Firstly, I should note that I forgot to mention that there is a
significant number of Catholic theologians who claim to support the Just War Theory
in theory, but who do not believe that
any war the U.S. has ever waged was a just war. Most of these people are stealth pacifists; some just have a threshold for just war so high that they are
effectively pacifists. (Many Catholic opponents of the Iraq War fall into this category.)
To this group, it goes without saying,
all American conflicts would fall into the “probably unjust” or “clearly unjust” categories.
[regarding the Civil War] The Pope did not “support” either side.
Fun, and true, fact: Britain and France were sympathetic to the South, far more so than the pope.
Well… I’m afraid that’s just not true. Pope Pius IX was undoubtedly, among all the crowned heads of Europe, by far the most sympathetic to the Confederacy. Without question, he came closest to providing the C.S.A. with the official recognition it craved. Britain and France both considered providing recognition (and concomitant military aid), but only out of national interest. They backed down as soon as the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
Pope Pius, by contrast, continued to make his sympathies for the Confederacy known. General Lee had a portrait of the Pope in his home and considered him the Confederacy’s only European friend. Even after the war was over and Jeff Davis was
imprisoned, Pius IX continued to send ex-President Davis sympathetic messages, including one with his photograph, autograph, and the Latin text of Matt 11:28! The old “crown of thorns” story appears to be untrue, but it is beyond historical dispute that Pope Pius IX was a strong sympathizer of the Confederate cause – beyond doubt their strongest proponent among European heads of state.
Huh? The war started when the US invaded British territory. The British and their Canadian colonists defeated the US easily, but luckily for the US, Britain granted extremely generous terms of surrender, having its hands full fighting the imperialist anti-Christian tyrant Napoleon (with whom the USA was allied).
Firstly, the war started when Congress declared war, in accordance with their national obligations under the law of nations. The precipitating cause of the declaration (among others), however, was the illegal capture and enslavement of American citizens by the British, who were then impressed into service in the Royal Navy. This is
clearly an attack on American citizens – clearly an act of war.
As for the military outcomes, I find it very difficult to see a British victory when all three of their invasions were repulsed and became long-running stalemates. (Similarly, I can’t call it an American victory, since our invasions of Canada were also repulsed and stalemated.) Your characterization of the Treaty of Ghent as a “surrender” is, frankly, a complete novelty in my reading. It is true that Britain was eager to end the war, due to partly to their other military commitments and largely due to the cost of waging a years-long stalemate, but, if it had been a surrender, one would have expected a little less eagerness from the American public of 1814 to fight on.
To the OP: this little argument I’m having with
Petergee points to another major problem Catholic theorists have when they’re arguing about whether a given war or action was justified or not: we very rarely completely agree on the
historical facts we’re talking about!
Example: I was once in a class on Catholic Social Doctrine with a very wise and intelligent professor, who explained to us why the use of the atomic bomb was wrong and evil and all the rest. It was (and is) considered legitimate by Church teaching to destroy facilities dedicated to the production of war materiel (such as factories, armories, airfields, railroad lines, etc.), even if those attacks incur casualties among the non-combatant workers in those settings, because those workers are not, strictly speaking, civilians. The problem with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my professor argued, is that they weren’t significant industrial centers in 1945, and that they were specifically chosen because they were soft targets that promised insanely high civilian casualty rates – which would of course make Nagasaki a monstrous, direct, premeditated attack on civilian populations and a grave moral evil. So I asked him, “Then, if Nagasaki had been, for example, a major sea port and one of Japan’s largest industrial centers in August 1945, the atomic bombing would have been justified?” “Well, according to the Church, yes, that could have been a legitimate and proportionate response.”
What I didn’t tell him at the time was that my hypothetical was quoted
directly from Wikipedia’s article on Nagasaki.
I’m not saying that his theology on the atom bomb was necessarily correct, and I don’t even think I’m quite reproducing his argument quite the way he presented it, but my point is that, in all these conversations, along with the theological disputes, which are many and bitter, there’s a second layer of equally contested historical disputes.
[CONTINUED]
