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Introduction

Even when fully justified, war is a dirty business which can foul those who set out with pure hearts and noble intentions and drives
combatants into desperate alliances, sometimes
in indecent company.

— Norman Danus   Europe At War 1939-1945

  In the years since 1945, the Catholic Church has modified its teaching about war. The recent popes, while affirming that the traditional norms for a just war are still valid, argue that modern war almost never is just. The shift in papal teaching about war seems to be based on the conviction that the weapons of war now are so horrific that war itself is almost necessar­ily evil. Yet in terms of the number of people killed, the Thirty Years' War and the Napoleonic Wars devastated much of Europe, and some parts of Germany (like the Palatinate) recovered from the former only in the final decades of the 20th century. Nuclear war is unthinkable but still possible.

  Moreover, the Vatican is probably influenced by the consensus among the prosperous and democratic peoples of the European union that war is no longer legitimate among them. Prosperity and democracy are strong inoculations against war. Similarly, the elimination of the death penalty in these countries may have influenced and been influenced by the church's more recent abhorrence of capital punishment. (1)

  Perhaps the change in papal emphasis results from the fact that no one really wins wars. They usually begin with a mistaken assumption about length...more

(1) The Wall StreetJournal, which has never seen a chance for American aggression that it hasn't liked, enjoys ridiculing Europeans for their lack of the "manly" virtues - small families, small armies, lack of support for their American allies, avoidance of intense economic competitions. The United States, it is implied, has to depend on allies who are cowards. A more charitable judgment would be that in the last century Europe saw enough war to want no part of it. From Europeans' point of view, American attitudes are those of cowboys in Western films.

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FATHER ANDREW M GREELEY divides his time between teaching at
the University of Arizona at Tucson and The University of Chicago.