Vice President JD Vance says he has yet to read all of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, but the document has a message just for him.
To say “Magnifica Humanitas” is about artificial intelligence sells it short. It is a wide-ranging review of the Catholic Church’s principles of social justice. And it is a passionate plea for governments, churches and individuals to apply those principles anew in a world where technological advances and the unaccountable companies that control them threaten to undermine and devalue human dignity.
But it’s impossible to read the 42,300-word document without thinking of the current leadership of the United States, and there’s one paragraph in particular — number 192 of 245, if you’re reading along — that pointedly rebukes the vice president.
In a section addressing “the culture of power,” Leo decries “the normalization of war” and the shift away from an international commitment, however ineffective and half-hearted, to pursuing disarmament and peace. Then he makes a significant pronouncement:
Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.
This will come as a blow to Vance, who was confidently holding forth about “just war theory” only last month as a way to rebut the pope’s concerns about the war with Iran. The pope’s criticism of the war became more pointed in April; among other critiques, Leo wrote, “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.” At a Turning Point USA event a few days later, Vance was asked how he, as a Catholic, handles the clash between his spiritual leader and his boss. Vance objected to the pope’s blanket condemnation: How, he asked, could the pope say such a thing when “there is a thousand-year tradition of just war theory”?
“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said, as if he longed to enter into a good-faith debate over the moral foundations of his administration’s bombing campaigns, but the pope wasn’t doing his part. “If you’re going to opine on matters of theology,” Vance said, “you’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth, and that’s one of the things that I try to do, and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”
The argument sounded convincing enough to House Speaker Mike Johnson: “It is a very well-settled matter of Christian theology,” he told reporters the next day, “there’s something called the just war doctrine.”
Neither Johnson nor Vance showed much interest in what just war theory actually says or in applying it to the war with Iran. In brief, the framework, which originated in the fifth-century writings of St. Augustine and was developed by later theologians, attempts to lay out conditions for legitimate military action. According to church doctrine, such action must be taken only in self-defense, only when all other efforts to secure peace have failed, only when there are “serious prospects of success” and only when armed conflict will not create “evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”
Vance gave American Catholic bishops an opportunity, and even an obligation, to speak up on the deep immorality of the Iran war.
The destructive capability of contemporary weapons makes that last condition all but impossible to meet. Yet, the term “just war theory” has become a kind of permission slip glibly invoked by men like Vance and Johnson. They use the theoretical possibility of moral warfare to conclude that any given war can be declared just.
Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, called out that move in his 2020 encyclical “Fratelli Tutti”: “War can easily be chosen by invoking all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses, and even resorting to the manipulation of information. In recent decades, every single war has been ostensibly ‘justified.’” (Leo cites this passage in a footnote to “Magnifica Humanitas.”)
Francis concludes, “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 the possibility of a ‘just war.’”
When a pope says a doctrinal proposition is “very difficult,” he’s setting up the next pope to toss it out completely. In “Magnifica Humanitas,” Leo does just that.
Meanwhile, Vance gave American Catholic bishops an opportunity, and even an obligation, to speak up on the deep immorality of the Iran war. Bishop James Massa, who chairs the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, issued a clarification: “When Pope Leo XIV speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church, he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ. The consistent teaching of the Church is insistent that all people of good will must pray and work toward lasting peace while avoiding the evils and injustices that accompany all war.”
Even mentioning just war theory in connection with the Iran war, in which roughly 1,700 civilians have died, is a kind of blasphemy. No one could argue a conflict with no clear objective, overseen by a defense secretary who revels in “lethality” and a president who issues lurid threats like “a whole civilization will die tonight,” is built on an ethical framework worthy of respect.
For now at least, Vance seems to have learned not to pick fights with the Vatican. When asked to respond to “Magnifica Humanitas,” Vance was polite but noncommittal: “What I read of it sounds very profound,” he told NBC News, “and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the church.”
In declaring just war theory “outdated,” Leo has taken away the fig leaf that contemporary warmongers hide behind, challenging them to reckon directly with the demands of peace and justice. Do we have Vance to thank for this development? If so, I can’t help wondering what church teaching he will publicly misconstrue next, and what else Leo might clarify in response.
Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
Mollie Wilson O’Reilly is editor-at-large for Commonweal magazine.