ALL THINGS CONSIDERED - Making Moral Sense of the Wars in Ukraine and Gaza

Responding to a pastoral query from a Christian military tribune about how to reconcile the Christian Gospel of love with the political need for the use of violent force to keep the peace, Augustine made a crucial distinction: what is wrong is not the use of force itself, but its motive and intention.1 Provided that it is not motivated by vengeance and intends to create the conditions for a just p. [...] Over the subsequent centuries, through the thinking of such people as Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, Francisco de Vitoria in the 16th, Hugo Grotius in the 17th, and Paul Ramsey in the 20th, the Christian ‘just war’ tradition grew into the most sophisticated ethic of war available. [...] The so-called doctrine of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’, which was articulated in the wake of atrocities in the Balkans during the 1990s and promoted by the Canadian government in the early 2000s, expresses this point of view. [...] As a consequence, the report of the Secretary General’s High Level Panel on United Nations Reform in 2004, the Secretary General’s own report of September 2005, and the Outcome Document of the 2005 UN World Summit all reaffirmed the prohibition on the use of force without prior Security Council authorisation, except in the case of armed attack;8 and the Panel expressly rejected the claim that forc. [...] What, then, about the justice of Ukraine’s military resistance? Putin’s invasion is an injustice and, given the ruthlessly lawless nature of the regime in the Kremlin and the grossly indiscriminate manner of the war it is waging, that injustice is grave.