OPINION:
On April 15, 1861, President Lincoln called up 75,000 soldiers and ordered a blockade of Southern ports in response to the secession of seven states from the Union.
Lincoln’s actions unleashed the longest, bloodiest war in North American history — a conflict that would ultimately end the vile institution of slavery in the U.S. and the freeing of millions of Black Americans.
More recently, on June 6, 1944, thousands of American soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy to begin the liberation of France from the oppressive occupation by the Germans.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt could easily have chosen to leave the European conflict to the Europeans, but he elected to wage war and help end the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis throughout Europe by relying on the only viable means available: the use of overwhelming military force.
I am personally grateful that Roosevelt made his decision. If he had not, then I would not have lived because my mother’s French-Jewish family was scheduled for deportation to Auschwitz. They would have been murdered had the D-Day landings not taken place successfully when they did.
These two examples of righteous wars come to mind in the wake of Pope Leo XIV’s recent unqualified statement that war must always be eschewed. The pope called on “all people of goodwill to always search for peace and to reject war” and castigated all who would wage war, regardless of justification.
The pope went further when he urged people to unqualifiedly act against war: “I would invite citizens of all the countries involved to contact the authorities, political leaders, congressmen, to ask them to work for peace and to reject war always.”
Without any nuance, the leader of the more than 1 billion Catholics (undoubtedly a decent man of goodwill and good intentions) was telling people everywhere to use their political muscle to stop all wars, regardless of reason or purpose, even wars of liberation.
With the Trump administration pursuing its war against the Iranian regime, Leo was not speaking theoretically. He was targeting the administration’s military effort to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon with which to threaten the world.
President Trump’s reactions to the pope’s criticisms have not been nuanced — but then, the president does not engage in nuance. He has called Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and said the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” with his anti-war comments.
In his own way, Mr. Trump echoed an American perspective that has prevailed since the very inception of our nation. It has always been part of our history to use military force to defend our interests and promote our ethical democratic principles.
So it is surprising that the pope, a man whose role requires him to be thoughtful and precise, was so lacking in nuance when he condemned all wars.
Although the pope and I come from very different religious traditions, we do have some things in common. We both spent formative years on the South Side of Chicago and went to school in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Leo’s ancestry, like mine, seems to include members of a persecuted minority. It appears we even had at least one mentor in common, a rabbi who taught at the Catholic seminary attended by the pope.
These elements heighten my confusion about Leo’s categorical condemnation of war.
The pope must know that the Judeo-Christian tradition does not reject war. It is true that it strongly favors peace, but it also emphasizes that there is a time to confront evil with firmness and even violence. The Bible reminds us in multiple passages that there are times when the purveyors of hatred can be dissuaded from their nefarious pursuits only by force.
To assert that war is always wrong is to do what so many in our time seem intent on doing: preventing recourse to the actions that are sometimes necessary to safeguard Western civilization, including its Judeo-Christian tradition.
The pope and I share another bond. By reason of the decisive use of military force, some of our respective ancestors may have been spared terrible fates: his, the possible prolongation of enslavement, and mine, certain death in gas chambers.
Awareness of the past should assuredly encourage nuance, if not serious rethinking, on the pope’s part.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm and the author of “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution.”
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