Bishop Barron vs. Pope Leo? War and Church teaching

[LONGREAD: The president and the pope really are at odds. Bishop Barron seems to want to separate them into non-overlapping magisteria.]

On Monday Bishop Robert Barron took to X-Twitter to propose what he called “a way past the absurd and deeply divisive ‘war’ between the President and the Pope on the Iran war.” Bishop Barron’s “solution” to this “war” between the president and the pope appears to amount to this:

1. The president is meant to decide what U.S. actions in Iran are warranted or not.

2. The pope is meant, apparently, to stay in his lane, i.e., not to take positions on what actions in Iran are warranted or not.

It seems that Bishop Barron believes, based on his interpretation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that the pope should stick to a) teaching general moral principles and b) raising questions about their application to particular situations—but answering those questions in particular situations is solely the president’s job, not the pope’s.

In effect, Bishop Barron appears to propose that the Catechism advocates a theory of Church and State as functioning in a way like what some theorists of science and religion have called “non-overlapping magisteria.” Church and State, in Barron’s words, have “qualitatively different roles to play in the determination of moral action in regard to war,” thereby neatly avoiding any possibility of “absurd and deeply divisive” conflict.

Here is the full text of Bishop Barron’s tweet:

There is a way past the absurd and deeply divisive “war” between the President and the Pope, which has been enthusiastically ginned up by the press. And it is indicated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2309 to be precise. After laying out the various criteria for determining a just war—proportionality, last resort, declaration by a competent authority, reasonable hope of success, etc.—the Catechism points out that “the evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.” The assumption is that the just war principles function, to use the technical term, as heuristic devices, designed to guide the practical decision-making of those civil authorities who have to adjudicate matters of war and peace.

The role of the Church, therefore, is to call for peace and to urge that any conflict be strictly circumscribed by the moral constraints of the just war criteria. But it is not the role of the Church to evaluate whether a particular war is just or unjust. That appraisal belongs to the civil authorities, who, one presumes, have requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground. So, is the war in question truly the last resort? Is there really a balance between the good to be attained and the destruction caused by the war? Are combatants and non-combatants being properly distinguished in the waging of the conflict? Do the belligerents have right intention? Is there a reasonable hope of success? The posing of those questions—indeed the insistence upon their moral relevance—belongs rightly to the Church, but the answering of them belongs to the civil authorities.

The Pope has said, on numerous occasions, that he is not a politician and that his role is not the determination of any nation’s foreign policy. But he has just as clearly said that he will continue to speak for peace and for moral constraint. In making both of these claims, he is operating perfectly within the framework of paragraph 2309 of the Catechism. If we understand that the Pope and the President have qualitatively different roles to play in the determination of moral action in regard to war, we can, I hope, extricate ourselves from the completely unhelpful narrative of “Pope vs. President.”

What can be said to this?

The first thing that occurs to me is how many popes in just the last century or so might be thought to have failed to recognize what Bishop Barron appears to consider the limits of their authority in only teaching moral principles and raising questions without weighing in on the morality of particular wars or actions in wars. If offering critiques of particular wars, or of specific conduct in particular wars, amounts to “acting like a politician” (not a framing I accept, but for the sake of discussion), then, as we will see, many recent popes seem to have been unaware that their papal office called them to avoid this kind of political behavior. (Much more on this below.)

A better place to start, though, may be here: Bishop Barron seems to assume the good will as well as the competence of “civil authorities,” whom he says “one presumes” have “requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground” to be entrusted with decisions regarding going to war or not. But the Catechism itself, in the same passage quoted by Bishop Barron, warns that powerful men may be motivated to seek war for manifestly unjust, unworthy, imprudent reasons:

Injustice, excessive economic or social inequalities, envy, distrust, and pride raging among men and nations constantly threaten peace and cause wars. … Insofar as men are sinners, the threat of war hangs over them and will so continue until Christ comes again. (CCC 2317)

These reasonable and proper concerns about unjustly motivated wars are developed at length by Pope Francis in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (258):

War can easily be chosen by invoking all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses, and even resorting to the manipulation of information. In recent decades, every single war has been ostensibly “justified”. The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the possibility of legitimate defence by means of military force, which involves demonstrating that certain “rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy” have been met. Yet it is easy to fall into an overly broad interpretation of this potential right. In this way, some would also wrongly justify even “preventive” attacks or acts of war that can hardly avoid entailing “evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated”. … The truth is that “never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely”.

Not incidentally, Pope Leo himself has likewise challenged the idea that the knowledge and motives of leaders who make war can be trusted. At a Vatican prayer vigil for peace, without mentioning Iran, Leo directly called out the corrupt motives of wealthy, powerful men who make war: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough with war!” While he didn’t specifically mention Iran here, as he has in other remarks, his comments here do weigh against simply trusting leaders to know what to do and to do it.

As an aside, even the current occupant of the Oval Office has in the past memorably raised just these types of concerns regarding what he saw as the danger of prior presidents choosing to go to war, specifically with Iran, for unjust reasons:

While Mr. Trump’s predictions in that case, among others, were happily not borne out, the larger concerns are very real, and rightly occupy us all. This has perhaps never been more the case for Americans than it is right now, at a time when the president has rationalized the Iran war based on what he called a “good feeling” that Iran would attack U.S. interests (in spite of U.S. intelligence to the contrary) and has said that the war will be over when he “feels it in his bones.” This is also a man who has said that he doesn’t need international law and that nothing constrains him but his own morality.

While I’m at it, it’s also not easy to see how we are expected to believe that our leaders have the “requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground,” given the wildly conflicting statements about how long the war will last and other flipflops, the evidence of their many miscalculations, the factually challenged claims about the Strait of Hormuz, contradictory statements even on such matters as which U.S. officials will be involved in peace talks, and reports that aides are deliberately keeping the president in the dark regarding some details of the war.

At any rate, so long as the very real danger of unjustly motivated war under any government hangs over our heads, we are not called simply to trust that those who exercise power over us are in fact making wise, prudent decisions about war based on whatever “knowledge of conditions on the ground” they may have.

Here, again, the same passage of the Catechism ascribes to citizens as well as governments the obligation to resist the impetus to war: “All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war” (CCC 2308). This is in keeping with the larger reality that, when the Catechism says that evaluating moral legitimacy in warfare “belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good,” those who “have responsibility for the common good,” according to the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (CSDC), are not just public authorities, but “individual persons” as well:

The responsibility for attaining the common good, besides falling to individual persons, belongs also to the State, since the common good is the reason that the political authority exists. (CSDC 168)

This passage of the Compendium footnotes the following from the Catechism:

Each human community possesses a common good which permits it to be recognized as such; it is in the political community that its most complete realization is found. It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society, its citizens, and intermediate bodies. (CCC 1910)

The “political community” and “the state” are not just governing authorities; they include all of us as voters, citizens, and participants in society. We the people have both the right and the responsibility to bring our beliefs and judgments to bear on matters of public concern. The Compendium states (emphasis in original):

The political community finds its authentic dimension in its reference to people: “it is and should in practice be the organic and organizing unity of a real people”. The term “a people” does not mean a shapeless multitude, an inert mass to be manipulated and exploited, but a group of persons, each of whom — “at his proper place and in his own way” — is able to form its own opinion on public matters and has the freedom to express its own political sentiments and to bring them to bear positively on the common good. A people “exists in the fullness of the lives of the men and women by whom it is made up, each of whom ... is a person aware of his own responsibilities and convictions”. Those who belong to a political community, although organically united among themselves as a people, maintain an irrepressible autonomy at the level of personal existence and of the goals to be pursued.

Again, Pope St. John XXIII writes in his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris:

Man’s personal dignity involves his right to take an active part in public life, and to make his own contribution to the common welfare of his fellow citizens.

Among other things, this means that, while our governing authorities are charged with acting on our behalf and for our good, they are also answerable to us. Quite rightly, we expect our leaders, in the case of actions with grave consequences such as going to war, to make their case to us, the public. We reserve for ourselves the right to evaluate their actions; to speak out and to seek to influence public opinion in support of or in opposition to their decisions; to press our elected officials to support or oppose their policies; to seek by our votes to support or oppose leaders and parties in keeping with our judgments of their performance; and potentially to join and actively participate in political parties to further what we see as their best aims.

In short, we as citizens are not called on to passively accept the correctness of political decisions of our leaders regarding war or anything else. We are called to make the best prudential judgments we can about the correctness of our leaders’ actions.

In evaluating and responding to the actions of our leaders, we rightly bring to bear our opinions and beliefs—including, of course, our religious beliefs. In particular, Catholics are rightly guided by Church teaching, including Catholic social teaching, regarding our engagement with political realities. Per the Catechism:

It is a part of the Church’s mission “to pass moral judgments even in matters related to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it. The means, the only means, she may use are those which are in accord with the Gospel and the welfare of all men according to the diversity of times and circumstances.” CCC 2246)

“The Church’s social teaching comprises a body of doctrine, which is articulated as the Church interprets events in the course of history, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, in the light of the whole of what has been revealed by Jesus Christ. This teaching can be more easily accepted by men of good will, the more the faithful let themselves be guided by it.” (CCC 2422)

In engaging with political realities, Church leaders must walk a fine line. They must not be partisan, embracing or endorsing particular political parties or leaders—but they may well be obliged to weigh in on particular political initiatives and policies, including particular wars.

A well-known example of such a judgment was Pope St. John Paul II’s opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While refraining from definitively, publicly condemning this war, John Paul II made his opposition clear¹—and his right-hand man, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), made the implications of the Holy Father’s opposition even clearer in a 2003 Zenit interview (emphasis added):

The Pope expressed his thought with great clarity, not only as his individual thought but as the thought of a man who is knowledgeable in the highest functions of the Catholic Church. Of course, he did not impose this position as doctrine of the Church but as the appeal of a conscience enlightened by faith. The Holy Father’s judgment is also convincing from the rational point of view: There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a “just war.”

Very clearly, Cardinal Ratzinger did not subscribe to a “non-overlapping magisteria” interpretation of Church and State, with Church leaders confining themselves to teaching moral principles and raising questions while leaving it to political leaders to answer those questions in concrete situations. He didn’t mind saying, as a high-ranking cardinal, that the invasion of Iraq was not justified, and that the Holy Father’s view on this matter was persuasive. As for John Paul II, in a personal letter to George W. Bush, he urged the president to receive an emissary, Cardinal Pio Laghi, as “a personal envoy” with a “message he bears on my behalf.” Cardinal Laghi argued on John Paul II’s behalf that the Iraq war was both “unjust” and “illegal,” in part because it lacked United Nations sanction.²

This is how popes over the last century or so have weighed in on the morality of particular wars: not imposing their views as doctrine, but presenting their own prudential judgments regarding the correct application of Church teaching to specific situations. Such prudential judgments are not binding in faith, nor must they be definitively held with religious submission of will and intellect. This does not, though, make them merely their own “individual thought” that Catholics are free to disregard entirely.

Rather, the interventions of popes and other magisterial authorities into prudential matters should be received with gratitude and respect, even when they are not binding.³ Catholics should recognize that, even when not teaching definitively, the Magisterium does benefit from the special guidance of the Holy Spirit. We should avoid the assumption that Church leaders are probably wrong just because another view seems more plausible to us. Finally, while disagreeing with the guidance or exhortations of popes on prudential matters may be justified for good reason, we should recognize that, if after all the pope is right and we are wrong, our culpability may be greater for having rejected the guidance that could have helped us arrive more surely at the truth.

In opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq as unjustified, John Paul II joined a long history of modern popes making specific moral judgments regarding particular wars.

• More than a hundred years ago, in 1917, Pope Benedict XV—in the approving words of his namesake Benedict XVI, 89 years later—“condemned the First World War as a ‘useless slaughter’” (inutile strage) and directly appealed to the warring nations to negotiate an end to the conflict. This appeal was striking, in the words of the Italian Wikipedia page linked above, precisely for going “beyond a generic deploring of violence, proposing concrete conditions for the start of peace negotiations and casting the shadow of religious delegitimization over the conflict.” Parties on all sides were insulted by words that were taken to indicate that Benedict XV believed that the slaughter in this particular war was not just tragic, but “useless”: in other words, that, by 1917 at least, the human toll of the war had become disproportionate to any good end to be achieved, leaving no side just cause for the ongoing conflict. (Most historians today have convergent views of WWI.)

• Far more directly, in 1935, Pope Pius XI frankly condemned Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia as a “war of conquest” and an “unjust war.” These strong remarks apparently made Vatican officials nervous about reaction from Mussolini, and Pius XI grudgingly consented to a censored version of the record that didn’t take sides, while still insisting (again, correctly in view of virtually all analysts) that Ethiopia was an “unjust war.”

• Pope Pius XII, in his 1939 Encyclical Summi Pantificatus, condemned certain ideological causes of World War II without naming names or picking sides, though he did not sweepingly condemn the war itself in a way that would implicate all sides. One specific reference Pius XII did make was a lament over the plight of recently occupied Poland, which the Holy Father said “has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world.” In saying this, Pius XII appeared to signal two concrete judgments: First, Germany did not have a just cause to invade and occupy Poland; second, other nations would in principle have just cause to come to Poland’s aid. Like Benedict XV, Pius XII did not limit himself to generalities and abstract principles, but applied the principles to a specific situation.

• In 1940, Pius XII actually warned the Low Countries of imminent invasion by the Nazis. After the invasion, he sent messages of sympathy to the leaders of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Mussolini took umbrage at this and filed an official protest through his ambassador to the Vatican, charging that Pius XII had taken sides—to which Mussolini’s foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano claimed that Pius XII was “ready to let himself be deported to a concentration camp, rather than do anything against his conscience.” Pius XII also unsuccessfully tried to dissuade Mussolini from joining Hitler in the war effort.

• Paul VI, in the 1960s, took a nuanced approach to the Vietnam War. While not excluding the possibility that the war could be just in principle, his repeated calls for the end of the conflict through negotiation rather than military victory strongly suggested his belief that in practice the ongoing conflict had become unjustifiable.

• In 1991, a dozen years before opposing the invasion of Iraq, Pope St. John Paul II wrote publicly to George H. W. Bush strongly arguing that the Gulf War was not justified on the grounds that it was “not likely to bring an adequate solution to international problems,” and that, “even though an unjust situation might be momentarily met,” the consequences would include, “in addition to suffering and destruction, … new and perhaps worse injustices.”

• Pope Francis was unsparing in his condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, calling it “abominable,” “unacceptable armed aggression,” and “a crime against God and humanity.” The catch was that his language was often so sweeping that it wasn’t always clear that he considered Russia to blame for the war—but on the first anniversary of the invasion Francis specifically condemned “the invasion of Ukraine, a year since [the start of] this absurd and cruel war” while expressing closeness to the “martyred Ukrainian people who continue to suffer.”

• Francis was clearer and more specific in judgments in the Israel–Gaza war. In spite of his overwhelmingly negative tone on war in general, in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks Pope Francis affirmed, “One who is attacked has the right of self-defense,” adding, “but I am very concerned about the total siege under which Palestinians are living in Gaza, where there also have been many innocent victims.”

One need not agree with every judgment of every pope regarding every war to recognize the validity in principle of popes engaging in prudential judgments of this type. One can also, in principle, reject this entire type of papal intervention as imprudent and unwarranted. One can say, as Bishop Barron appears to say, that popes should be guided by a non-overlapping magisteria model, limiting themselves to general principles and raising questions without ever taking definite positions on the justice or lack thereof of any war, thus avoiding conflicts with political authorities. Claiming that all of these popes were wrong to take the stances they did is a nettle I doubt Bishop Barron would grasp, but it’s a position one could take. Certainly it’s not an infallible dogma that popes may prudently comment on the morality of specific wars.

For that matter, just war doctrine itself is not an infallible dogma. Technically, it has not been infallibly defined that there is any such thing as a just war, let alone that the criteria worked out by St. Augustine and embraced in magisterial teaching are the eternally valid, necessary, sufficient means of evaluating whether a cause to go to war is just. Not that I have any doubt that just causes of war do exist, or that the usual criteria of just war doctrine are valid; my point is simply that what is or isn’t infallibly defined is a question of much more limited utility and interest than is sometimes supposed.

To the extent that Catholic social teaching engages with questions of prudential judgment, its teachings are necessarily not infallible; nevertheless, as noted above, the Church invites the faithful to be guided by it. Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, gives a strong endorsement to Catholic social teaching:

In today’s complex situation, not least because of the growth of a globalized economy, the Church’s social doctrine has become a set of fundamental guidelines offering approaches that are valid even beyond the confines of the Church: in the face of ongoing development these guidelines need to be addressed in the context of dialogue with all those seriously concerned for humanity and for the world in which we live.

Over time, Catholic social teaching has placed growing emphasis on the dignity and sacredness of human life, and has become increasingly skeptical of arguments for taking it. On the death penalty, over the papacies of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, the Church took an increasingly hard line against the legitimacy of the death penalty in the modern world, culminating in Francis’s declaration in Fratelli Tutti of the death penalty as “inadmissible.”⁴ While this change in Church teaching has been controversial in some circles, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith characterized it as an “authentic development of doctrine.”

In a similar way, without rejecting just war entirely, a growing skepticism toward the practical possibility of just war is reflected in Catholic social teaching. Ratzinger’s question in 2003 whether “it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war’” resonates with similar statements of popes before and after him. Before him, John XXIII wrote in Pacem in Terris, “it is hardly possible to imagine that in an atomic era, war could be used as an instrument of justice.” Pope Francis even went so far as to say, “There is no such thing as a just war: they do not exist!”⁵ More authoritatively, in Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis wrote:

We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a “just war”. Never again war!

The Compendium offers a veritable catalogue of this new sensibility in papal statements on this topic (emphasis in original):

The Magisterium condemns “the savagery of war” and asks that war be considered in a new way. In fact, “it is hardly possible to imagine that in an atomic era, war could be used as an instrument of justice”. War is a “scourge” and is never an appropriate way to resolve problems that arise between nations, “it has never been and it will never be”, because it creates new and still more complicated conflicts. When it erupts, war becomes an “unnecessary massacre”, an “adventure without return” that compromises humanity's present and threatens its future. “Nothing is lost by peace; everything may be lost by war”. The damage caused by an armed conflict is not only material but also moral. In the end, war is “the failure of all true humanism”, “it is always a defeat for humanity”: “never again some peoples against others, never again! ... no more war, no more war!” (CSDC 497)

None of this is infallible. It is possible to embrace a narrative of decline in which these growing concerns represent the Church drifting further and further into error on war as well as the death penalty. Once again, I doubt Bishop Barron would embrace such a narrative. Yet it’s not easy to square his attempts to limit Pope Leo to teaching general principles and not weighing in on particular wars with fully embracing the record of the popes’ moral leadership in the last century.

Pope Leo XIV has been nearly as clear as any modern pope regarding his views of the Iran war—and supporting comments from Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and other allies leave no doubt that the pope regards the Iran war as unjust. Among other things, a couple of weeks ago, directly referring to the Iran war, he called on people of goodwill “to reject war—especially a war which many people have said is unjust, which is continuing to escalate and which is not resolving anything.” Notwithstanding the fig-leaf of objectivity in that “which many people have said” clause, his comment is clearly some sort of endorsement of this opinion. Certainly Leo was calling people to reject, not war in general, but this specific war, which he himself said “is continuing to escalate and which is not resolving anything.” (By definition, a war without a serious prospects of resolving something—specifically, of preventing lasting, grave, and certain damage inflicted by an aggressor—cannot be a just war.) Most unambiguously, in the wake of President Trump’s genocidal threat to end “a whole civilization,” Leo directly denounced this threat as “truly unacceptable.”

Bishop Barron’s response to these and other comments was to do an interview on The Ben Shapiro Show actively subverting Pope Leo’s message, claiming that “Pope Leo is not referring specifically or precisely to the Iran war” and interpreting Leo’s words in reference to unjust war in general. While it is true that Leo’s words have not always explicitly mentioned Iran, some of them have, and others are clearly meant to be understood against that backdrop—most notably Leo’s Palm Sunday message, in the wake of Pete Hegseth’s bloodthirsty, imprecatory prayer, that the Lord “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’.”

The reality is that the pope and the president really are at odds on Iran. The president knows it. The pope knows it. Trying to quarantine them into non-overlapping magisteria—to limit the pope, in other words, to teaching principles and raising questions—isn’t going to work. Someday Bishop Barron may have to face that reality.

□ SEE ALSO

1. For example, from John Paul II’s January 13 2003 Address to the Diplomatic Corps:

NO TO WAR! … What are we to say of the threat of a war which could strike the people of Iraq, the land of the Prophets, a people already sorely tried by more than twelve years of embargo? War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations. As the Charter of the United Nations Organization and international law itself remind us, war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the military operations.

2. John Paul II did not publicly endorse these arguments, but Ratzinger’s comments added to Laghi’s leave no doubt that the Holy Father’s opposition to the war was categorical.

3. For example, the 1990 Instruction Donum Veritatis of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith acknowledges that

in order to serve the People of God as well as possible, in particular, by warning them of dangerous opinions which could lead to error, the Magisterium can intervene in questions under discussion which involve, in addition to solid principles, certain contingent and conjectural elements.

Specifically addressing the condition of theologians, the Instruction notes that “The willingness to submit loyally to the teaching of the Magisterium on matters per se not irreformable must be the rule”—a rule that acknowledge exceptions, so long as this is done with due respect and careful consideration, avoiding the rash notion that the Magisterium “can be habitually mistaken in its prudential judgments, or that it does not enjoy divine assistance in the integral exercise of its mission.”

For further discussion, see Jimmy Akin, Teaching with Authority: How to Cut Through Doctrinal Confusion & Understand What the Church Really Says (Catholic Answers Press, 2018).

4. Pope Leo XIV, in comments to reporters, has added his support for this new approach to the death penalty with his much-quoted remark “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but is in favor of the death penalty, is not really pro-life.”

5. This startling saying is in a relatively trivial sense literally true: In every war there is always at least one side that is an unjust aggressor and at most one side that is a defender with a just cause to go to war. Thus, there is no such thing as a “just war” in which all sides are acting reasonably and justly. This is probably at least part of what Francis means, but he is also leaning into the increasingly negative prudential judgment of recent popes on the practical unlikelihood of a genuinely just cause to go to war.