Pope Francis might jettison idea of a ‘just war’, by Maria Stephan.

Developed in the fifth century A.D. by St. Augustine, the doctrine of a “just war” empowers rulers to wage war only as a last resort to confront grave wrongs. As Augustine wrote: “Peace should be the object of your desire; war should be waged only as a necessity.”

Later, the Summa Theologica, written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1260s and 1270s, clarified that war could only be waged by a properly instituted authority like the state, that it could not occur for purposes of self-gain, and that attaining peace must be its central aim. …

But it seems that Pope Francis – who is by all accounts a progressive thinker, unafraid to challenge old Church doctrines – might welcome a debate over the church’s foundational tenets on war and peace. “Faith and violence are incompatible,” he repeated in a 2013 mass prayer gathering at the Vatican. … In his letter to a recent Rome conference, he exhorted participants to revitalize the tools of “active nonviolence.” It was a call, in other words, to challenge the idea of “just war” and to propose an alternative paradigm.

Robert Spencer scathingly applies realism to dispel the Pope’s PC nonsense:

That would remove one of the West’s key philosophical foundations and leave Catholics no alternative but to surrender to the advancing jihad. But with the monuments of Catholic Europe in ruins and the Church subjugated and enslaved, as the jihadi’s blade slices through his neck, Pope Francis can congratulate himself that he was never, ever “Islamophobic,” and that he and his bishops made sure that those within their purview who spoke honestly about the jihad threat were duly silenced.

The Pope has forgotten, if he ever knew, that (as Winston Churchill put it) “we sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”

hat-tip Stephen Neil