When Pope Benedict XVI met with President Bush last week at the Vatican, he missed an opportunity to condemn the Iraq War as "unjust" under the Christian doctrine of Just War. After his meeting with the pope Bush was almost gloating:
"Speaking later to reporters, Bush said the pontiff was worried that Christians in Iraq were being "mistreated by the Muslim majority."The Vatican has been critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but both sides said they did not dwell on those differences Saturday. "We didn’t talk about just war," the president said at a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi."
This was very unfortunate in several respects. First, Pope Benedict has been very open in his criticism of the US-led invasion of Iraq and its catastrophic aftermath. In his Easter address this year, Benedict spoke lamented that "nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees." Second, Benedict could have used the occasion his meeting with Bush to instruct Christians everywhere on the meaning of "Just War" from a Christian perspective, and how the Iraq Invasion fails the "Just War" test in several respects. This is all the more important since President Bush has often justified his use of violence in messianic Christian terms, even hinting to reporter Bob Woodward that he had consulted with God on the necessity for launching a unilateral invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Bush’s Iraq invasion at the minimum fails the "Last Resort" requirement: Force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted. And, to most sane observers who have watched with horror the death toll on Iraqi civilians caused by the invasion, Bush’s war fails the Proportionality Test: The overall destruction expected from the use of force must be outweighed by the good to be achieved , as well as the Minimun Force Test: This principle is meant to limit excessive and unnecessary death and destruction.
But I sometimes have to question whether Benedict XVI even believes in "Just War". Last July, just as the war in Lebanon was breaking out and Condoleezza Rice was celebrating the violence as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East", Pope Benedict spoke extemporaneously about How to Be A Force for Peace in the World. Here is an excerpt:
"The Lord has triumphed upon the cross. He did not triumph with a new empire, with a power greater than the others and capable of destroying them; he triumphed, not in a human way, as we would imagine, with an empire more powerful than the other. He triumphed with a love capable of reaching even to death. This is God’s new way of winning: he does not oppose violence with a stronger form of violence. He opposes violence with its exact opposite: love to the very end, his cross. This is God’s humble way of winning: with his love – and this is the only way it is possible – he puts a limit on violence. This is a way of winning that seems very slow to us, but it is the real way to overcome evil, to overcome violence, and we must entrust ourselves to this divine way of winning."
These words go beyond "Just War" in their rejection of violence; too bad he did not challenge President Bush by repeating them in his presence.
