The discourse around just war theory related to Leo and his comments in recent weeks have driven me a little crazy.

I actually think the question of like, can under modern conditions, can there actually be a just war?

Like given the way we fight wars now. Like just war theory began before gunpowder was a part of war.

Yeah. You know, when Christian princes would lead their armies against some other prince

in his army, it's striking how many significant figures in the Catholic Church in the 20th century,

which is to say essentially after World War I and World War II,

along with the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War and the reality that we could

wipe out human life on this planet. Not just Leo, not just Francis, you know, not just the so-called

lib popes, but people like Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict,

have reflected on, like, maybe industrialized, mechanized, kind of total war that can't be fought

justly. I mean, think about what we're doing in Iran, right? Like, we're bombing steel plants,

you know, and that necessarily will kill some civilians, right? Like, we're bombing steel plants, you know, and that necessarily will kill some

civilians, right? And, you know, resources that might not necessarily have gone to war. It's kind of like,

is it actually possible in this day and age to have a just war? Yeah, I mean, like you mentioned,

Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, when he was a cardinal, he said in 2003,

given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups,

today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a just war.

John Paul II was a critic of the invasion of Iraq. He said in a 2003 state of the

world address, no to war, war is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity.

And perhaps even more explicitly on this score, in a speech called The Challenge of Peace, JP2 said,

today the scale and the horror of modern warfare, whether nuclear or not, makes it totally

unacceptable as a means of settling differences between nations.

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