In [Pope Francis’s] interview, there was evidently no papal call to Russia to cease its aggression, which has cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and done a trillion dollars worth of damage. There was no papal demand that Catholics be allowed to worship freely in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, where Catholic rites are now banned. There was no papal insistence that Russia release the tens of thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children who are being “re-educated.” There was no papal condemnation of Russian war crimes in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and elsewhere. Nor did the pope denounce the Russian Orthodox Church’s relentless campaign of disinformation in support of Vladimir Putin’s war.
Though a “just defense” seems as moral and rational as anything, I’m generally ambivalent about “just war theory,” at least as most people have appeared to me to use and apply it. I go back to Stanley Hauerwas often for his quite honorable commitment to pacifism — specifically Christian pacifism, I should add. It’s a commitment I have never been able to fully make or justify. (95% pacifism works for me.) But I do believe that we are morally and rationally obligated to ask a scarily damning question which Hauerwas once presciently put to Richard John Neuhaus: “Do we have a population trained well enough in the habits of sacrifice to make just war possible?”
We should also ask first, Do we have leaders or experts of any kind who are even interested in something we might call “habits of sacrifice”?
“Realism,” as I see it, is never anything more than the implications of the answers to the questions we are willing to ask.
One of the first rules to any moral assessment of … anything, is: Never assume that you are asking the right question(s).
(Also worth noting the phrase “navigating the wilderness of mirrors that is the new world disorder.”)