Pope Leo has issued an encyclical in which he state that “just war” theory is no longer valid:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a news story about this encyclical on Religion News Service<\/a> \u2014 posted less than an hour ago \u2014 reporters Aleja Hertzler-McCain and Jack Jenkins trace the pope’s statement on “just war” theory to a Vatican study group which issues a report this month in which they said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Since war can no longer be confined to military targets but overflows into civilian life, taking on new forms (hybrid, asymmetrical, etc.), the recourse to frameworks used in the past for legitimate defense \u2014 and even more so for \u2018just war\u2019 \u2014 appears increasingly inadequate\u2026.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n I became a pacifist in part because Dan Greeley, the minister of my Unitarian Universalist congregation when I was in my teens, argued that war was no longer morally defensible after the invention of atomic weapons. War technology has only gotten more destructive since then, and I’m glad the Vatican has finally caught up with what Greeley perceived in the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I only wish that today’s Unitarian Universalists would remember that war is a more urgent moral issue that the narrow United States culture wars issues that seem to get the most attention from our religious community. But the internationalism of Greeley’s generation of Unitarian Universalists has been mostly forgotten, and the culture wars are now considered of paramount importance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pope Leo has issued an encyclical in which he state that “just war” theory is no longer valid: “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of … Continue reading “A blow to “just war” theory”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1205],"class_list":["post-13365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology","tag-just-war-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13365"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13371,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13365\/revisions\/13371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}