As noted here on January 2, 2006 the changing nature of warfare calls for a Revision of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Challenge of Peace document. The nature of warfare has changed drastically in the past 20 years. Warfare has, so to speak, fallen on bad times - in numbers of wars and in total deaths due to war. This does not mean that peace has broken forth. It does mean that the nature of armed violence has changed and that the Church must rethink its approach to just war questions.
Part of the administration's response to terrorism is set forth in its Global Strike Plan. This plan should cause the Bishops to consider some of the just war questions involved. While the Bishops are otherwise occupied, Rutgers University Religion Professor James Turner Johnson has a very detailed treatment in the January 2005 issue of First Things. Here is an extract:
I conclude by identifying four particular challenges to be met in recovering the classic just war tradition for moral reflection, policy, and action regarding the use of armed force today.
The first challenge is to recover the moral element in the classic just war conception of sovereign authority: a conception of sovereignty as responsibility for the common good.
…
The second challenge is to examine in depth what should count as just cause for use of force in the contemporary context. The classic just war tradition gives us three benchmarks: recovery of that which has been wrongly taken, punishment of evil, and overall defense of the common good. How can and should these benchmarks provide guidance in the present confused debate, with rival claims being made on behalf of the limits on just cause provided in the United Nations Charter, a well-developed sense that resort to force by individual states is not only proper but even obligatory to end and remedy egregious abuses of basic human rights, and a newly invigorated conception of the right of states to defend themselves in the face of the evils of terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons?
…
The third challenge is to examine closely and weigh carefully the question of right intention in any use of armed force.
…
The fourth challenge is to confront realistically the face of contemporary war. Earlier I identified, in order to fault it, the conception that all modern war is inherently indiscriminate and disproportionate in its destruction, so that modern war as such must be opposed. Such a conception of modern war is the root of the idea that just war theory, at least today, must begin with a presumption against war. The sort of war envisioned has as its models the carnage of the trenches in World War I, the bombing of cities in World War II, and the expectation of global catastrophe that would result from a superpower nuclear war. This conception of war also has as its villains the states who engage in it, so that states, instead of being potential sources of human good, are recast as the agents of massive evil. The influence of this understanding of war can be easily identified in recent debates over particular uses of force. But as I have noted, the actual face of recent warfare differs markedly from this, as it involves civil wars, uses of force by non-state actors, and massive harm to the innocent not from the use of horrific weapons but because they are made the direct targets of weapons ranging from knives to automatic rifles to suicide bombs. The actual villains here are not states as such but regional warlords, rulers who oppress their people to maintain or expand their power, and individuals and groups who use religious or ethnic difference as a justification for oppression, torture, and genocide. This is, as I suggested earlier, the real “World War III,” not a repeated and more horrible update of the London Blitz or the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima. Those who claim that “modern war” is inherently unjust seem to me to have missed all this.
One would hope that the Bishops can take some time for this away from their upcoming discussion on such crucial issues as the whether the liturgically correct answer to "the Lord be with you" should be
"and also with you" or "and with your spirit."
Comments