On Sunday, just hours after the United States delivered a devastating attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites, Pope Leo XIV posted an appeal for peace on social media.
“War does not solve problems; on the contrary, it amplifies them and inflicts deep wounds on the history of peoples, which take generations to heal,” he wrote. “No armed victory can compensate for the pain of mothers, the fear of children, or stolen futures. May diplomacy silence the weapons! May nations chart their futures with works of peace, not with violence and bloodstained conflicts!”
The new pontiff’s words were earnest, compassionate, and deeply misguided.
No rational human being denies that war is terrible. Wherever there is armed conflict, there is death, pain, and destruction. But that does not mean that war never solves problems. Sometimes it’s the only thing that does.
The Revolutionary War solved the problem of American subjugation to a far-off British monarchy. The American Civil War solved the problem of slavery in the southern United States. World War II halted Adolf Hitler’s conquest of Europe and stopped the Holocaust. Operation Desert Storm liberated Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Israel’s War of Independence ended 19 centuries of Jewish statelessness. Far from being “amplified” by war, those injustices were finally resolved because governments embarked on combat and citizens risked their lives to fight.
The pope is right to highlight the suffering of wartime — the pain of mothers, the fear of children, the desolation of stolen futures. But where is his acknowledgement of the suffering caused by tyranny and submission? Pope Leo says nothing about the pain of mothers whose loved ones are rounded up by secret police. Or the fear of children who grow up under totalitarian cruelty. Or the stolen futures of those who are immiserated by evil governments or pitiless invaders. War is not the only thing that breaks hearts and wrecks lives. Nor is peace always a blessing.
“May diplomacy silence the weapons,” prays the new pope. Diplomacy is not the opposite of force; often it depends on the credible threat of force to be effective. Conversely, there is nothing admirable about sending in diplomats to forestall a confrontation with an unrepentantly evil regime. That was the West’s approach to Iran for the past two decades, an approach that emboldened Tehran to believe it could get away with ever-ghastlier atrocities.
In a famous 1942 essay, “Pacifism and the War,” George Orwell — writing in the midst of World War II — argued that pacifism was not neutral. To refuse on principle to support the war against Hitler was “objectively pro-fascist,” he said. Those who insisted that avoiding war was the supreme value — that anything was preferable to military bloodshed — showed thereby that they were more concerned with their own abstract moral purity than with the real-world consequences of their actions.
Of course there are times when nonviolence is the best means of resisting evil. Part of what made the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s so effective at changing hearts and minds, and ultimately the law, was the rigorous insistence on nonviolence by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement’s other leaders.
But when it comes to relations among nations, a refusal to fight when necessary should not inspire moral admiration. Far from preventing violence, it often emboldens the violent to new and worse brutality. When Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 agreed that Nazi Germany could help itself to a swath of Czechoslovakia, Hitler took Britain’s reluctance to resist as a green light for further aggression. When former president Barack Obama unilaterally pulled all US military personnel out of Iraq in 2011, he created a vacuum that the sadistic jihadists of Islamic State swiftly filled.
As the pope assuredly is aware, nothing in Scripture portrays pacifism as a moral absolute. On the contrary, Ecclesiastes teaches that “for everything there is a season … a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.” Jesus, whom Christians revere as the Prince of Peace, tells his disciples in the Gospel of Luke that if they lack a sword, they should sell their cloak and buy one. He knew that in this fallen world, it is sometimes only through deadly force that evil can be overcome. In Isaiah’s beautiful messianic vision of a perfect future, human beings will “beat their swords into plowshares/And their spears into pruning hooks.” But the prophet Joel, squarely facing the realities of the here and now, reversed Isaiah’s words. “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears,” he advised his listeners. “Let the weak say, I am strong.”
For all its heartfelt eloquence, Pope Leo’s statement reflects a peace-at-any-price mindset that appeals more to emotion than experience. In theory, we all want to “chart the future with works of peace.” But peace is not always just, and justice is not always peaceful. And sometimes the most meaningful prayer is not that the weapons be silenced but that the righteous be granted the strength to endure the fight.
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