Nonviolence missing from discussions of Church and Iran War

Mainstream media accounts have focused on a narrative of conflict between Pope Leo XIV and President Trump, and on Just War Doctrine. In some cases, church leaders have directly referenced Just War Doctrine, and in others, journalists who are more familiar with the just war framing interpret church statements as alluding only to that centuries-old doctrine and fail to appreciate the ways the church has moved beyond the just war approach to a fuller set of teachings grounded in gospel nonviolence.

“The concern here,” says Dan Moriarty, Senior Program Officer for Peace and Nonviolence at the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, “is that, while the current Iran war clearly violates numerous limits laid out under just war doctrine, repeated appeals to that doctrine risk giving the impression that a few tweaks to certain elements of how the war is being waged would make it acceptable in the eyes of the church (and God). But we are always against war. Instead, the church promotes nonviolent approaches to conflict and injustice, seeking always to prevent, interrupt, and heal from violence.”

Pope Leo XIV has not explicitly cited just war doctrine in his recent statements, insisting instead on the pursuit of dialogue and affirming that “God does not bless any conflict [and] is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” But observers have interpreted his words as expressions of just war ethics.

Writing in America magazine, Cardinal Robert McElroy, Archbishop of Washington, notes several distortions in recent debates on the Church and the Iran war, the first being “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.” He goes on to cite 60 years of statements from every pope since John XXIII, challenging the possibility of a just war and asserting the church’s opposition to all war.

In a 2023 presentation at the University of Notre Dame, Cardinal McElroy developed in depth the need to renew Catholic teaching on war and peace. As the nature of modern warfare and geopolitics increasingly rendered the just war doctrine inadequate to current moral realities, he argues, Pope Francis built on the statements of his predecessors to establish “comprehensive nonviolence” “rather than the just war ethic as the dominant prism through which to evaluate decisions” on war and peace.

It is through the same prism of comprehensive nonviolence that Pope Leo’s recent statements should be understood. He and the Catholic Church seek not that nations should wage war more justly, but that they pursue justice without waging war.

President Trump has suggested that Pope Leo does not understand the threat posed by Iran, and that preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons justifies the war. The Church has long maintained that preventative war is not self-defense and cannot be allowed. But Pope Leo has focused his message on urging the tireless, nonviolent work of dialogue and diplomacy. It must be remembered that the United States had a nuclear deal with Iran, the JCPOA, that was working until President Trump withdrew from it in his first term, replacing it with a policy of “maximum pressure” via sanctions that hurt Iranian civilians but did not stop their government from pursuing weapons-grade plutonium. Maryknoll and other Catholic groups have been consistent supporters of the JCPOA and renewed negotiations with Iran, as well as nuclear disarmament by the United States and other nuclear-armed states.

While mainstream coverage has focused on the application of just war doctrine to the Iran war, some Catholic authors have highlighted the nonviolent vision promoted by Pope Leo and other church leaders. Eli McCarthy has written on ways a “just peace” ethic can move us beyond questions of whether to justify violence, toward embracing an array of nonviolent responses to conflict. And Ken Butigan, writing on behalf of Pax Christi’s Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, highlights the central message of Leo XIV’s papacy, announcing Christ’s “unarmed and disarming peace,” and his message of nonviolence regarding the war in Iran: “I make a heartfelt appeal to all the parties involved to assume the moral responsibility of halting the spiral of violence before it becomes an unbridgeable chasm. May diplomacy regain its proper role, and may the well-being of peoples, who yearn for peaceful existence founded on justice, be upheld. And let us continue to pray for peace.”

Photo: Deir-e Gachin Caravansarai in Iran, courtesy of Mostafameraji, available in public domain via Wikimedia Commons.