Even for a non-Catholic, the entire section beginning Non Occides, “Thou shalt not kill,” is impressive. But this section has not sat well with the American Roman Catholig right wing. For these theological advocates of invading Iraq, the failure to limit war, the inattention to conduct, the terrible punishments for the defeated, and the “high level of artificiality” are inconsequential. What matters is the “pre-Westphalian” (Jean Bethke Elshtain’s term) nostalgia -– note the echo of “prelapsarian” — bliss of an era when state borders were at best advisory and invasion to set things right was an easy thing, or at least, easily embarked upon. That is why Elshtain regrets the modern “presumption of state sovereignty”; George Weigel, the loss of the “classic” just war tradition; and James Turner Johnson the “great loss” of just war “as it was.” One man’s “humanitarian intervention” becomes another’s Thirty Years War.

For this group, the Peace of Westphalia that brought that war to an end was a theological disaster. Pope Innocent X called it “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.”

One big problem these folks have with the new Catechism is that it respects “in bello” considerations (what happens in war). That, they seem to believe, is a betrayal of the old “ad bellum” considerations (what justified going to war). Of course, those old considerations in the Golden Age of Just War basically allowed princes 1250-1650 to commit horrible carnage.

For these eminent people, Karl Rove may have been a higher authority than any Pope: Richard John “Neuhaus chose to base his analysis not on the [WMD] report itself but on a heavily redacted and deceptively interpreted version … provided … by Karl Rove’s White House deputy, Peter Wehner.”

Damon Linker, The Theocons. Secular America Under Siege (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 137. See also:
WMD’s and the Iraq War, by Deal Hudson. April 17, 2007 http://catholicjustwar.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html.

Dan