With Easter, 2026, taking
place amid the holocaustic genocide in Gaza, Russia’s ongoing invasion of
Ukraine, and the U.S./Israel attacks against Israel, Pope Leo used the occasion
to speak out against war, and those who benefit politically and by profiting
from war. The pope’s absolute rejection of war included excoriating Christians
who had been using theological rationales to justify war. Although not in the
pope’s field of vision at the time, such Christians have included the popes who
had perpetuated four crusades—the last of which was waged against Constantinople
(i.e., eastern Christians)—in Medieval European Christendom. The implication is
that Jesus did not hear the prayers of those militarized Christians who thought
they were defending Jesus and his Church.
The pope’s Easter message
against war was unequivocal: “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who
rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.”[1]
Compassion towards detractors and even enemies is antipodal to war, and thus
the pope’s condemnation was indeed on solid ground. What are we to make,
therefore, of the Catholic just war rationales? If Jesus rejects war, then even
a war that is just is included in the rejection. Besides being a problem for
Catholic social-ethics theory, should Jesus’s preachment of compassion for the
Nazis as they committed genocide against Slavs, Jews, Communists, and other
societal undesirables stand up against the just-war rationale to invade Germany
to stop the wholesale slaughter? Asked about how India should have reacted to a
Nazi invasion, Gandhi answered in line with the pope’s condemnation by saying
that people should stand in non-violent resistance on India’s borders. Would Jesus
agree? His distancing of himself from the Zealots in the Gospels may suggest
that he would not join the armed resistance to the Nazis. His kindness to the Roman
soldiers suggests that he would have compassion for individual Nazis in spite
of their atrocities.
So in the wake of the pope’s condemnation
of war, Catholic just-war theory may need to be revised. The pope also claimed
that Jesus ignores the prayers of Christians who support or wage war. This
would include even the prayers of Christians who were supporting Israel because
of its role as a precondition for Jesus’s Second Coming even as Israel was
committing crimes against humanity against the people of Gaza with impunity.
Whether taking back Jerusalem for Jesus in the Middle Ages or enabling a
genocidal government in the twenty-first century so Jesus could return, such
rationales are ignored by the Christian deity.
The presumption that even
positions that are antithetical to Jesus’s preachments in the Gospels are in
some way Christian nonetheless reveals the susceptibility of the human mind to going
too far without any self-check mechanism in the domain of religion. Faced with Christians
who were looking the other way as Israel was committing a genocide, Jesus would
probably retort that his second coming is in the righteous suffering of the Gazan
people who were not guilty of having attacked Israel in 2023. He would no doubt
apply his condemnation of the Jewish religious leaders in the Gospels to Netanyahu
and his government, with something like, They still don’t get it, but
even such a guttural condemnation does not go far enough, for the principle of
selfless love even and especially against people we don’t like (and even hate) is
in need of loudspeakers in being pronounced to be the way into the Kingdom of
God in this life. Defending Jesus and protecting the way for the Second Coming,
especially if by violence, pale in comparison to that principle, which can
stand on its own without any anthropomorphism.
[1]
Joshua McElwee, “Pope
Leo Says God Rejects Prayers of Leaders Who Wage Wars,” Reuters.com, March
29, 2026.
