“Never war! Never war!”

Those were the words of Pope Francis recently, marking the centennial of the outbreak of the cataclysmic First World War. “I think most of all about children, whose hopes for a dignified life, a future, are dashed.”

But sometimes, according to Roman Catholic doctrine, thinking about the children and other innocent victims means thinking about the use of warfare to protect them.

A top Vatican diplomat and other church officials say that could be the case now in northern Iraq, with Christians and other religious minorities reportedly facing exile or violence by the extremist Islamic State.

In a rare departure from the Vatican’s fierce criticism of the U.S. military invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and its aborted threat of action in Syria last year, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, Vatican envoy to the United Nations, said recently that the U.S. airstrikes that have slowed the militant advance may be necessary.

He cited the recently developed United Nations doctrine of the “responsibility to protect,” in which international forces can override local sovereignty to prevent mass slaughter.

A LAST RESORT

Tomasi told Vatican Radio that Iraq is a case that can justify not only economic sanctions but “all the force that is necessary to stop this evil and this tragedy.”

He said the international community may come to regret inaction in Iraq as much as it laments its paralysis during the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

His words shouldn’t be a surprise, said Anna Floerke Scheid, professor of theology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and a specialist in Catholic social ethics. Ancient Catholic doctrine authorizes a “just war” as a last resort.

“To suggest that military action might be a possible ethical response to the murder of civilians in a war situation or in any kind of conflict is very much in keeping with the just-war tradition,” she said. “It’s not really a switch.”

That ethic, she said, also led to Catholic opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 – which, she said, failed to meet the just-war criteria that Iraq posed an imminent threat or that the United States had exhausted other means short of war to resolve the conflict. Pope John Paul II also opposed the U.S. action expelling Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 and its airstrikes against Serbs in Kosovo in 1999.

‘MORALLY JUSTIFIED’

Pope Francis, who vociferously opposed the U.S. preparations to attack Syria in response to its chemical attacks on regime opponents in 2013, himself has not directly called for the use of force in Iraq now. But he wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, calling for international action on behalf of minorities “forced to flee from their homes and witness the destruction of their places of worship and religious patrimony.” He cited “the tears, the suffering and the heartfelt cries of despair of Christians and other religious minorities of the beloved land of Iraq.”

Similarly, Louisville Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent a letter to President Obama calling on the nation to “do all that it can to stop and to prevent further systematic violence against ethnic and religious minorities.”

Spokeswoman Melissa Swearingen said that although Kurtz is not recommending a specific military policy, “the church has been pretty consistent that the use of force to obtain justice can be morally justified.”

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