Democratic War and the Catholic
Conscience

Private persons cannot declare war. Only the constituted authorities have responsibility for the common weal and the right to "have recourse to the material sword" to defend it against internal disturbances and external enemies. In wartime the people must be summoned together for the common defense, and it is not the business of any private party to do so. (It is interesting to note that the United States has been struggling with this very issue since President Truman waged his "police action" in Korea almost half a century ago. The progression through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and Vietnam, President Reagan in Grenada and Libya, President Bush in Desert Storm and President Clinton in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia is prima facie evidence that the "sovereign" of the United States for purposes of declaring war is the president, notwithstanding the constitutional reservation of that authority to Congress. Aquinas, I suspect, would find historical facts weightier than the constitutional formality.)

On the criterion of just cause, Thomas simply quotes Augustine: "A just war is usually described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly." One wonders if leading up to the Gulf War President Bush was aware of this propaganda for the anti-Saddam coalition with a pedigree of more than sixteen centuries.

The belligerents’ intentions are right if they are directed to the "object of securing peace, of punishing evildoers, and of uplifting the good," while the "passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such things" may well render unjust an otherwise just war.

Thomas also discusses whether it is lawful to lay ambushes in war (yes); to fight on holy days (yes); and for clerics and bishops to fight in wars (no).

There is a refreshing earthiness in the thought of Aquinas, as one might expect from the premier theologian and philosopher to emerge from the holy womb of the Bride of Christ. Reading him, we cannot help but be reminded that our God is an Incarnate God wholly prepared to skin His knuckles and bloody His smock in His surgery on our brokenness. The Son of Man is not too fastidious to descend into the nether world of authority in the hands of sinners, of everyday good and evil, of just and unjust killing.

Many modern attempts to improve upon the Angelic Doctor’s formulation focus on a new criterion of proportionality, a need accentuated by the development of weapons of mass destruction in this century. And that is a good thing, too, for technology cannot be repealed and we must assume that the coming century will give us new reasons to fear the intersection of technological advance with poor moral reasoning.1

We also need, however, to take another look at the criterion of legitimacy. In Aquinas’s day a war was legitimate if declared and waged by the sovereign, that is, by the king or emperor. With kings now almost uniformly nonexistent or irrelevant to the critical choices of nation-states, what does it take to render a choice for war legitimate? And what are the moral implications for individual citizens, marginal, at best, to the making of such choices but essential, with their lives and bodies and skills, to the actual waging of war?

Until several years ago, I had assumed the theoretical gap could be filled simply by substituting the final authority in democratic systems, the people, for the sovereign. Then I found it was not that simple.

Some years back, Germain Grisez, Flynn Chair of Ethics at Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, MD, wrote an article for Crisis in which he solicited materials from readers for a work on Christian ethics he was preparing to publish, focusing on experiences presenting ethical dilemmas. I wrote him a lengthy account of the situation I faced in 1965 when I received my induction notice, the dilemma arising from the fact that I had concluded a year earlier that U.S. military action in Vietnam was not in the national interest. Did I submit to induction, did I refuse induction and face the legal music, or did I decide to flee to Canada or Sweden?

I was 24, just returning from a Peace Corps tour, and my moral judgment was simple and direct, as moral judgments tend to be at that age. To wit, I did not have all the facts available to me, I was living in a democracy (and enjoying its blessings), the representative and authoritative organs of that democracy had voted overwhelmingly in favor of confronting the ideological perils posed by Hanoi (behind which stood the hostile Soviet Union and an even more menacing Red China), the Selective Service System rested on legitimate law, and it would be presumptuous of me to substitute my private judgment for the authoritative judgment of my democracy. Ergo, it was my duty to submit to induction. I did and served in combat and staff positions with the 4th Infantry Division in Quang Ngai Province and Pleiku in 1967-68.

I do not believe that I ever reached a firm judgment on whether our involvement in Vietnam was just, although it certainly did not escape my attention that Cardinal Spell man quite energetically supported our growing involvement in Southeast Asia. Considerations of national interest, how ever, may provide fruitful ground for adding to the formulation of Aquinas, on the premise that waging unjust war is never in any country’s true interest.

Professor Grisez is a learned scholar and gracious correspondent. He informed me that in his judgment it was objectively evil of me to submit to induction during the Vietnam War era, hastening to add that this did not necessarily mean that my actions were subjectively sinful. I was not prepared to accept this, and I wrote him back with a lengthy rebuttal filled with additional considerations I thought his analysis overlooked. Because of the volume of mail he receives, he was unable to reply in detail to my second letter. But he did give me a copy of related galley proofs for the book he was writing.2

In the interest both of clarity and thoroughness, I would like to construct an argument on the Thomistic model, using Professor Grisez’s conclusions and arguments as the "objections" to which Thomas would reply.

(1) It is objected, in the first instance, that Christians "should not materially cooperate in a war they judge unjust unless confident that some moral responsibility requires them to do so." Our objector cites chaplains and medical personnel who may well judge that, "while their care of the souls and bodies of military personnel will contribute to the war effort, the needs of those they serve morally require them to exercise their ministries."3

I answer that, This objection partakes of a utilitarian spirit and almost amounts to an argument that the end justifies the means. Catholic moral teaching has always held that no evil may be justified by the conviction that it will lead to a good end. Assuming, arguendo, that our objector has not slipped into consequentialism, even so, by what criterion does one distinguish the "needs" served by chaplains and medical personnel from those served, say, by a rifle platoon leader (my role in the Vietnam War)? Indeed, in addition to my obedience to the mandate I felt from the democracy I lived in, I discovered additional moral solace in my belief that, by serving, I could increase the number of American boys who would return safely to their families and that my personal leadership might even diminish the moral perils my soldiers would face. Now, three decades after my service, I am convinced that such considerations were not entirely unfounded.

I conclude that, In a democracy, where there is not a single conscience with sovereign authority but, rather, a marketplace of consciences, our moral judgments regarding contributions to a war effort must be proportionately tempered. There are degrees of clarity in the judgments of consciences (just as there are degrees of guilt in consciences improperly formed) ranging from blindingly clear (one thinks of Hitler and his Nazis) to prudentially positive or negative (and it is surely apropos that, more than two decades after its conclusion, honest people are still debating the justifiability of the Vietnam War). Thus, a firm conclusion on the objective guilt or innocence of those either refusing or accepting induction is simply not a viable moral position. This is not to say that the same standard applies to those collectively in authority in a democracy.

(2) It is also objected that not only should all Christians other than chaplains and medical personnel "re fuse service in the armed forces in any war they judge more probably unjust than just," in addition, "those already in the armed forces should not engage in combat" and, if already engaged, "they should surrender to the enemy or refuse to go on fighting" or, if not engaged in combat, "should desert, seek a discharge, or in some other way ensure that they do not go into combat." The alternative, according to this objection, is "to violate con science, and in this situation Christians say: ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority.’"4

I answer that, The armed forces of nations are specifically formed for the purpose of waging war. The Church of Jesus Christ has consistently held that there is such a thing as just war, does not condemn those who enter such armed forces in peacetime, and routinely supplies chaplains to such armed forces in order to serve the spiritual needs of uniformed Catholics. This objector argues that such chaplains may continue to serve without objective guilt and, indeed, are "morally required" to provide such service, even in situations where they personally regard the war effort as unjust. If those chaplains are truly to serve the spiritual needs of those members in such an unjust war, they cannot escape the duty to advise Catholic soldiers and sailors and aviators of their moral duty to avoid combat, to surrender to the enemy, to refuse to go on fighting, or to desert, actions which would expose these Catholics to summary military justice and these chaplains themselves to courts martial on charges of treason and providing aid and comfort to the enemy. If such reasoning were valid, it would be a short step to absolute pacifism as the moral duty of all Catholics. The argument, I contend, collapses of its own weight. No Catholic should be morally obliged to face such consequences on the strength of his private conscience until and unless the Church he belongs to has thrown its full moral authority against the waging of the unjust war, has publicly condemned it and the public officials who decided in its favor and has followed up on this condemnation by forbidding its priests to serve as its chaplains. Such chaplains would not be justified, in any event, in granting absolution to soldiers unrepentant of their unjust combat and, in consequence of that, be unable in conscience to dispense to these unrepentant sinners the Blessed Sacrament.

In addition, not only are soldiers engaged in combat in a kill-or-be-killed situation, they are also in a fight-or-see-your-buddy-die situation, and the individual conscience is inevitably torn between the obligation both to the enemy and one’s compatriots. Combat is inherently a circumstance of the most intense human solidarity, and the withholding of such solidarity is a grave moral action fraught with complex and incalculable consequences. Refusing to engage in combat is not simply a retreat to pacifism but a deliberate act, as well, of collaboration with the enemy, who may also be engaged in an objectively unjust war effort. It cannot be the case that an all-seeing Providence wills that the moral brunt of such complex cases be borne by the individual soldiers caught up in the heat of battle unless it is also the case that the Holy Spirit, acting through the authorities of the Church He guides at every moment of its existence, has called all the members of the Church to a mass witness, including the possibility of martyrdom, by placing the Church into open defiance of the unjust political authorities who placed the soldiers in these circumstances. Those who spoke the noble words about serving God rather than man, cited by our objector, were themselves Apostles of Christ, and it should not be judged an objective evil for the poor and the powerless to obey human authority in fear when the successors to those Apostles themselves stand silent or have, as in the case of Cardinal Spell man, pronounced the war effort worthy of Catholic support.

While I commanded my rifle platoon, only (!) one of my soldiers was killed, Mike Barrett, a young black man from Atlanta, a bubbly joke-teller loved without exception by everybody in the platoon. He was a few months shy of reaching his 21st birthday. An impression of his name from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial hangs in my office.

If Germain Grisez is right, Mike committed an act of objective evil when he bowed to his draft notice and put his life on the line. And William Jefferson Clinton, in pursuit of maintaining his political viability, did the right thing evading that same draft.

C. S. Lewis cannot aspire to the lofty stature of Aquinas, but he is one of the clearest thinkers of our bloody century. With the remarkable range of his moral imagination well established, it should come as no surprise that he arrived at a preliminary judgment on the issue dealt with in this essay. Writing in May, 1939, not long before his English compatriots had to take up arms against the Nazi monster, Lewis noted that sincere people would certainly differ over the prospects of victory, one of the conditions of just war, and that the essential question, therefore, was one of authority: "Who has the duty of deciding when the conditions are fulfilled, and the right of enforcing his decision?" While all can agree that the hangman must not hang a man he knows is innocent, "will anyone interpret this to mean that the hangman has the same duty of investigating the prisoner’s guilt which the judge has?" Thus, it is "absurd to give to the private citizen the same right and duty of deciding the justice of a given war which rests on governments." In the long run, "the nation, as a nation, must act, and it can act only through its government. (It must be remembered that there are risks in both directions: if war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.)" Perhaps the via media would be for Christians to consent to bear arms but then to refuse to obey anti-Christian orders such as murdering prisoners or bombing civilians—Lewis was certain that "one Christian airman shot for refusing to bomb enemy civilians would be a more effective martyr...than a hundred Christians in jail for refusing to join the army."

Less than six years later, Lewis’s words were forgotten when Dresden and Cologne were being reduced to rubble by Allied airmen, but it is difficult not to agree with his summary judgment: "Christendom has made two efforts to deal with the evil of war—chivalry and pacifism. Neither succeeded. But I doubt whether chivalry has such an unbroken record of failure as pacifism."5

Had vox populi been a more salient consideration in the time of Aquinas, it seems probable to me that the Angelic Doctor would have staked out for our guidance a moral position quite similar to this. Thinkers on Catholic morality should re-examine in its light whatever position they have taken, with due regard also, in this century of massacre and mass destruction, for sanguinis populi.

One last point: The contention that individual soldiers, in forming moral judgments about the propriety of engaging in combat, owe no prudential deference to authoritative decisions democratically arrived at, together with the exclusion from relevance of the authoritative stance, or lack of a stance, of the Catholic Church regarding such combat, amounts to an assertion of primacy for the individual conscience over against the authority of the Church. We know, however, that Christ pursued the kingdom of heaven and established a hierarchical Church in the service of that kingdom on earth. We should also know, by now, that the assertion of the democratic spirit in the governing of the Church is tactical camouflage for dissent in the Church and, therefore, for disobedience to Christ Himself. Catholics living in democracies and sifting over what is due to Caesar and what is due to God can do no better than to give great deference to their democracy and absolute obedience, including the embrace of martyrdom, to Christ in His Church. When the Church does not call us to martyrdom, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Frank Creel was a rifle platoon leader and staff officer in Vietnam. A returned Peace Corps volunteer in Turkey, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has worked at the U.S. Department of Commerce since 1973. He is a Catholic father of three grown children.

End Notes

1. Fr. William Saunders, dean of the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College, recently provided an excellent two-part summation of Catholic just war theory, and the second part was devoted entirely to the question of proportionality (Arlington Catholic Herald, March 5 and 12, 1998; I do not know if Fr. Saunders’s column is syndicated to other Catholic publications.)

2. The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 2: Living a Christian Life, Franciscan Press, 1993.

3. Op. cit., p. 909.

4. Op. cit., p. 910.