The recent visit of Pope Leo XIV to France has been a key intervention into the war hysteria being fomented by European political circles. Shortly before that visit, Cardinal Robert McElroy, Archbishop of Washington, addressed a meeting in Rome of the Pax Christi International, indicating a revision of St. Augustine’s “just war doctrine,” given the way that it has been circumvented by political layers to justify many unjust wars and wars of outright aggression.

When St. Augustine developed the doctrine, he did so during the declining days of the Roman Empire, in which violence and oppression seemed to reign. While he had no premonition about the horrors that would occur in the 20th Century with the expansion of fascism and policies of mass genocide, he realized that under certain circumstances, taking up arms against an unjust cause when all else has failed is legitimate for Christians.

McElroy noted the innumerable instances of political leaders using the “just war” doctrine to support wars of aggression. He noted that this point, of moving the doctrine of “just war” closer to a doctrine of “non-violence” or “non-violent resistance,” as practiced so effectively by the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, was stated repeatedly in Pope Leo’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas.” The Pope noted in the encyclical that he is writing at a time when “war” has become an almost daily occurrence and in which the accumulation of nuclear armaments, which could end civilization entirely, is being proliferated to ever more nations.

While a radical doctrine of “non-violence” may lead to neither peace and harmony nor the end of oppression, the misuse of Augustine’s “just war” is leading to a revision in the Vatican. McElroy noted that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is working on a revision using the notion of “Proportionate Defense” in order to bring the views of Augustine into the modern era.

Speaking about this, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, the head of the Dicastery responsible for the revision, said that language of “Magnifica Humanitas” shows how “the very notion of legitimate self-defense must be more clearly defined so that it can be understood in its strictest sense,” and said that the state of the world invites the church’s social doctrine to weigh in as a moral voice.