In recent weeks there has been a vibrant and robust debate within the United States about the morality of launching and sustaining war against Iran.

Catholic moral teaching has been at the center of this national dialogue, and the statements of Pope Leo XIV on the war with Iran have been welcomed by many Catholics, recast by some and totally rejected by others. Because the war is a highly volatile issue in our polarized society, it is particularly important that Catholic teaching be clear and well understood as we seek to move forward to peace. For this reason, it is essential to identify and reject three major distortions of Catholic teaching on war and peace that have crept into our national dialogue.

First Distortion

The first distortion is the assertion that the just war tradition is the foundational stance toward war in Catholic teaching.

In reality, the fundamental stance of the church toward war is that it must be avoided. Pope John XXIII proclaimed in “Pacem in Terris” that “it is hardly possible to imagine that in an atomic era war could be used as an instrument of justice.” Pope Paul VI journeyed to the United Nations to plead with the world: “Never again war, never again war!”

Pope John Paul II taught that war is never an appropriate way to settle disputes among peoples: “It has never been and it will never be.”

Upon his election, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger chose the name Benedict XVI to tie his entire pontificate to that of Pope Benedict XV, who tried to end all war. And Pope Francis wrote in “Fratelli Tutti” that “we can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of a just war. Never again war.”

It is in this light that we must view Pope Leo’s statements that “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

Pope Leo’s strenuous opposition to war in every form is not a product of his particular papacy or his personal viewpoint but rather reflects the constant refrain of the popes for the last 60 years. It is a refrain that is rooted in the fundamental command for disciples to be peacemakers and to act on the conviction that war is always antithetical to the Gospel. And it is a refrain that has been accelerated by the enormous destructive power of modern weapons that have the capacity to destroy whole civilizations and, indeed, humanity itself.

Second Distortion

A second claim distorting the dialogue about Catholic teaching and the Iran war is the assertion that just war principles are merely a heuristic—that is, a mental shortcut or rule of thumb—rather than an objective set of stringent criteria for determining whether a war is morally legitimate in extreme circumstances.

The just war teaching of the church is secondary to the teaching that war is antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It proceeds from the recognition that in extraordinary and rare instances military force may be necessary to repel overwhelming evil in the world. But Catholic teaching insists that legitimate recourse to war even in these circumstances is restricted by precise and substantive conditions for engaging in military conflict.

The teaching in the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes this clear: “The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy” (No. 2309). Specifically, the damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave and certain; all other means have been shown to be fruitless; there must be serious prospects of success; there must be the right intention to solely restore peace and justice; and the resort to war must not produce evils graver than the evil which will be eliminated by war. All of these requirements must be met simultaneously for recourse to war to be legitimate. The Catechism notes that the immense destructiveness of modern warfare must be fully recognized in assessing the evils that war will unleash.

These are not the words of a heuristic. They are strict moral conditions which must be objectively fulfilled for any recourse to war to be morally legitimate. Presenting these strict conditions as having the elasticity of a heuristic is to evacuate the moral substance and rigor of the norms through which the church seeks to limit war. Of course, these strict conditions need to be applied to a particular wartime situation in a manner that requires sound prudential judgment. But such sound judgment seeks to maximize fidelity to the norm, rather than inventing elasticity that departs from the norm.

Third Distortion

A third claim about Catholic moral teaching distorting our current national dialogue is the assertion that while posing the central moral questions about a war rightfully belongs to the church, the application of those norms and the determination of moral legitimacy to go to war belong solely to the leaders of government.

This assertion first arose concerning the American decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Pope John Paul II was clear in his insistence that the war was not morally legitimate. Before the war, he sent Archbishop Pio Laghi to personally communicate to President George W. Bush the pope’s conviction that the contemplated invasion would be a moral disaster. And the pope authorized Cardinal Ratzinger to specifically assert that the invasion did not meet the requirements of Catholic just war teaching.

It was in this context that the American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Novak wrote an article in 2003 challenging the legitimacy of church leaders in making conclusive statements regarding the morality of particular wars.

Mr. Novak advanced two central assertions in his article. 

The first is that since St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas proposed that the moral evaluation of war does not “begin with a presumption against violence,” neither should Catholic teaching. But as we have seen, all of the modern popes have approached war with the belief that as disciples of Jesus Christ who calls us to be peacemakers in an age of violence and massive destructiveness, we absolutely must approach every war with the presumption against violence. Any ethical analysis that does not do so cannot be seen as faithful to current Catholic magisterial statements.

The second argument of Mr. Novak in his debate with Pope John Paul II asserts that leaders of government have an exclusive legitimacy in determining whether the moral requirements of just war teaching are met in a given situation. In support of this position, he quoted a line in the Catechism which states that “the evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.” Mr. Novak supported his conclusion by stating that the head of government has access to secret information that others do not and he also has the primary responsibility for protecting his people.

There are several problems with this conclusion. The first is that those who have responsibility for the common good in matters of war extend far beyond the president. They include Congress directly; and also religious and cultural leaders, media, civic, labor and veterans’ groups.

Entering into war is a momentous step that often brings unexpected consequences that burden the whole of society. For this reason, the evaluation of the morality of a given war must extend to the wider array of leaders who in Catholic teaching are charged with evaluating the common good of society.

Even more importantly, those who lead us toward war are often the least able to objectively evaluate whether the criteria of just war have in fact been met because they are already committed to a position for political or strategic reasons that will override any ethical concern.

The exclusion of the church from any substantive role in evaluating the moral legitimacy of decisions to go to war, as well as the exclusion of other sources of wisdom and insight in our society, is a pathway to amoral decisions on war, not moral ones. Pope John Paul II recognized this when Michael Novak first proposed it in 2003, and we should recognize it now.

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy is the archbishop of Washington, D.C. He is author of The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contributions of John Courtney Murray (Paulist Press, 1989) and Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs (Princeton University Press, 1992).