Pope Francis stated that he believes it is time to reconsider the idea of “just war” in an interview that was published on Friday.
“I believe it is time to rethink the concept of a ‘just war.’ A war may be just, there is the right to defend oneself. But we need to rethink the way that the concept is used nowadays,” Pope Francis said.
“I have said that the use and possession of nuclear weapons are immoral. Resolving conflicts through war is saying no to verbal reasoning, to being constructive. … War is essentially a lack of dialogue.”
The national news agency of Argentina, Télam, had an interview with the pope on June 20. A 1-hour video of the interview was published on July 1.
The pope stated that there is “an entire infrastructure of arms sales” that encourages war today in response to a query about how the lack of communication is a contributing element to the state of events on the planet right now.
“A person who knew about statistics told me, I don’t remember the numbers well, that if weapons were not manufactured for a year, there would be no hunger in the world,” he said.
Pope Francis described how he cried during visits to war cemeteries in Europe, including the Redipuglia World War I memorial and Anzio World War II cemetery in Italy.
“And when the anniversary of the landing in Normandy was commemorated, I thought of the 30,000 boys who were left dead on the beach. They opened the boats and said, ‘get off, get off,’ they were ordered while the Nazis waited for them. Is that justified? Visiting military cemeteries in Europe helps one realize this,” he said.
The pope added that the current state of affairs in Europe demonstrates that the UN “has no power” to avert a war.
“After World War II, trust was placed in the United Nations. It is not my intention to offend anybody, I know there are very good people working there, but at this point, the UN has no power to assert,” he said.
“It does help to avoid wars — and I am thinking of Cyprus, where there are Argentine troops. But to stop a war, to solve a conflict situation like the one we are living today in Europe, or like the ones lived in other parts of the world, it has no power.”
The just war theory, which was developed by St. Augustine in the fourth century and is the foundation for church teaching on the morality of war, acknowledges that there may occasionally be a legitimate justification for going to war.
Theologians told CNA in 2019 that it is more difficult, however normative, to apply this argument to modern conflict, which frequently entails missile and air strikes rather than savage combat between troops.
The Pope spoke about the Covid-19 pandemic, intergenerational communication, and climate change, among other topics.
“You can rest assured that God always forgives, and we, men, forgive every now and then. But nature never forgives. It pays us back. If we use nature for our profit, it will bear down on us. A warmed-up world prevents the construction of a fraternal and just society,” the pope said.
When asked about the Catholic Church in Latin America, the pope said that it has a long history of being “close to the people.”
Pope Francis said: “In a way, this is the experience of the Latin American Church, although there have been attempts of ideologization, such as the use of Marxist concepts in the analysis of reality by Liberation Theology. That was an ideological exploitation …”
“There is a difference between the people and populisms,” he added.