“No Just War” in Iran — Pope Leo XIV Retires the Warhawks’ Favorite Doctrine on the Flight to Madrid
“The notion of a just war no longer applies,” the pope told reporters mid-flight. Three weeks from now, his cardinals meet in Rome to decide what’s next.
Pope Leo XIV declared aboard the papal flight to Madrid on Saturday that “in Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.”
The theory itself, he told the more than eighty journalists traveling with him, “dates back to centuries when it was impossible to imagine the weapons and the destructive capacity available to humanity today.”
The question came from Franca Giansoldati, the veteran Vatican correspondent of Il Messaggero, during the pope’s customary visit to the press section at the back of the plane.
Claire Giangravè of Religion News Service, traveling aboard, rendered the answer this way in her dispatch from the cabin:
“I think this has already been made very clear: the notion of a just war no longer applies. The problem is that just war theory developed in centuries when no one could have imagined the weapons we have today or humanity’s capacity for destruction.”
The Vatican’s official English translation confines the first clause to Iran. The second sentence is about the theory itself — a body of teaching that, by the pope’s own account, belongs to an age that could not conceive of what human beings can now do to one another.
He was effectively quoting himself. In Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical he published on May 25, Leo wrote in paragraph 192:
“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important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”
Humanity, the encyclical argues, “possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”
The timing itself is important.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the dean of the College of Cardinals, circulated a letter on June 3 formally convening an extraordinary consistory — a summit of the world’s cardinals — for June 26 and 27 in Rome.
Edgar Beltrán reported at The Pillar that the consistory’s second session is devoted to chapter 5 of the encyclical, paragraphs 182 through 192, and that the cardinals will take up paragraph 192’s call to rethink just war doctrine in greater detail.
The doctrine is formally on the docket. Three weeks before his cardinals gather to debate it, the pope stood in an airplane aisle and gave the press corps a framing for understanding the question.
It is an extraordinary thing to say in a casual exchange with reporters. A tradition carried since Augustine usually moves on the Church’s slowest clocks — though Pope Francis proved on the 2013 flight home from Rio de Janeiro, with five words about gay priests, that an airborne press conference can bend the whole story overnight.
The Vatican-watcher account Catholic Sat posted within hours: “Pope just dropped the biggest change in Church teaching in a very long time, and he did so mid-flight.”
To understand why Leo is doing this, it’s important to look at who has been wielding the doctrine in recent history
