"The Catholic Case against War" Excerpt by Notre Dame Press

THE CATHOLIC CASE AGAINST

WAR A BRIEF GUIDE

D AV I D C A R R O L L C O C H R A N University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Notre Dame University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Control Number: TK

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

000

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization

000

CHAPTER 2

War’s False Promises and the Power of Nonviolence

000

CHAPTER 3

Preventing War through Greater Global Governance

000

CHAPTER 4

Preventing War through Economic and Political Justice

000

CHAPTER 5

Abolishing War

000

Recommended Reading Notes Works Cited Index

000

000 000 000

IN T RODUC T ION

“Never again war!” It has become a mantra for popes over the last five decades, one signaling the emergence of Catholic teaching as a remarkably powerful voice against warfare in the contemporary world.1 The church’s case against war combines a sweeping critique of war’s nature and a detailed vision for abolishing it by strengthening its alternatives and actively building peace. This case amounts to, in the words of John Paul II, a comprehensive and urgent “No to War!”2 The church has not always been such a strong critic of war. Although the earliest Christians usually rejected participation in warfare as contrary to the gospel, starting in the fourth century thinkers such as Ambrose and Augustine gradually laid the foundations of the Christian just war tradition. Developed over the centuries since, this tradition argues that war, while often terrible, is sometimes necessary to protect a just and peaceful order given the realities of sin in the world. Under certain conditions — a just cause, right intention, last resort, and others — going to war is morally legitimate. And fighting such wars once underway can be morally just too, as long as participants observe certain moral limits — not intentionally attacking civilians, avoiding disproportionate destruction, treating prisoners humanely, and others. This 1

2 The Catholic Case Against War

was the dominant lens the Catholic Church used to analyze war for most of its history up into the twentieth century. Not all wars are just, but some are, and war itself, while regrettable, is a normal and often legitimate part of the way countries behave in the world.3 Beginning in the twentieth century, however, Catholic teaching on war and peace underwent significant shifts, especially after Vatican II’s promise to “undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude.”4 While its interpretation of the just war tradition was once flexible enough to accommodate war as a normal part of statecraft, the Vatican increasingly applied stricter interpretations, using them to condemn wars for such things as lacking just cause or right intention, ignoring alternatives demanded by the last resort requirement, unleashing disproportionate destruction on societies, and, especially, indiscriminately killing civilians. Rather than emphasizing war’s necessity in protecting a just and peaceful order, Catholic teaching’s emerging case against war condemned it as a threat to such an order, creating cycles of violence, devastation, and oppression that only made things worse. Alongside these growing condemnations of war and, eventually, calls to abolish it completely, the church emphasized alternatives to armed conflict such as negotiation, mediation, and nonviolent resistance. It urged the world to address the roots of war through greater global cooperation, international law, and a commitment to sustainable economic development, human rights, and democratic political institutions.5 In this way, the Vatican increasingly emphasized principles associated with what is often now called a “just peace” perspective.6 While this shift to a much more critical view of war has been dramatic, there remains the question of whether Catholic teaching still allows any space for a just war under certain conditions. On the yes side, even as Vatican statements increasingly condemned war, they allowed for narrow exceptions as a last resort — either in national self-defense or as military interventions to prevent humanitarian disasters such as genocide — at least until humanity succeeds in ending war itself. Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes states: “As long as the danger of war remains

Introduction 3

and there is no competent and sufficiently powerful authority at the international level, governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defense once every means of peaceful settlement has been exhausted.” And John Paul II, who once said “we are not pacifists,” gives a qualified endorsement to “humanitarian interventions” to disarm an “unjust aggressor” when other means to prevent grave abuse of innocent populations have failed.7 More recently, however, church teaching may have closed this remaining space for morally permitted war. While pointing to the need to resist “unjust aggression,” Francis states, “I don’t say bomb, make war,” and calls the decision “to engage in war” a “mistaken understanding of our own principles.” In 2020’s Fratelli Tutti, Francis warns, “War can easily be chosen by invoking all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses. . . . In recent decades, every single war has been ostensibly ‘justified.’” The nature of modern warfare makes it “very difficult” to ever satisfy traditional just war criteria and therefore to even “speak of the possibility of a ‘just war’” today. According to Francis, Augustine “forged a concept of ‘just war’ that we no longer uphold in our own day.”8 And in statements addressing the war following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Francis is even more direct, saying “wars are always unjust” and “there is no such thing as a just war: they do not exist!”9 There have, then, been major and, given the church’s millennia-long existence, relatively recent developments in Catholic teaching on war and peace over the last century, ones rooted in shifts in both how the church views the world and how it communicates the nonviolent teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. And these developments are ongoing. This means it is an area of teaching that is still relatively fluid, and therefore one necessarily marked by a number of ambiguities and unanswered questions, especially around if and when armed force is ever morally permitted. Until we have a major authoritative document, such as a papal encyclical, that directly addresses the question in detail, those who believe Catholic teaching permits some instances of armed force, either in

4 The Catholic Case Against War

self-defense or to protect vulnerable populations from mass atrocities such as genocide, can certainly find support for their position, just as those who believe the church no longer permits such force can find support for theirs. This issue of if and when contemporary church teaching permits any resort to war is important, and it has rightly sparked a rich dialogue among Catholic ethicists and theologians.10 It is crucial to realize, however, that the issue of narrow exceptions in Catholic teaching that may or may not allow military force should not obscure the much larger, systematic, and comprehensive case against war itself that the church has developed over the last century. That case is this book’s focus. — Unfortunately, the Catholic case against war is underappreciated for two reasons. First, many people, Catholic and not, don’t know enough about it. Like other areas of Catholic social teaching, what the church says about war and peace still doesn’t get enough attention from the pulpit, the press, and political discourse. It doesn’t help that while the Vatican has much to say on the topic, it is scattered across decades of different encyclicals, statements, and messages. This book’s first purpose, then, is to draw on these texts to gather in one, accessible place the essential features of Catholic teaching’s case against war, one useful for those who want to know more about it and who can share it with others. While many Catholic thinkers, activists, and national bishops’ conferences have made significant contributions to developing Catholic teaching in this area, I have decided, in the interest of a more concise and focused account, to only use formal Vatican documents and papal statements. It is important to note that the church does not consider all of these equally authoritative; an encyclical carries more weight than a homily or press interview. But together they constitute the clearest articulation of what those officially charged with communicating church teaching have to say about war and peace. For ease of reference, I have listed these documents and statements separately in the works cited section at the book’s end.

Introduction 5

The second, and more troubling, reason the Catholic case against war is underappreciated is that, even among those familiar with it, too many consider it unrealistic. Critics frequently dismiss it as hopelessly naïve, sentimental, and utopian, while even those sympathetic to its moral witness can worry that it is too optimistic for how the world really works.11 So the book’s second, and more important, purpose is to demonstrate how thoroughly realistic the church’s case against war really is. There is a large and sophisticated body of empirical and historical research about war. Those who study armed conflict have learned much about its nature, its causes, its alternatives, and ways to prevent it in the first place. By drawing on key findings from this work, I detail just how consistent the Catholic case is with what we actually know about the realities of war and peace.12 The Catholic Church’s case against war turns out to not only be morally inspiring but also empirically sound. It is among the most comprehensive, powerful, and, yes, deeply realistic takes on war and peace in the world today.

C H A P T E R

WA R’S DE AT H, DE S T RUC T ION, A ND DEHUM A NI Z AT ION

Given how central “the sacredness and inviolability of human life” is in contemporary Catholic teaching, the mass killing inherent in war is unsurprisingly front-and-center in the church’s case against it. War is a key part of the larger “culture of death” that church teaching condemns. In the words of John Paul II, “War itself is an attack on human life.”1 Of particular concern is the scale of killing and its many innocent victims. Writing just a few months into World War I, Benedict XV laments in Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum: “There is no limit to the measure of ruin and of slaughter; day by day the earth is drenched with newly- shed blood, and is covered with the bodies of the wounded and the slain.” Paul VI decries war’s “useless massacres” resulting in the “blood of millions,” and John Paul II denounces war for its “millions and millions of victims” and for how it “destroys the lives of innocent people.”2 While church teaching does count soldiers caught up in conflicts not of their own making among war’s victims, as when Francis mourns the death of both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers in their war that began in 2022, it more often focuses on the shocking numbers of noncombatant 7

8 The Catholic Case Against War

deaths during war, condemning “civilian populations torn apart” and how dead civilians are casually dismissed as “collateral damage.”3 And it regularly highlights the exceptional horror of so many children killed. As John Paul II writes, “Sadly, many of the world’s children are innocent victims of war. In recent years millions of them have been wounded or killed; a veritable slaughter.”4 Over the last century, the Vatican has been particularly alarmed by how the technology of war, including weapons of mass destruction, can magnify the potential scale and indiscriminate nature of its killing. It denounces the “terrifying destructive force of modern weapons,” the way they pave the way for “a savagery far surpassing that of the past,” and how they “have granted war an uncontrollable destructive power over great numbers of innocent civilians.”5 Indeed, Francis has made clear that Catholic teaching considers a country’s even possessing nuclear weapons deeply immoral.6 — Of course, recognizing war’s killing is nothing new. For traditional just war thinkers such as Augustine, it may be regrettable, but sometimes war is nonetheless necessary to protect what he called “the tranquility of order,” meaning a humane, secure, lawful society where people can live their lives free of violence and abuse.7 The Vatican continues to emphasize the importance of such an order today. It regularly uses phrases such as “well-ordered” institutions, “civic order,” and “tranquil social coexistence” to indicate societies that promote human flourishing by being rooted in security, cooperation, justice, and human dignity.8 But whereas Augustine and church teaching in the past may have considered war necessary to protect the tranquility of order, the Vatican is now far more likely to condemn war as actually destroying it. A just order based on violence is neither just nor orderly, and it certainly isn’t tranquil. In Pacem in Terris, John XXIII writes, “There is nothing human about a society that is welded together by force,” and Francis adds, “We cannot claim to maintain stability in the world through fear of annihilation.”9 Those who try to protect a just and peaceful order through vi-

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 9

olence, domination, threats, intimidation, or a balance of military power betray the very thing they claim to protect; war is not a guarantor of just order, but is itself a form of injustice and disorder.10 The Second Vatican Council contrasts war’s “ravages” with a “more genuinely human” order, and Francis condemns the world’s “wars and conflicts that bring only death and destruction in their wake.”11 Indeed, a crucial part of the Catholic case against war is calling attention to the long train of suffering and destruction that it produces. War doesn’t only kill people; it devastates a humane social order even for those it leaves alive.12 A passage from Francis in his 2021 World Day of Peace messages illustrates this sweeping critique: Tragically, many regions and communities can no longer remember a time when they dwelt in security and peace. Numerous cities have become epicentres of insecurity: citizens struggle to maintain their normal routine in the face of indiscriminate attacks by explosives, artillery and small arms. Children are unable to study. Men and women cannot work to support their families. Famine is spreading in places where it was previously unknown. People are being forced to take flight, leaving behind not only their homes but also their family history and their cultural roots.13 Similarly, John Paul II laments “families and countries destroyed, an ocean of refugees, misery, hunger, disease, underdevelopment and the loss of immense resources.”14 Vatican statements on this theme often include images of physical, cultural, and environmental wreckage left by war. Paul VI invokes “frightening ruins,” John Paul II speaks of the “disintegration of human relations and the irreparable loss of an immense artistic and environmental patrimony,” and Francis deplores the “grave harm to the environment and the cultural riches of people.”15 An area of particular concern is war’s impact on children, the family, and the home. John Paul II calls the family an institution that is key to

10 The Catholic Case Against War

an “enduring peaceful order,” and church teaching condemns how war devastates it and the lives of its members. It emphasizes the intense suffering of orphans, widows, child soldiers, refugees, and victims of sexual abuse, forced labor, disease, or famine caused by war.16 Francis is especially powerful in condemning this dimension of armed conflict. He states, “One out of every six children in our world is affected by the violence of war and its effects, even when they are not enrolled as child soldiers or held hostage by armed groups.” He laments all the “wounded children, maimed children, orphaned children, children who have the remnants of war as toys, children who do not know how to smile,” as well as “mothers who lost their children, and the boys and girls maimed or deprived of their childhood.” And, pointing to how “armed conflicts and other forms of organized violence continue to trigger the movement of peoples within national borders and beyond,” Francis writes, “In a spirit of compassion, let us embrace all those fleeing from war and hunger.”17 In highlighting these types of intense suffering brought by war, church teaching also emphasizes the deep and lasting wounds for persons and communities over time. War creates legacies of damage and pain that, according to John Paul II, “remain long unhealed.” In Fratelli Tutti, Francis invokes this ongoing suffering among war’s survivors, arguing that in listening to their stories, “we will be able to grasp the abyss of evil at the heart of war.” Francis demands that we recognize the true impact of choosing war: “This means destroying the future, causing dramatic trauma in the lives of the smallest and most innocent among us. This is the brutality of war — a barbaric and sacrilegious act!”18 Another dimension of war’s destructiveness that church teaching frequently denounces is its economic costs. Not only does war disproportionately afflict the poor and vulnerable, but warfare itself causes more poverty.19 Here is Benedict XV during World War I again: “Trade is at a standstill; agriculture is abandoned; the arts are reduced to inactivity; the wealthy are in difficulties; the poor are reduced to abject misery; all are in distress.”20 And here is John Paul II eight decades later: “War wors-

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 11

ens the sufferings of the poor; indeed, it creates new poor by destroying means of subsistence, homes and property, and by eating away at the very fabric of the social environment. Young people see their hopes for the future shattered and too often, as victims, they become irresponsible agents of conflict.”21 Poverty and the material suffering of the vulnerable are also made worse by the resources poured into preparing for and fighting wars. Again and again, Vatican documents decry the way governments — driven by fear, militarism, and the interests of the arms industry — spend vast sums on weapons rather than economic development, healthcare, education, and other forms of human welfare.22 In Mater et Magistra, John XXIII denounces this “vast expenditure of human energy and natural resources on projects that are disruptive of human society rather than beneficial to it.” The 1971 World Synod of Catholic Bishops at the Vatican protests: “The arms race is a threat to our highest good, which is life; it makes poor peoples and individuals yet more miserable, while making richer the already powerful.” John Paul II calls arms races “insane” since resources “are used for weapons rather than for development, peace and justice.” And Paul VI is most blunt, calling military spending “an act of theft” and an “act of aggression” against the world’s most vulnerable, one that is “starving the poor to death” for lack of resources.23 Finally, the Catholic case that war destroys rather than protects the “tranquility of order” includes war’s dehumanization and how it corrodes the very virtues that a just and humane society requires. For John Paul II, war is fundamentally “inhuman” and “always a defeat for humanity.” It “teaches how to kill, throws into upheaval even the lives of those who do the killing and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred.”24 Francis reinforces this theme of dehumanization, condemning war for lowering persons “to the status of objects.” It is rooted in and cultivates a profound “indifference to others and their dignity” that destroys the very “moral and spiritual integrity” of persons and communities.

12 The Catholic Case Against War

He sums up the church’s view of war thus: “Every war is a form of fratricide that destroys the human family’s innate vocation to brotherhood.”25

DEATH In their detailed studies of war’s nature, the historian Joanna Bourke and military psychologist Dave Grossman both arrive at the same conclusion: once you strip away the historical causes and moral justifications, war’s inescapable essence is its killing. For Bourke, it is “the characteristic act” of war, and Grossman states that “killing is what war is all about.”26 Describing their experience of combat, many soldiers agree. In his autobiography, U.S. Navy sniper Chris Kyle writes, “My job was killing,” and Ken Lukowiak, who fought in the British Army during the Falklands War, recalls: “We were professional soldiers, and that’s what professional soldiers do — kill people.”27 And war is not merely killing, but killing at scale — the massive, organized, sustained slaughter of fellow human beings. Scroll through any online tabulation of estimated deaths per war across history, and the sheer numbers of people killed quickly become mind-numbing. It’s not just the cases we may know best — the hundreds of thousands who perished in the American Civil War, the tens of millions killed in World War I or World War II, or the third of Europe’s German-speaking population that died in the Thirty Years War. Eighth-century China’s An Lushan Revolt killed an estimated thirty-six million people, around a sixth of the world’s population at the time. The Spanish Civil War killed a half-million people, as did the U.S. seizure of the Philippines from Spain in the early twentieth century. Nine million people died in the Russian Civil War. Between one and two million people died during Bangladesh’s independence war against Pakistan, about the same as in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion. And the War of the Triple Alliance, fought in Paraguay in the late 1860s, killed over half that country’s entire population.28 The list could go on for the rest of this

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 13

chapter. As Catholic teaching emphasizes, warfare is an ongoing mass assault on human life. — Among all these persons killed by war throughout human history, the majority are its innocent victims. The most obvious are civilian noncombatants, whose deaths contemporary Vatican statements so frequently condemn. While some civilians may be guilty of supporting or profiting from wars of aggression or repression, almost all noncombatants caught up wars are not responsible for starting them, do not participate in their killing, and seek only to avoid their violence. As Erasmus observed five centuries ago, “Princes wage war unscathed and their generals thrive on it, while the main flood of misfortune sweeps over the peasants and humble citizens, who have no interest in war and gave no occasion for it.”29 Yet killing such noncombatants is inseparable from warfare and always has been. Dead civilians are so common and widespread in war that scholars trying to gather accurate casualty estimates for even recent conflicts struggle to do so given the sheer volume.30 Sometimes killing civilians is intentional. This can be deliberate strategy — from ancient warriors’ putting entire towns to the sword to strategic bombing in World War II that purposely targeted civilian populations — or it can be soldiers’ killing civilians for sport, an ageold practice that still flourishes today.31 Inuit oral traditions describe the ancient practice of raids on rival communities where the goal was to “eliminate everyone in the village one by one, going from house to house and killing them while they slept.”32 On a larger scale, the 1631 sack of Magdeburg, Germany, saw thirty thousand residents slaughtered.33 Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for war in 1920, justified using chemical weapons against civilians to put down rebellions against British colonial rule, saying, “I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes.”34 In a letter to his wife, a German soldier describes killing Jewish children in Belarus during World War II: “Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight.”35 One participant in the My Lai massacre, where American

14 The Catholic Case Against War

soldiers killed almost five hundred noncombatants, mainly women and children, recalls: “We were told to leave nothing standing. We did what we were told, regardless of whether they were civilians.”36 In 1998, the Taliban in Afghanistan sacked the town of Mazar-e-Sharif, spending several days torturing and killing its inhabitants, many by being locked into shipping containers to be slowly “baked alive in the desert sun.”37 These examples illustrate the conclusion Steven LeBlanc and Katherine Register draw, in their study of war’s origins, that “the act of massacring civilians is as ancient as war itself,” and John Keegan’s observation, in his influential A History of Warfare, that targeting civilian populations has been “standard practice” from war’s beginnings to today.38 Sometimes killing noncombatants is not so much deliberate as merely indiscriminate. In such cases, warriors may not seek out civilians to kill specifically, but they also don’t bother to distinguish them from combatants either. As the popular saying dismissively puts it: “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” The history of warfare is marked by siege and blockade tactics that use hunger and disease against combatants and noncombatant alike.39 And indiscriminately shelling areas from distance similarly kills both. Some kinds of modern weapons are also particularly indiscriminate (as we have seen, the Vatican is especially likely to condemn these types of arms). Most obvious are weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear or biological ones. But other armaments, such as landmines and cluster munitions, also end up killing far more noncombatants than soldiers. Unexploded landmines from the Vietnam War still regularly kill civilians fifty years after its end; children are especially at risk of death in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine from picking up unexploded cluster bomblets; and environmental contaminants that remain decades after wars end continue to threaten the lives of local populations around the world.40 The traditional rules of war, now enshrined in treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, include prohibitions on intentionally or indiscriminately killing civilians. Wars in which one or both parties attempt in good faith to follow such rules have been the exception in human

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 15

history; either the rules didn’t exist at the time, they were simply ignored, or parties paid them lip service while continuing to engage in indiscriminate killing in the name of military necessity.41 But even when belligerents do try to uphold rules designed to protect noncombatants in war, as many professionalized militaries do today, they can end up killing enormous numbers of civilians anyway. The explanation lies in the nature of warfare itself. It takes place in an environment of violence and uncertainty. Under often brutal conditions, heightened fear, and a culture of aggression, soldiers wield highly lethal weapons and use them as a matter of course. It is a context with a unique and remarkably low threshold for killing.42 Actual combat often features what Grossman calls “gray-area killings,” where soldiers are unsure of the precise status or actual threat posed by people they are killing.43 The circumstances of danger and the need for “force protection” encourage soldiers not to take chances by holding their fire, which shifts significant risk to civilians caught in warzones. As one American soldier in Iraq commented when responding to civilians mistakenly killed at checkpoints, “We didn’t know what was in that bus. . . . I’d rather see more of them dead than any of my friends.”44 Another factor is the reality of target selection in modern war. Combatants often fire weapons — from small arms to artillery to missiles — at people based not on who they are as individuals but instead on broader categories such as location, being a fighting-age male, or behavior that might be suspicious but could also be innocuous (is the person on drone surveillance planting a roadside bomb or repairing an irrigation pipe?).45 In any complex situation marked by pressure and rapid decision-making, mistakes are inevitable. And even when soldiers do fire at actual enemy combatants, spillover from their powerful weapons often kills nearby noncombatants as well.46 Is it any wonder so many civilians end up dead in wars? Now also consider that all of this doesn’t yet account for the many noncombatants killed not directly by war’s weapons but rather by the famine, disease, and exposure it brings in its wake. When armed conflict destroys crops, livestock, water treatment plants, power grids, hospitals,

16 The Catholic Case Against War

transportation systems, and homes, death rates among local populations soar, especially among children, the elderly, and the sick. As Hugo Slim remarks in his study of noncombatants in war, when it comes to civilian casualties, “most people die from war rather than in battle.”47 There is a common misperception, one that also appears in some Vatican statements, that modern weapons have made war more indiscriminate overall, killing a greater percentage of civilians compared to wars of the past. Technology has made modern weapons far more powerful and destructive, killing enormous numbers of people, but it doesn’t seem to have decisively changed the ratio of noncombatant to combatant deaths. This is not because modern warfare doesn’t kill lots of civilians, but rather because war has always done so. Set-piece battles between soldiers lined up in fields far from civilians, which many people imagine when picturing wars in earlier ages, did happen, but they were the exception, and they usually took place within larger wars with plenty of civilian killing.48 You don’t need modern technology for mass destruction. As Robert Holmes says of the Roman sack of Carthage in 146 BCE, “The Romans annihilated the Carthaginians in the third Punic War as effectively as if they had dropped a nuclear bomb on them.”49 According to Joshua Goldstein, while the civilian percentage of war deaths compared to soldiers can vary widely depending on the particular conflict, the average across human history is roughly 50 percent.50 Killing civilians, then, is not some kind of unfortunate exception more likely in modern warfare. Equaling combatant deaths throughout war’s existence, it is clearly a feature, not a bug. — There is a powerful tendency to react to noncombatant deaths in war differently depending on their side of a conflict. While belligerents usually publicize and lament dead civilians from their group, often invoking them to bolster the righteousness of their cause, they usually rationalize or ignore an opponent’s civilian deaths. As the war correspondent Chris Hedges puts it, “While we venerate and mourn our own dead we

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 17

are curiously indifferent about those we kill. . . . Our dead matter, theirs do not.”51 Public opinion research backs this up. In The Deaths of Others, John Tirman details just how uninterested and unsympathetic the American public historically is to civilian war deaths among foreign populations. Even when public opinion turns against participation in a conflict, as in the case of the Vietnam War, it is due to ongoing casualties among American soldiers rather than non-American civilian deaths.52 There is also evidence that as nationalist and ethnocentric attitudes increase, so too does indifference to noncombatant fatalities on the opponent’s side.53 There are some typical ways to justify, minimize, or disregard civilian deaths on the other side of a war.54 One is refusing to even recognize the difference between soldiers and civilians, viewing everyone on the enemy side as collectively guilty or threatening, especially as wars descend into cycles of reprisals and revenge. As an American officer said of bombing Japanese cities, “There are no civilians in Japan,” or as an Algerian Islamist insurgent said, “With the exception of those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserve to die.”55 Another way is with the equivalent of a dismissive shrug. Waving away noncombatant deaths with some variation of the phrase “that’s war” is remarkably common, from President George W. Bush during the post-9/11 war on terror, to terrorists who targeted civilians in bombings in Israel and London, to Lt. William Calley on his role in the My Lai massacre.56 A more sophisticated way is to hide behind semantic evasions. As long as all those dead civilians were not technically “intended” but were merely “collateral damage,” then it is possible to safely ignore them (even if they themselves would likely have protested against such moral reasoning if anyone had bothered to ask them).57 Of course, being realistic about war means fully facing the reality of its noncombatant fatalities on all sides. This is what the Vatican’s case against war does. It identifies killing innocent civilians as an inescapable feature of war itself, condemning their staggering death toll and recognizing

18 The Catholic Case Against War

each of them as equally a victim regardless of what national, ethnic, religious, or other groups they belong to. — Catholic teaching includes soldiers among war’s victims too, though not as frequently or powerfully as it condemns civilian deaths. This is important because most soldiers are also innocent in important ways. That may sound odd, since as active participants in war’s killing, soldiers are considered legitimate targets in war (unless they are wounded, surrendering, or similarly out of combat). But like most civilians, most soldiers are not responsible for the war itself. They may be reluctant participants or even forced to participate. In many wars the majority of soldiers killed on both sides have been drafted to fight, and some scholars estimate that the majority of armed conflicts in the world today include coerced child soldiers.58 Most soldiers are caught up in wars not of their making and are just trying to survive. In the words of Erasmus, “They must either slay without mercy, or fall without pity.”59 Accounts offered by soldiers themselves often echo this. A US Marine in World War II, after killing a Japanese soldier and finding a photo of the dead man’s family in his wallet, recalled thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? Here’s a guy that’s never done a thing to me, and yet I had to kill him because his boss said ‘go to war’ and my boss said ‘go to war.’”60 The rules of war themselves actually acknowledge this type of innocence among ordinary soldiers. Why do the rules prohibit killing soldiers when wounded or surrendering, or mistreating them when taken prisoner, or punishing rather than releasing them once the war is over? Because as long as such soldiers have themselves followed the rules of war, they have done nothing wrong. Unlike criminals, they don’t deserve punishment.61 And this is true even if they are fighting in a war of aggression or repression. The Catholic Church itself has a prime example in its own Pope Benedict XVI, who was conscripted as a teenager into the German military during World War II, was captured by Allied troops as Hitler’s regime collapsed, spent about a month in a POW

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 19

camp, and was released without punishment to live the rest of his life following a vocation that led him to the papacy.62 Notice, however, that the very soldiers the rules of war deem immune from killing or lesser punishments once they are out of the war, because they haven’t done anything to deserve it, are also, according to the same rules, free game for slaughter during the war, and not just during actual combat, but also when they are miles away sitting scared in a trench, asleep in their bunk, or seasick on a transport ship. Indeed, as military experts often note, the deadliest time for soldiers in warfare is when their lines have broken and they are in full retreat fleeing for their lives.63 At the end of the First Gulf War, for instance, the US military strafed defenseless retreating Iraqi troops from the air, killing thousands of them along the notorious “highway of death.”64 As with civilian deaths, the sheer scale at which war slaughters soldiers can be overwhelming. At the 1571 naval Battle of Lepanto, 30,000 combatants drowned in a single day. By the end of the eighteenth century’s Seven Years’ War, the Prussian army had seen 180,000 of its soldiers killed, three times as many as it started the war with. During World War I, tens of thousands of Ottoman soldiers froze to death in just one operation against Russian troops, and over 700,000 soldiers died during the battle for Verdun. Just a few decades later, during its World War II invasion of the Soviet Union, the German army killed 4,000,000 Soviet soldiers in the first six months alone.65 This slaughter of soldiers is another reason why any clear-eyed scrutiny of war’s nature must put mass killing at its core.

DESTRUCTION AND DEHUMANIZATION In early Mesoamerican writing, the symbol for war was a burning building.66 There is good reason for the frequent connection between warfare and images of destruction. As Keegan shows in his history of the

20 The Catholic Case Against War

institution, “Laying waste the enemy’s land” has been part of war from its very beginning.67 Centuries ago, Erasmus condemned the “train of evils” that mean “war always brings about the wreck of everything that is good, and the tide of war overflows with everything that is worst.”68 Christopher Blattman, a contemporary scholar of armed conflict, is even more blunt: “War is ruinous.”69 Catholic teaching is correct when it emphasizes that in addition to its mass killing, war devastates communities, sabotages a humane social order, and unleashes intense human suffering. Those who study war provide a grim catalog of these impacts.70 War causes spikes in famine, contaminated drinking water, communicable disease, and birth defects. It destroys homes and infrastructure, producing staggering numbers of refugees struggling to live in brutal and dangerous conditions. Gangs and organized crime thrive in war zones. War drives surges in looting, arson, drug trafficking, assault, rape, torture and mutilation, terrorism, and the desecration of holy sites and objects. Enslavement and other forms of coerced and trafficked labor are common, whether as fighters, porters, sex workers, or builders of fortifications. So too are detention, restricted movement, and suppression of liberties such as speech, the press, and religious exercise. War creates pervasive fear and collapses social trust. It sets back gross domestic product (GDP) and trade levels by decades, pushes large portions of the population into poverty, and diverts money from human needs to militaries and warlords. The technology of modern armed conflict in particular can leave a trail of environmental destruction and toxic pollution for decades. War leaves children without parents, parents without children, and spouses, lovers, and friends without each other. It is no wonder that many who survive war, soldiers and civilians, live the rest of their lives with deep physical and emotional wounds — it brings an aftermath of chronic pain, limited mobility, post-traumatic stress disorder, guilt, despair, fear, humiliation, and rage. Most heartbreaking are the legacies of suffering born by children, such as the teenage girl haunted by memories of seeing her neighbors die screaming with their

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 21

feet stuck in melting asphalt during the firebombing of Hamburg during World War II, or the note left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, that read, “I have dreamed of the day you’ll come home and finally be my dad.”71 — Each item on the list above contains worlds of cruelty and pain all its own. It is worth taking a closer look at just one of them to illustrate. Sixteen centuries ago, Augustine called rape an “ancient and customary evil” of war.72 He was correct then and still is today; rape is inseparable from the institution of war.73 Nothing documents this better than Christina Lamb’s Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, her examination of the pervasiveness of rape in warfare, both historically and today, and the devastating consequences this has for its victims, overwhelmingly women and girls (though sometimes men and boys too).74 From Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, who described Phoenician women “raped successively by so many Persian soldiers that they died,” to the two million German women raped by Soviet soldiers in the final stages of World War II (as word of the rampages spread, hundreds of thousands of women and girls took their own lives as soldiers approached their homes), to the standard two hours Franco’s Spanish Civil War officers gave troops to rape and mutilate women in towns they captured, to the mass rape committed by Turkish troops in their 1974 invasion of Cyprus, where girls who reported to Turkish officers that they had been raped were raped again by those same officers, to a single hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has treated over fifty-five thousand women and girls for injuries from rape over the last two decades of civil war, Lamb makes it clear that rape has always been “a systematic weapon of war” and that still today in many war zones “it is more dangerous to be a woman” than a man.75 The book details how warfare commonly involves victims being held in sexual slavery in camps, to be raped dozens of times a day; being publicly gang raped, with family members and neighbors forced to watch; seeing family members killed before being raped; and having

22 The Catholic Case Against War

sexual organs mutilated as part of rapes. A Filipino woman named Lola Narcisa Claveria remembers being enslaved by Japanese soldiers during World War II along with her sisters after seeing their family members killed and house burned, saying, “Almost every night we were being raped, sometimes by two or three soldiers, and in front of the others. . . . They raped me over and over and burnt us with cigarettes. . . . Every day I would pray that night would not come and the sun would not go down because then the Japanese would rape us.” Jane Mukunizwa, a Congolese woman, recalls being raped at fourteen years old by Interahamwe fighters: “We were tied to trees with our arms out as if we were being crucified. It was as if we had already died.” And a Rohingya mother named Munira describes what happened when Burmese soldiers attacked her village, killed all the men, and raped the women and girls: “I was raped by five men. . . . I saw two girls dead near me. . . . By the time the sun came up I was barely conscious. . . . I couldn’t walk but only crawl. . . . I tried to find my children. Then I saw a small boy lying face down, shot in the back. It was Subat Alam, my eldest. He had been running towards me. He was eight.”76 Lamb’s accounts show how those raped in war are “double victims,” since the aftermath of physical injuries, psychological wounds, shame, social ostracism, and suicide can amount to “slow murder.”77 After being abducted by a Serbian paramilitary member to be gang raped, a Kosovar woman named Vasfije Krasniqi-Goodman says, “I begged him to kill me but he said no, you’ll suffer more this way. . . . The man was right I would suffer more. Every day my mind goes to what happened.” During the Bangladesh independence war in 1971, Hanzera Khatam recalls how after a group of Pakistani soldiers caught her, stomped her three-year-old daughter to death, and “raped me so much I lost consciousness,” she made her way home, but “the villagers wouldn’t let me back in the village.”78 The terrible aftermath of being raped in war is compounded by the impunity attackers often enjoy. Many victims have to see their rapists walking around communities free. Whey they speak

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 23

out, they are frequently ignored or blamed by authorities; a common taunt is that they are not attractive enough to rape. Dismissing wartime rape goes beyond individual victims to the very practice itself. Lamb details the history of rape’s being “trivialized and regarded as acceptable when it occurred in war,” with “military and political leaders shrugging it off as if it were a sideshow” or denying it happened at all.79 Since it is “the world’s most neglected war crime,” she writes, “you won’t find these women’s names in the history books or on the war memorials we pass in our railway stations or town centers.”80 She demonstrates how in the aftermath of wars from Guatemala to Germany to the Philippines to Bangladesh to Serbia, mass rape that occurs in wars gets erased in such things as treaty negotiations, school textbooks, or public monuments to the war’s victims.81 — As normalized mass rape exemplifies, war unleashes dehumanizing brutality of a unique kind and on a vast scale. Those who observe or experience war frequently describe a world of inverted morality. Saint Cyprian said of war in the third century: “Murder, considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse.” And Hedges echoes this today when he describes war as the “collapse of a moral universe, a world where right and wrong have been turned upside down,” where “perversion may become moral, guilt may become honor, and the gunning down of unarmed people, including children, may be defined as heroic.”82 An Irish veteran of World War I recalled: “You do such things and get praise for them, such as smashing a fellow’s skull, or putting a bullet through him, which if you were to do at home you’d soon be on the run, with a hue and cry and all the police of the country at your heels.”83 After World War II, the chief American counsel at the Nuremberg Tribunals commented: “War consists largely of acts that would be criminal if performed in the time of peace — killing, wounding, kidnapping, destroying or carrying off other people’s property. Such conduct is not regarded as criminal if it takes

24 The Catholic Case Against War

place in the course of war.” Participant accounts from that same war confirm this view. The American William Manchester described killing a Japanese soldier as “a betrayal of what I’d been taught since a child,” where “murder is the most heinous of crimes,” and a German soldier explained war’s mass violence by saying, “This is no kindergarten.”84 This is actually a real challenge for militaries. To get ordinary people to fight in wars and do things normally thought deeply wrong, it is often necessary, as Gwynne Dyer puts it, to “reverse the moral training of a lifetime.”85 Turning people into effective warriors, whether it is in professionalized armies or irregular militias, requires a particular kind of dehumanizing conditioning.86 Grossman details this process in his book On Killing. Most people have a deep inner reluctance to kill, one rooted in an awareness of common humanity, which is why doing so often comes at such a high psychological cost, especially feelings of profound guilt. This is why researchers have found that, even in combat when their own lives are at risk, a surprising number of soldiers still avoid killing by, for instance, intentionally firing their weapons too high.87 To counter this, military organizations use psychological conditioning and combat training to “throw off the moral inhibitions” soldiers arrive with.88 “Battleproofing” them means cultivating harshness, emotional distance, obedience, and seeing the enemy as inferior objects of disgust, hatred, and vengeance. Desensitization and euphemisms — “engaging targets” rather than killing persons — allow soldiers to “deny the humanity of the victim” of their violence. These methods all provide what Grossman describes as “prepackaged denial defense mechanisms” that allow a soldier to “deny to himself that he is actually killing another human being.”89 As the mother of one American participant in the My Lai massacre put it, “I sent them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer.”90 Since warfare fosters violent dehumanization, it’s not surprising that it can descend into what Bourke calls the “carnivalesque,” a cruel celebration of brutality and bloodshed.91 Genghis Khan infamously said, “Happiness lies in conquering your enemies, in driving them in front of you, in taking their property, in savouring their despair, in raping their

War’s Death, Destruction, and Dehumanization 25

wives and daughters.”92 In World War I, some Allied veterans called bayonetting Germans “gorgeously satisfying” and “beautiful,” while a mortar officer described “the happiest moment of my life” when his shot landed and he “saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded.” American soldiers in Vietnam recalled, “I enjoyed the shooting and the killing. I was literally turned on when I saw a gook get shot,” and, “It was encouraged to cut ears off, to cut the nose off, to cut the guy’s penis off. A female, you cut her breasts off.”93 A helicopter gunner in the same war said: “I had enjoyed killing the three Vietcong who ran from the tree line near the village. Feeling like a glorious bird of prey swooping down, I watched the mini-gun rounds splash through the paddy toward the running men, then ripping and tearing their bodies to lifelessness.”94 During the Iraq War, General James Mattis, who would go on to be the US secretary of defense, simply said of war: “It’s fun to shoot some people.”95 And normally a person getting a human skull in the mail would be horrified, but during World War II, a woman who received one of a dead Japanese soldier from her boyfriend fighting in the Pacific, signed by him with the words “a good Jap — a dead one,” posed proudly with it for Life magazine.96 All this confirms Simone Weil’s observation, in her essay on the Iliad, that the “final secret of war” is its fundamental dehumanization. Its brutality transforms persons into things — mere objects, soulless bodies, animals to be slaughtered.97 One veteran of World War I said “it was no place for a human being to be, really,” and a marine in Vietnam dismissed atrocities against civilians, saying “it wasn’t like they were humans.” An infantry officer in World War II spoke of feeding soldiers into battle to be killed: “You use them up: they’re material.” Colonel David Hackworth, who fought in both Korea and Vietnam, described combat as “like working in a slaughterhouse. At first the blood, the gore, gets to you. But after a while you don’t see it, you don’t smell it, you don’t feel it.” A mother who lost her children in the massacre of civilians at Srebrenica during the Bosnian War said of herself and similar mothers: “We’ve been dead for a long time. Only our bodies are present.”98

26 The Catholic Case Against War

Echoing Catholic teaching when it points to how such dehumanizing violence undermines the very things a just and humane society requires, observers and participants are frequently struck by how war corrodes kindness, compassion, tenderness, respect, joy, hope, and similar virtues.99 Erasmus said that war “overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful,” and Hedges writes, “Stay long enough in war and real love, real tenderness and connection, becomes nearly impossible.”100 In World War I, one soldier recalled that “one had to be callous,” while another wrote to his wife, saying: “I have no compunction, no sympathy. . . . I can’t be bothered to waste tears.” Commenting on the mass starvation of Leningrad’s population in World War II, a German officer commented, “Sentimentality would be out of place.” General Sherman said it was necessary to “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war,” while General Patton told his soldiers that when they met the enemy “show him no mercy.” Perhaps Heidi Baruch, a nurse in the Vietnam War, put it best: “When you live in an environment of hate and anger, you become hate and anger.”101 — We can see, then, how those who experience war closeup confirm Catholic teaching’s critique of its brutal dehumanization. While modern war does not necessarily kill a higher ratio of civilians to soldiers compared with wars of the past, Catholic teaching is correct to emphasize the frightening scale of death and destruction modern weapons can produce for both combatants and noncombatants alike. The Catholic case against war is especially clear-eyed in identifying mass killing as its central feature, in pointing to its devastating impact on those who survive it, and in cataloging its physical, social, economic, and environmental wreckage.