Chicago Studies Spring/Summer 2019

and in concert to take vigorous preventative actions when warning signs of human rights abuses are emerging. All too often, brewing crises are ignored until bloodshed is already rampant.

Attentive peacebuilding must be the foundational perspective of Catholic moral thinking on both international conflict and its prevention.

The Canadian report placed its major focus on preventative action. But it also contemplated that at times military action to forestall massive human rights violations. So, too it is in the Christian community. Faced with barbarity occurring before his eyes, the Good Samaritan has a duty to intervene even in violence to protect the vulnerable.

The grave responsibility in any such intervention is to insure that it is truly a last resort and tremendously limited in scope. It is in these areas that the just war tradition as currently formulated does not offer the rigor necessary to condemn unnecessary wars in a world filled with rationalization and rampant militarization.

That is why the Commission on the Responsibility to Protect offers a substantive correction to the just war tradition in its interpretation of just cause and right intention. In a nuclear age, with stockpiles of lethal weapons in every nation, the legitimate just cause for war must be confined to human rights atrocities, genocide, and the invasion of a country. Similarly, there must be an increasingly demanding formulation of the criterion of right intention, which looks to the breadth of the coalition undertaking military action, the receptiveness of the peoples for whom the intervention is supposedly being launched, and the reactions of nations in the region to gauge whether military action is truly moral.

Catholic moral theology must rethink its current approach to war and peace. It must give greater legitimacy to the pacifist tradition and the demands it places upon all Christians to be first and foremost peacebuilders. It must enflesh the growing reservations of the modern popes about any recourse to war in the modern age. Catholic teaching must recognize that that suppleness of the just war criteria has rendered it incapable of discriminating effectively between just and unjust wars. And Catholic moral theology must reforge the criteria of just cause and right intention to provide a truly effective standard for determining when, with ultimate sadness, military action is warranted.

The Good Samaritan traveled his pathway as an agent of compassion, confronting violence, and seeking to restore justice in peace. So, must we all in this nuclear age.