From Bishop Alberto Rojas to Pope Leo XIV, the response of Church leaders to the U.S. military strikes against Iran has been one of concern over the tragic cost of human lives brought by war.
“On behalf of the Christians of the Middle East, and all women and men of good will, I appeal to those responsible for this conflict: cease fire!” Pope Leo said March 15 after praying the Angelus with people gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
“May paths of dialogue be reopened!” he continued. “Violence can never lead to justice, stability and peace for which the people are waiting.”
A week earlier local Catholics had gathered at Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral in San Bernardino to join Bishop Rojas for a Holy Hour and Choral Vespers for Peace. The prayer service had been planned in response to the call of Archbishop Paul S. Coakley in late January for all U.S. diocese to offer a Holy Hour for Peace as a Catholic response to domestic strife playing out in immigration enforcement and other areas of political and social division.
As the diocese gathered for the March 8 Holy Hour the prayers for peace took on the added dimension of the newly unfolding war in the Middle East.
“All of us are aware of the atrocities that are taking place in the Middle East these days,” Bishop Rojas said.
Josette Letson helped to hand out worship aides as local Catholics filed into the Cathedral for the Holy Hour. The conflict with Iran was squarely on her mind.
“Innocent people are being killed,” said Letson, a parishioner of The Holy Name of Jesus in Redlands. “There’s no end to it, from one country to the next. There is always a loser in war.”
In the wake of the conflict, some Catholic bishops and theologians have raised the long held Just War Doctrine of the Church as a measurement of whether the U.S. attack is morally justified.
For a war to be justified, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it must be waged to fight against a grave evil, the damage caused by waging the war cannot be graver than the evil it is meant to eliminate, there must be a serious prospect of success, and all alternatives to war must have already been tried.
Taylor Patrick O’Neill, theology professor at Thomas Aquinas College, told EWTN News that every condition must be present for a war to be just. He said a war is sinful “if you fail to meet a single one of those criteria.”
O’Neill added that Catholics have a right to “question whether or not just cause is present” and “question whether or not right intention is present.” He said there would need to be an “imminent” threat, such as if there is “some weapon or [if] some type of military action is currently being planned and will be executed.”
Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington D.C. has stated that he believes the Iran war has not met the Just War threshold.
“The criterion of just cause is not met because our country was not responding to an existing or imminent and objectively verifiable attack by Iran,” McElroy said. “Already the war has had unintended consequences. Iran’s morally despicable decision to target its neighbors in the region has spread the expanse of destruction. Lebanon may fall into civil war. The world’s oil supply is under great strain. The potential disintegration of Iran could well produce new and dangerous realities. And the possibility of immense casualties on all sides is immense.”
At press time, 13 U.S. soldiers had died in the conflict and 200 more had been wounded; more than 1,400 Iranians, including over 200 children, have been killed, and an estimated 1,000 human casualties have been reported in Lebanon.
In his remarks during the March 8 Holy Hour, Bishop Rojas said those who make the decision to go to war sometimes are not motivated by values consistent with the Catholic faith.
“I’m always praying for government leaders that somehow the Lord touches their hearts,” he said, “because they don’t think of the human value of other people. They think, perhaps, of power.”
The prayers of Catholics in times of war are fundamental to our response as a “weapon” to counteract violence and bring the peace of Christ to the world, Bishop Rojas said. Pam Lucero, a parishioner of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Riverside who came to the Holy Hour, was moved by that message.
“With prayer we can see a resolution,” she said. “We can change the wars.”