 |
| Pic courtesy Leunig and Jason Goroncy |
On the face of it, none of Trump's Truth Social post makes a great deal of political sense. He needs the conservative Catholic vote in states like Pennsylvania, michigan and Wisconsin, which were fundamental to his election in 2024.
What is also hard to fathom is his grounds for this criticism. His Truth Social post talks about Leo being "weak on crime, weak on nuclear weapons", and mentions a meeting with David Axelrod.
Now Leo has not made any definitive statement about crime since he began his reign as pontiff, apart from criticising state crime in Iran after the reported killing of protestors. Maybe Trump doesn't believe there is any such thing as state crime..
As for nuclear weapons, Leo has described nuclear weapons as "a profound horror" and "an affront to humanity".
So maybe Trump is unhappy about the Pope's criticism of the war against Iran.
That criticism did not name either Trump or the USA, but did call for deescalation.
In any event, the Pope is qualified (unlike J D Vance) to talk about the moral theology underpinning the notion of a just war. For a war to be just, a number of criteria have to be met. Frank Brennan discusses this in his homily given on the Third Sunday of Easter.
He quotes Cardinal McElroy of Washington, who pointed out that the war was not necessary, that diplomacy had been bulldozed, and that there was ambiguity about the intention and purpose of the military commitment.
The principles of a just war are that it has just cause, is a last resort, is declared by a proper authority, has a right intention, and a reasonable chance of success, and that the end is proportional to the means being used.
Trump's "just cause" has ricocheted between preventing Iran accessing nuclear weapons and changing the regime. Strangely enough, there was an agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency, limiting Iran to nuclear material insufficient to construct a bomb, but that agreement was dissolved in May 2018.
Guess who withdrew from the agreement. I'll let you guess. It wasn't Iran.
Trump appealed to the Iranian people to overthrow the mad Mullahs, but was unwilling to provide any material support, so any sane observer might be tempted to doubt that genuine regime change is part of a just cause.
As for "proper authority", Trump doesn't have congressional approval, and the "reasonable chance of success" seems to have evaporated with Iran's persistent intransigence.
The USA's attack on Iran in the middle of diplomatic negotiations reminds me eerily of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour on 7th December 1941.
Was Imperial Japan's aggression part of a "just war" back then? The lead up and sequence events are similar. There's a fair chance that the outcome for the aggressor this time will also be similar.
