By Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
January 10, 2026
Since the time, about 400 years after Jesus, when Augustine and a bunch of politically and economically well connected Bishops began to push Stoic just war theory into the Church, it has been clear that a reigning tenet of the Christianized just war theory has been from the beginning that a just war could not be an offensive war. An offensive war was always and everywhere an unjust war, a moral Christian impossibility. Its killing was therefore an intrinsically gravely evil and the homicide that took place within it was always unjustified homicide, murder.
This principle was historically so sacrosanct, that President Roosevelt went to extremes in planning the war on Japan to make sure that Japan factually and in terms of public perception fired the first lethal shot. Interestingly, the planning by all the king's military men missed a possibility, and the first lethal shot of World War II was fired on December 7, 1941 by the U.S. in waters outside Pearl Harbor.
Because the defensive-war-only principle was so important for PR purposes this fact was withheld from the public and when it became known it was intentionally obscured with confusions and denial, until official acknowledgement in 2022. My sole point here is that the 1600 year-old just war principle that defensive war is the only type of war that is not murder under Catholic and most other just war theories, was present and active in the minds of Church leaders and the minds and hearts of many other Catholics and Non Catholics in1941.
But soon after, what constituted a defensive versus offensive war was being blurred by the academics. Initially the most influential of the Christian scholarly class to try to undermine and cloud the traditional standard of the grave immorality of offensive war was the Methodist Princeton ethicist, Paul Ramsey. In 1959 he wrote, approximately, "If a nation, although not being under immediate lethal attacks, attacks another nation in anticipation of an attack which that nation would have possibly made if given the chance, then the war that ensues is a defense war and not an offensive war, even though the other party did not fire the first shot, but could reasonably have been believed to have chosen to do so if given the opportunity." The Catholic Church rejected this line of moral thinking, saying it would all but nullify the entire just war theory.
Prior to the commencement of the preemptive invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. on March 19, 2003, the men and women who wrote and who publicly signed the infamous 1996, The Project for a New American Century document, the "New Pearl Harbor" group, now in 2003 sitting in the highest political offices in the U.S.,i.e., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumfield, Paul Wolfowitz, etc. sent one of their own 29 signatories on The Project for a New American Century, George Weigel, who was well connected among the American and Vatican hierarchy over to Rome to tell Pope John Paull II and the Cardinals and Bishops in Rome why the preemptive invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was in conformity with Catholic just war theology. To the Pope's and Vatican's eternal credit he never was allowed through the doors at the Vatican. He had to give his war justification for a preemptive war, which turned out to be eighteen years of ceaseless American slaughter of the people in various countries in the Middle East, at the American Embassy in Rome.
Fifty-five times before this war began Pope John Paul II condemned it as a preemptive war and gravely evil. As did his Secretary of the Office of the Congregation of Faith and Morals, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Yet, in 2026 all Pope Leo, the Vicar of Christ and the Successor of St.Peter, had to say when Venezuela was preemptively attacked by Catholics and other Christians from the U.S. was to call "for human and civil rights to be upheld" in Venezuela and to encouraged the Venezuelan faithful to "persevere in prayer for the unity of our people." The Pope also called on believers to "live more intensely in the hope and in fervent prayer for peace in our hearts and in society, rejecting all forms of violence." "In light of the events unfolding in Venezuela today," the Pope added, "we ask God to grant all Venezuelans serenity, wisdom, and strength. We stand in solidarity with those who were injured and the families of those who died."(The exact word here, if he is speaking about the 55 Venezuelans killed during the U.S. high tech invasion is not died, but "murdered".)
But, who can criticize such benign and wholesome thoughts of Pope Leo ? I can and do. A great and grave evil has been done. Murdering human beings in another country with the full knowledge, consent and participation of Catholics in some to the highest offices in the government and by Catholics who agreed to be the "boots on the ground" for murdering people up close and personal in a war where not single standard of Catholic just war theory had been adhered to.
TV and newspaper journalists speak only on the invasion of Venezuela in terms of politics, economics, Western Hemisphere and global strategies. No one in authority in the Catholic Church, not even the Pope, is naming it and calling it by its Gospel name, "a murder operation," or even by its Catholic Just War Theory name, "a murder operation." It is the Pope, specifically in this case Pope Leo, who must call murder, murder. If he cannot find the courage to do this, then the Catholic grunts for Trump in the Vice President's Office, in the Secretary of States' Office and in the "boot on the ground," will continue to believe that their participation of what by Catholic moral standards is murder is good and they will continue to follow this course of evil as if it were good, until their inevitable last breath. Is this really what a Pope should be or do?
Then Pope's Commission directly from Jesus commission is to "feed my sheep," and to "teach them to obey all that I have commanded you," and "to love as I have love." Refusing to call murder, murder when Catholics are participating in it and when Catholics are suffering under it, may be considered diplomatic in the secular domain. In the domain of one's God given Gospel obligations as a Baptized Christian within the uniqueness Petrine ministry in the Church, failure to speak the truth with love and name murder, murder is a gross dereliction of duty, the consequence of which will reach the gates of eternity for many until the third or fourth generation after your one chance, Leo, to lead people into the Way of and to God has forever passed.