Pope Francis on Ukraine: What Has His Holiness been Reading?

 

'You've got to be in it to win it' goes the adage cited by academics working overtime to submit lengthy applications to the lottery for external research grants in order to save their jobs. But Pope Francis is telling Volodymyr Zelensky, 'You've got to be able to win it to justify being in it'.

What the war-weary population of Ukraine, an Orthodox country, do not need is being told to surrender by the head of the largest Christian church on the planet, to which fewer than 3% of them belong. His Holiness made these reckless remarks last month in an interview with Swiss broadcaster RSI. A transcript was made available yesterday to Reuters. It is to be broadcast on March 20.

When asked if he thought Ukraine should surrender to Russia, he apparently responded, ‘I think that the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates’. International Powers could help: ‘The word negotiate is a courageous word. When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate’.

Zelensky meets Pope Francis in 2023

Hmm. Leaving aside the question of why this individual thinks he has the right to demoralise the Ukrainians at such a precarious moment in their history (which I personally think is highly irresponsible of the former bouncer, janitor and food technician), we can ask whether his unsolicited and (I am certain) unwelcome advice to Volodymyr Zelensky has any doctrinal basis in Roman Catholic ‘Just War’ theory.

The answer is ‘well sort of’, but only if you take seriously what Cardinal Thomas de Vio, aka Cajetan (better known as the spokesman for Roman Catholic opposition to the teachings of Martin Luther) decreed in 1540, after a millennium of RC Just War discourse.

In City of God Augustine said that war is a tragic necessity in a sinful world, but that it those waging it need to hold the just intention  of restoring peace, which is surely the Ukrainians’ goal. Perhaps the Pope has been reading the 11^th-century Benedictine cardinal Peter Damian, who, in a letter to Bishop Olderic deploring priests making war on each other, reminded his correspondent of Matthew 18.21-2. When asked by Peter ‘How often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me? As often as seven times?’, Jesus responded that he should forgive ‘seventy times seven’.

Damian then reported an incident in Gaul where an abbot and a nobleman  confronted one another in battle. The abbot ordered his monks to face the opposing cavalry completely unarmed; his opponents were filled with the fear of god, threw down their weapons and begged for forgiveness.  I fervently hope that Pope Francis is not so daft as to expect that Vladimir Putin’s army would respond in the face of Ukrainian submission like those Gallic militiamen.

I heard a religious commentator say on radio this morning that Thomas Aquinas had stipulated that the prosecutor of a just war needed to be able to win that war. But this is not the case. In Summa Theologiae 40, Aquinas actually modifies Augustine’s view, permitting other goals than peace: ‘True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good’. If some Ukrainians are motivated by a desire to punish the Russians, I for one am not bothered.

It was in fact a commentator on the Summa Theologiae, the aforementioned Cardinal Thomas de Vio, who in 1540 was the first to (mis)understand Aquinas as saying that a war is only justly waged if it is won.

'Cajetan' v. Luther

The far more intelligent Roman Catholic who suggested that the suffering caused by the war to one's own side should be proportionate to the advantages the war confers (a subtle point not made by Il Papa) was the Granada-born Aristotelian expert Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). He is to be admired for his questioning in de Indis of the violence of European colonisers, and his argument that the islands of the Indies be viewed as sovereign states legally equal to Spain as members of a worldwide community of autonomous nations. I suspect he would have disapproved of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But in his Disputatio de Bello, Suárez may  have given the Pope the ideological ammunition to underpin his potentially catastrophic comments, if unintentionally:

‘For a war to be just, the sovereign ought to be so sure of the degree of his power, that he is morally certain of victory. The first reason for this conclusion is the fact that otherwise the prince would incur the evident peril of inflicting upon his state losses greater than the advantages involved… Furthermore, he ought to balance the expectation of victory against the risk of loss, and ascertain whether, all things being carefully considered, expectation is preponderant’.

Francisco Suárez

But Suárez was writing about pre-democratic states ruled by monarchs. His point was that the absolute ruler must ask whether a war benefits his subjects. If it harms them, the ruler is behaving like a tyrant. Suárez also sensibly points out that certainty about the outcome of a war is an impossibility. Moreover, thinking about this issue may delay the end of the war. 

Pope Francis would do well to keep his Renaissance scholastic disputations to himself, because they may have the dangerous effect not only of delaying a just outcome to this war, but of altering its course in favour of the unjust party. Where Vladimir Putin’s concerned, you’ve always got to be in it, and supported by the international community, to win it.