Welcome back to Thomas Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire, and I want to talk about the concept of just war

because there are a lot of conflicts going on in the world right now in places like Ukraine,

in Israel and the Palestinian territories, in Iran, and probably many other places around the world

that are not making the news to the same degree. And in many of these cases, the U.S. is asked to be

involved directly or indirectly,

or Christians just want to know who to root for, who to support, and how we should respond.

And there is an actual moral framework for answering these questions, but many of us aren't familiar with it.

So I want to explore the idea of what just war actually means because it gets misused or ignored quite frequently. But I want to first

start by raising a challenge to it. So I'm going to do this in a few parts. Number one, I'm going

to look at an alternative to say, shouldn't we just be pacifist? Isn't the idea of just war,

contrary to the making of peace that is clearly taught by Jesus in places like the

sermon on the mount? How do we get from turn the other cheek to, yeah, you can wage war sometimes?

And second, like once we see why we shouldn't just be strict pacifists, that there is such a need for a doctrine like just war, I want to look at the different parts of it.

So the beginning, what's sometimes called use at Bellum, the reasons for why you can go to war.

Like, what makes a just war at the outset?

When is it just to resort to state violence? Second, use in bellow. Like, okay,

once a war has been declared, once you've decided, okay, we're doing this war thing, that doesn't

end the discussion. There's still a morality to what you're allowed to do even during a just war.

So even if you say World War II is just, that doesn't mean the

atomic bombings or the bombing of Dresden automatically are just as well. And then I want to look at a

third component that is not in traditional teaching of just war, but has been proposed by several

leading Catholic thinkers and other moralists as well that I think we need to take

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