked it. The military that carried out the invasion of Iraq was at least 50% Christian, 25% Catholic.
Pope Benedict XVI said, “There is no allowance for preemptive war in the Catechism.” Yet the invasion was followed by a decades-long occupation, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, and decimated the Christian population, all with the help of a military that was at least 50% Christian, 25% Catholic. How many Catholics planned the war I don’t know, but we can assume similar percentages.
Does anyone else see a problem here?
Is the problem the Jews?
Five years ago, I invited E. Michael Jones onto my podcast, Catholics Against Militarism, to find out more about his antiwar views.
I asked him, “Why did we go to war in Iraq?”
“Israel!” he said. “It is all about Israel!”
I love E. Michael Jones—most of all for his candor. His answer was simple, clear. It made sense.
I know Dr. Jones better now than I did then, and I would like to pick up the conversation where we left off on that podcast five years ago, in a spirit of “trusting dialogue and sincere friendship” which John Paul II said was needed to “sustain reason in all its searching.” And I want to invite you, the Culture Wars reader, into that conversation in hopes that together we can move it forward.
I want to pose the question again: “Why did we go to Iraq?” But this time I’m not talking about Americans, our representatives in the United States government, or smug elites. I am talking about Catholics. Even if you believe that Jews start all the wars, we must ask ourselves: Why are Catholics (and all Christians) so easily led, so easily dragged, so easily duped into fighting them? It’s an important question and possibly the only question we Catholics need to be asking about war at this point in human history. For twenty years I have been trying to answer it, perhaps because two of the Catholics who fought in that preemptive war condemned by two Popes were my brothers.
The Railroad Switch
I am no theologian. I am no Scripture scholar either, but I’ve been teaching ancient literature at a Catholic high school for the past ten years and conversing with Catholics through my podcast both on and off the record for the last five, so I think I understand well the mindset and mind style of the average Catholic, and the main problem I see is cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term that describes a state of mental discomfort that is felt when people hold conflicting beliefs — or when actions contradict beliefs. (Mostly in this essay I am talking about beliefs, or the intellect, not actions, or the will.) F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his famous essay “The Crack-Up” about his midlife crisis: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That should give you some idea of the mental strain that results from cognitive dissonance.
The source of cognitive dissonance is Catholic teaching itself when it is is not well explained and thoroughly presented, which it never is. In The Harvest of Justice is Sown in Peace (1993), the USCCB wrote:
“An essential component of a spirituality for peacemaking is an ethic for dealing with conflict in a sinful world. The Christian tradition possesses two ways to address conflict: nonviolence and just war. They both share the common goal: to diminish violence in this world. For as we wrote in The Challenge of Peace, ‘the Christian has no choice but to defend peace . . . . This is an inalienable obligation. It is the how of defending peace which offers moral options.’ …Throughout history there has been a shifting relation between the two streams of the tradition which always remain in tension.”
I can tell you that most Catholics don’t even know that there are “two streams” of the tradition, but the bigger problem lies in knowing, because the person who discovers these two streams will immediately perceive that they flow in different directions. The “two ways” are opposed. There is just no getting around that.
I did an interview with David L. Gray at St. Dominic’s Media in May and we were discussing issues of war and violence. A listener commented:
“I went on a men’s campout with with our priest a few weeks ago…One of the men brought his 11-year-old son and while we sat around the fire, out of the blue, the kid asked Father: ‘Jesus said not to kill and told Peter to put down the sword, how can Catholics be in the military.’ Wow!!…”
I include the anecdote only to illustrate that even an 11-year-old can spot the problem.
Now it is a psychological fact that people will seek to eliminate cognitive dissonance as soon as possible to restore a sense of cognitive consonance. When opposing beliefs are held and cognitive dissonance is experienced, the person will most often attempt to relieve the tension by dropping or letting go of one of the beliefs. There are three tactics people usually use to accomplish this. By examining them, we can see that we are dealing with cognitive dissonance in the Church, and not simply issues on which Catholics of goodwill can disagree.
Avoidance
People will tend to avoid or ignore people or situations that remind them of the cognitive dissonance, discourage people from talking about it, or distract themselves from it. On an institutional level, the Church engages in almost total avoidance. Did you know that seminarians don’t spend more than a few hours learning about Catholic teaching on war? I’ve asked three different priests and they all said they talked about Just Defense (a term I will use instead of Just War) for exactly one afternoon in seminary — in a philosophy class. Maybe that’s why no parish priest ever gives a homily on it.
When I asked the seminarians if they had ever been taught anything about the other “stream of the tradition,” they said no; they had never heard of it except with respect to Gandhi or the civil rights movement. For that reason, I will be using the term “Gospel Nonviolence” in this essay to distinguish it from mere tactics employed to bring about social change. (No, Gospel Nonviolence is not “pacifism,” so I will not be using that term either. Calling it “pacifism” is a form of delegitimizing.)
Delegitimizing
When something can’t be ignored or avoided, there is an attempt to delegitimize it. People will attempt to ruin the credibility of the person, group, or situation that highlighted the dissonance. For example, they might say it is untrustworthy or biased. I see this all the time on my podcast. Many Catholics will tell me that Gospel Nonviolence is a kind of “fundamentalism” or that the person espousing it is “heterodox” because it “goes against the teaching of the Church” (i.e. Just Defense). I’ve been called a “heretic,” an “ignorant Novus Ordo Catholic,” a “hippie,” a “liberal,” a “utopian,” someone with a “spirit of rebellion against the Church” and yes a “pacifist,” simply for introducing, explaining and promoting Gospel Nonviolence in a serious way. This betrays either widespread confusion about Church teaching, the emotional and psychological effects of cognitive dissonance, or both. This is not an ideal state of affairs, especially if these two streams of the tradition are supposed to “remain in tension.”
Limiting
When Catholics must acknowledge the legitimacy of Gospel Nonviolence, they try to limit it by belittling its importance. In general, those who limit due to the experience of cognitive dissonance might do this by claiming that certain behavior a set of beliefs is a rare or a one-off event. I heard that the JustFaith curriculum, popular in Catholic parishes a few years back, taught Gospel Nonviolence alongside Just Defense. I was pleased to hear that, as it would be an improvement upon what is done in most seminaries; I found out, however, that the curriculum taught it only by talking about individuals who had chosen nonviolence as a “moral option.” This is typical of the limiting strategy in the Church: They present someone like Dorothy Day as a kind of curious case study, “a rare or one-off event.” They might include a selection of quotes from her writings in order to give the nonviolent tradition a nod, but never do they offer a systematic and thorough explanation of that tradition.
Another limiting strategy is when a person tries to provide rational arguments to convince themselves or others that a certain a behavior is okay. The epitome of this can be seen in the efforts of some Catholics to justify and rationalize anything and everything that “must” be done in war, including, for example, the dropping of the atomic bombs on the Japanese people.
One would hope that we could look to the official teachings of the Catholic Church to reconcile these two streams of the tradition in such a way that eliminates cognitive dissonance and establishes a healthy “tension” instead. In my experience, the Catechism only causes confusion, especially when you have a classroom full of 14-year-olds who are all flipping through it trying to find proof for their positions. The sections on War and the Fifth Commandment seem like they were hashed out by committee, like Congress trying to pass a bill: I’ll give you your conscientious objection if you give me soldiers contribute to the common good. It feels like it ended up stuffed full of everything everyone wanted in there; it is riddled with contradictions and lacks any cohesive, organizing principle.
It would be almost comical if it weren’t so troubling to watch the way the kids skim through it. They’re like: Life is sacred (blah blah blah) and God alone is the Lord of life from the beginning until its end (blah blah blah) and in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus recalls the commandment, You shall not (blah blah blah)— OKAY! HERE’S THE PART WHERE IT SAYS WHEN YOU CAN KILL SOMEONE! And then, that becomes the conversation — intentionality, innocence, proportionality—those infinitely subjective, infinitely elastic categories of the mind. I learned long ago that the wisdom of the pagans in their ancient epics and tragedies is far more useful, impactful and instructive when it comes to teaching kids about violence and war. How is it that Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles understood more about the first sin committed outside Eden, when we have the light of Divine Revelation, and they did not?
Because in all the avoidance, delegitimizing, and limiting, we see cognitive dissonance run amok, and I think we all know which “moral option” or “stream of the tradition” gets dropped by 99% of Catholics 99% of the time. And I’m not just talking about teenagers. Towards the end of my first interview with Dr. Jones, I brought up Jesus’s words “love your enemies.” The way he spoke about the Jews worried me, and I wanted to see if I couldn’t convince him to take another approach. We barely touched on the topic of Jesus’s teachings when he responded:
“I’ve had this conversation with other people before. You’re supposed to turn the other cheek, okay, right? What if there’s a thug there beating up some old lady over there, across the street? He’s trying to steal her pocketbook. Wait a minute. ‘Honey, turn the other cheek!’ I’ll turn the other cheek for you because I don’t want to get involved. Do we turn the other cheek when someone is ready to kidnap your child? We have the right to self-defense here. And we have a cultural equivalent to the right of self-defense.”
In the interview, when he said this, I giggled and moved on, because we had already been talking for an hour, it was a great conversation, and it was not the right time to dig in on an entirely new topic, but that is exactly where I’d like to pick up the conversation, because with all due respect to Dr. Jones: This is exactly the kind of thing my 14-year-old students would say when I would point out Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels! Is this not basically what Israel is saying today? “We have the right to self-defense.” And what if there’s a madman over there in another country building weapons of mass destruction? Do we turn the other cheek because we don’t want to get involved? Even Oedipus, who killed his own father unknowingly, appealed to natural law: “Answer me this one thing: if here and now someone came up and threatened to take your life, your innocent life, would you then pass to ask if he were your father — or deal with him out of hand? I’m sure, as you love life, you’d pay the assailant in his own coin, not look for legal warrant.”
This kind of thinking is entirely natural for a human being. It is to be expected—of Jews, pagans, Muslims, secular humanists. Christians will have to grapple with these kinds of questions and concerns too of course, but for the Christian, they should be considered cliches, predictable objections that invite one to deeper contemplation and a more sophisticated conversation. But does it ever work that way? In my experience, never.
Instead, it works like a railroad switch. When these questions, objections and concerns are encountered, almost always within the context of an imagined, hypothetical scenario, the Christian can’t see past them on “the Jesus track.” It’s all fogged up down there. So the train of thought gets switched onto the “Just Defense track”. In effect, these questions, objections and concerns act as obstacles we can’t find our way around or through; so for all practical purposes, Just Defense doctrine ends up short-circuiting thought, diverting us from contemplation of Jesus’s teachings and ultimately becoming an excuse to dispense of them. All thinking from that point forward will be in the terms dictated by Just Defense. And when you cede that ground, you’ve already lost.
On Gemma O’Doherty’s podcast, Dr. Jones said: You better be smarter than the social engineers because if you’re not smarter they’ll destroy you…We have to elevate consciousness all throughout the world but especially in these Catholic countries…we have to come up with a higher understanding of the world than our enemies. If we don’t, they’ll destroy us.
Tension, Confusion, or Delusion?
I couldn’t agree more with Dr. Jones here! But what is that “higher understanding”? Is it Just Defense doctrine? Is that what we Catholics bring to the table? Because Just Defense doctrine doesn’t even stop us from destroying each other. Protestants and Catholics destroyed each other in Ireland. The Serbs and Croats destroyed each other in the Balkans. Catholics slaughtered each other by the millions in the Great War, which was at one time called The Great War of Christendom. In the first half of the twentieth century, 200,000 bells that had been ringing out across Europe for hundreds of years were melted down and turned into bullets. The bell towers were turned into snipers’ nests. Where was the tension between the two streams?
Some will with a shrug chalk all of this up to sin. Others will say that Christians, innocent as doves, were tricked, having fallen prey to sophisticated wartime propaganda dispensed through the powers of the new mass media (run, of course, by the Jews!) But the fog of war existed long before television and newspapers, as did man’s tendency to want to shift blame. One might recall King Agamemnon’s speech in The Iliad when he finally reconciles with Achilleus after their fight, a fight which “put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians”:
This is the word the Achaians have spoken often against me
And found fault with me in it, yet I am not responsible
But Zeus is, and Destiny, and Erinys the mist-walking
Who in assembly caught my heart in the savage delusion…
Yet what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things.
Delusion, the elder daughter of Zeus, the accursed
Who deludes all; her feet are delicate and they step not
On the firm earth, but she walks the air above men’s heads
And leads them astray. She has entangled others before me.
If it is in fact the Jews who are “the accursed who delude all,” then why didn’t Just Defense doctrine stop all those Christians from carrying out their will in 2003? According to Iraq Body Count, there have been 300,000 violent deaths since the invasion of Iraq twenty years ago. It is estimated that between 187,000 and 211,000 of those were civilian deaths: that is one-half to two-thirds of all casualties! Now Israel is claiming, “October 7 was our September 11.” In other words: “We don’t want to hear it.” Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil.
The Just Defense theory was initially written to try to limit Christian participation in war. Has it ever worked that way, even in countries not “controlled by the Jews”? Today the “white boys” see Russia as the last bastion of Christendom, a holdout against global Jewish oligarchical control. Russia completed construction of its Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in 2020. It is a dark, clanging monstrosity of militarism. The main dome is 19.45 meters across (to commemorate Russia’s victory in World War II). Soviet medals decorate the stained glass ceilings. Key battles are portrayed in mosaic. Everything is coated in metal. The bells, made of copper and tin, are decorated with military emblems. They weigh 22 tons. The floors are made from weapons and tanks that were seized from the Nazis. According to David Smith’s reporting in The Guardian, a tour guide told a group of women in headscarves: “As you walk across the floors of the Cathedral, you are symbolically delivering a blow to the fascist enemy.”
Twenty-thousand visitors a day can envision that blow to the enemy while the largest icon of Christ’s face ever created in mosaic looks down on them from the central dome above—without experiencing even the slightest pang of conscience. Why? Is there any better proof that Just Defense doctrine has become, operationally speaking, “an artful dodge whereby Christians try to fool themselves and the whole human community by morally rubber-stamping homicide in the name of Jesus on behalf of their particular kingdom”? (Just War Theory: The Logic of Deceit by Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy) Maybe this is why Pope Benedict XVI at one point called the Just War doctrine “a problem,” and said, “we should be asking ourselves if it is licit to even suggest the existence of a just war in this day and age.”
Here’s a thought that will not be popular: Maybe the Jews are not more depraved than we are (which is what I hear people saying); maybe they are just more honest with themselves and with the world about the nature of violence and the realities of war. I interviewed an American veteran on my podcast in May of this year who was defending Israel. I said that what Israel was doing was not proportional. He said proportionality is stupid in war, that the Americans tried to fight a proportional war in Iraq and Afghanistan and it went on for 20 years and ended up being worse in the long run. He said war is hell so you should want it to be over with as soon as possible, which means you fight to win. I said Israel is committing genocide. He said no, they are fighting until they render the aggressor unable to do harm. I asked him if he was a Christian and he said yes, “but I’m not speaking from that perspective.” What could I say? If we’re not speaking from that perspective, we lose all orientation, don’t we? It had never been so obvious to me as it was in this conversation that Just Defense, whether it be Christian or Jewish, was “simply one of the accoutrements of war…a normal part of the propaganda process… that nations employ in the process of prosecuting a war and persuading people to give their children, their money and their lives to the reciprocal butchery of human beings.” (Just War Theory: The Logic of Deceit by Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy)
I’ll say this much for the Jews: at least they are not trying to rubber-stamp homicide in the name of Jesus. I’ll give them that.
Can we blame Israel for choosing the Just Defense track when they literally have no other track, because they are Jews? Can we blame them if, once they start down that track, they have to tweak a few things here and there, like the “rules” about proportionality, as Christians have always had to do to bring our abstract philosophical theories about justified killing more in line with reality? Christians took the Just Defense track around the time of Constantine and one mile down the track, Thou Shalt Not Kill became thou shalt not kill unless you are wearing a military uniform. Ten miles down the track it became thou shalt not kill with a gun in war, only with a sword. Thou Shalt Not Kill had always implied thou shalt not kill the innocent, but thirty miles down the track, soldiers had stopped killing each other in fields, and every war started to entail massive civilian “casualties” (read: deaths), so the world coined the term, “collateral damage,” and the Church, ever accommodating, changed Thou Shalt Not Kill the Innocent to thou shalt not kill the innocent directly. Forty miles down the track that became thou shall not kill the innocent indiscriminately. Now, in the twenty-first century, Thou Shalt Not Kill has morphed into Thou Shalt Not Commit Genocide. How far we’ve come!
Is there not more than an echo of the serpent in all of this, the serpent who is described in Genesis as being “more subtle than any other creature” and asks Eve: “Did God say you shall not eat of any tree of the garden”? (Get 3:1).
Did God say thou shalt not kill under any circumstances?
With this new commandment Thou Shalt Not Commit Genocide we are further diverted from talking about the real issues Christians should be concerned with (the teachings of Jesus), and we instead get to argue with the rest of the world about the definition of genocide, asking questions like: Is it okay to kill 200,000 people over twenty years, which equates to 10,000 people a year, but it’s not okay to kill 40,000 people over eight months, which equates to 60,000 a year? But what if Israel ends up stopping after a year? Then you only have 60,000 people dead instead of 200,000. Isn’t that better? So doesn’t the American veteran I interviewed have a point? Maybe Catholic mathematicians should update Just Defense doctrine with an equation that specifies what velocity of killing is just and unjust.
Or maybe we should be concerned with the number of people killed compared to the total population. But in that case, would you count only Palestinians living in Gaza or those living all over the world? Maybe Catholic scientists can mine genetic databases so we can add something to the Catechism about how many persons of each race and ethnicity can be killed in a war without committing a “war crime.”
Or does the killing on both sides have to be proportional? As of this writing, forty thousand Palestinians have died since October 7, or so they say, and only 1,200 Israelis, so that’s a 33:1 ratio. If about 200,000 Iraqis died compared to 7,000 American troops in the war in Iraq, then that’s a 29:1 ratio, and we’re not much better than the Israelis. What if we count American contractor deaths in the Iraq War? That would bring the American casualties up to 15,000, or a 1:13 ratio. We could even throw in the 30,000 suicides among American veterans of that war and bring the ratio down to 1:4. But then do you count the deaths of pregnant Iraqi women as two instead of one? Of course not. The killing of the unborn only matters when it is done by Planned Parenthood not when it is done by a Christian drone pilot or a bomb signed by Nikki Haley, because in the first case it is direct killing and in the second it is indirect. But then do you count the deformed babies from all the uranium bombs? What about the Iraqi kid I once met whose face was burned off, who had to listen to his mother’s screams as she burned to death in a car? Does he count for anything? Do his psychological wounds count? What about the children his mother would have borne if she had not died? How do we count that? Well, that can surely be balanced out by the 1,367 American veterans who suffered permanent injuries to their genitals and were therefore never able to have any (or any more) children.
How do you measure evil? How do you quantify it, weigh it, balance it?
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Luckily we can look to the U.N. for clarity! It’s not about the numbers at all actually. The U.N. says: “To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group.” So we’re back to the idea of intention. How do you prove intent, especially when “the act of self-defense can have a double-effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor…The one is intended, the other is not” (CCC 2263)? That takes us right back to self-defense (CCC 2264). It’s a Russian doll of rationality! People are still arguing about how many Jews really died in World War II and whether Hitler intended to genocide them. Maybe Catholic neurologists can team up with Elon Musk to invent a brain chip that reads intentions. We can install them in all the political leaders of the world. Then maybe the Just War doctrine will work as intended.
But wait. Let’s say we could prove intent. Are we talking about intentions at the beginning of a war, in the middle, or at the end? And whose intentions matter, the politicians’ or the soldiers’ who are fighting the war? The Trojan soldiers started out fighting in self-defense, but ten years later, Antenor the Thoughtful, says in The Iliad, “…let us give back Helen of Argos and all her possessions to the sons of Atreus to take away, seeing now we fight with our true pledges turned into lies.” It seems something changed during the course of ten long years. There are stories in The Iliad about Achilleus at the beginning of the war when he was a very noble person, treating his enemies with honor and respect; but by the end he is abusing corpses and slaughtering so many Trojans that the river turns red from all the blood.
Xanthus (the river itself) stands up to Achilleus—but even this river god is concerned with self-defense! The pagan gods are always projections of the human psyche, of course.
Now swift Achilleus would have killed even more Paionians except that the deep-whirling river spoke to him in anger…the voice rose from the depth of the eddies: ‘Oh Achilleus, your strength is greater, your acts more violent than all men’s; since always the very gods are guarding you. If the son of Kronos has given all Trojans to your destruction, drive them at least out of me to the plain, and there wreak your havoc. For the loveliness of my waters is crammed with corpses, I cannot find a channel to cast my waters into the bright sea since I am congested with the dead men you kill so brutally. Let me alone, then; lord of the people, I am confounded.”
Achilleus tells Xanthus “I will not leave off my killing.”
Then Xanthus “rises on him in a darkening edge of water.”
