Anscombe vs. Miscamble on Truman: Catholic Disagreement over Honoring a President – Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau presents the Catholic disagreement over honoring Truman as a serious moral dispute rooted in differing judgments about just war, innocent life, and the necessity of the atomic bomb.
This lecture was given on February 14th, 2026, at Dominican House of Studies.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speakers:
A native of Louisiana, Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P., entered the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in 2005. After several years of pastoral work in New York City, Fr. Guilbeau began doctoral studies in moral theology at the University of Fribourg, where he completed a dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the common good. Currently, Fr. Guilbeau serves as the University Chaplain and Vice President for Ministry and Mission at The Catholic University of America.
Keywords: Atomic Bomb, Anscombe, Hiroshima, Innocent Life, Just War, Miscamble, Moral Disagreement, President Truman, Utilitarianism, War Ethics
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at |
| 0:21.6 | to mystic institute.org. |
| 0:23.6 | So you've all gotten a taste just within the last 24 hours of just how complex and rightly |
| 0:31.6 | so moral reasoning can be. It's hard. It's not easy. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes skill. |
| 0:40.3 | It takes talent. But it also takes an openness to truth and wisdom and really an openness also to love. |
| 0:49.3 | I mean that's really the end of all this, right? It's not just right action, but real relationship and justice |
| 0:59.0 | and in love with the neighbor, right? |
| 1:02.0 | In the smallest of circumstances, in the most simple of circumstances to the most complex. |
| 1:18.6 | So it's important that, you know, when we set out to study moral philosophy or moral theology and begin to take up the questions that moralists |
| 1:26.6 | wrestle with, it's always best to start |
| 1:30.5 | with evaluating let's say the easy questions or the easy cases before proceeding |
| 1:37.3 | on to the harder ones and that's a way forward and a kind of a plan of attack, not just for moral philosophy and moral theology, but so many things that we learn. |
| 1:52.0 | It's how we learn a sport. It's how we learn a game. It's how we pick up an instrument and learn how to play it. |
| 1:59.0 | I mean, just think of a child who we want to learn how to play it. I mean just think of a child who we want to learn |
| 2:03.6 | how to play the piano. We take a five or six year old and put them at the bench, put |
| 2:07.6 | them at the keyboard and that's the first thing we do. Well we don't put down in front |
| 2:12.6 | of them sheet music by Chopin and tell them to go out it. No, you start, there's middle C. You don't know what |
| 2:20.9 | middle C is, but trust me, that's middle C. That's going to be important, you know, later. |
| 2:27.8 | And the key to the right of it is D. You don't know what D is, right? But it's important and you'll learn the key to the left. |
| 2:37.0 | The middle C is a B. You know, again, you don't know what the B is, but trust me, B, C, D, you know, and then you go from there. |
| 2:47.0 | You teach them the keys, and then it scales and scales and scales and scales and scales and |
| 2:53.6 | scales and scales in different keys before you begin to play the higher compositions. |
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