"Just War 101"

Bishop Conley on just war doctrine: "One could make [a] consequentialist, utilitarian argument... But Catholics cannot accept such arguments. There are certain standards for which we stand, regardless of consequences. Period." https://t.co/rAxvCp4uwE

— Edward Feser (@FeserEdward) May 11, 2026

Edward Feser recommends an essay at the National Catholic Register by Bishop of Lincoln, NE James Conley, Just War 101: Catholic Teaching for a Dangerous Moment. It claims to be a review of Catholic "Just War doctrine", but its statement of this doctrine, even as it cites the Catechism, is seriously incomplete, and I think it also has several problems of both focus and logic.

Let's take the biggest problem of logic first. He cites the case of Father George Zabelka, "a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Air Force [who] served as a priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

In August of 1945, he was called upon to give the crew of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a blessing for their safety. This was an action that he had routinely performed hundreds of times, if not thousands. In fact, priests are called upon to bestow blessings for a variety of reasons. Blessing people is one of the gifts we priests are privileged to perform.

But not long afterward, he counseled an airman who had flown a reconaissance flight over Nagasaki and witnessed the terrible suffering of the civilians who'd been burned in that blast.

Over the next 20 years, Father Zabelka gradually came to believe that he had been terribly wrong, that he had denied the very foundations of his faith by lending moral and religious support to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This has me puzzled. Bp Conley says Fr Zabelka had blessed bomber crews hundreds, if not thousands of times. He was assigned to Tinian, where the B-29s that dropped the nuclear bombs were based. Tinian was one of the bases from which conventional firebomb raids on Japan were conducted throughout the final year of the war. In fact, if he blessed bomber crews hundreds of times during his assignment there, we may surmise he likely blessed the crews of the B-29s that participated in Operation Meetinghouse, on the night of March 9–10, 1945. This raid on Tokyo

constitute[d] the single most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history. Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.

. . . With over half of Tokyo's industry spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods, the firebombing cut the city's industrial output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raids a war crime due to the mass targeting of civilian infrastructure and ensuing large-scale loss of civilian life.

In fact, firebombing raids of Japanese cities were routine from mid-1944. Bp Conley strongly implies that Fr Zabelka had no problem blessing the hundreds of bomber crews that conducted these raids, and he began to question US strategy only after hearing of the suffering following the Nagasaki attack, but this misrepresents Fr Zabelka's actual stance, which was complete non-violence. In any case, the bomber crews who conducted the Meetinghouse raid were just as aware of what happened to civilians as the airman who'd flown over Nagasaki:

As the bombers passed over the target area and opened their bomb bay doors to unleash their payload, many of the crews were met with a sickening odor. Maynard David, a bombardier, recalled that, “when the bomb bay doors opened, the plane filled with smoke from the ground and we smelled this horrible odor. We closed the bomb bay doors after we dropped and headed to sea. The odor was still so strong in the plane that the pilot ordered me to open the doors again to let the fresh air in. You could only imagine what was going on down below us.” The odor, of course, was the smell of burning human flesh. Such were the casualties on the ground that the smell would permeate the airplanes and the flight suits of the crews for days after the raid.

Although Bp Conley doesn't mention this, Fr Zabelka eventually came to condemn the conventional firebomb raids as well, but this was part of a journey that actually took him away from Catholic just war theory:

In August 1980 Sojourners magazine published an extensive interview with Zabelka, titled “I was brainwashed. They told me it was necessary.” In the interview, he described the process of his conversion from a hard-core belief in the moral validity of Christian Just war theory as a viable moral option for a disciple of Jesus to instead making a full-fledged and public commitment to the nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels.

In the interview, he effectively acknowledges that he did bless the crews that firebombed Tokyo, but this was because he'd been misled by just war theory into thinking this was OK, and he'd left just war theory behind; just war theory was incorrect from the start, because it did tolerate civilian suffering under certain circumstances. In a 1985 speech, he said,

For the last 1700 years the church has not only been making war respectable: it has been inducing people to believe it is an honorable profession, an honorable Christian profession. This is not true. We have been brainwashed. This is a lie.

War is now, always has been, and always will be bad, bad news. I was there. I saw real war. Those who have seen real war will bear me out. I assure you, it is not of Christ. It is not Christ’s way. There is no way to conduct real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus. There is no way to train people for real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus.

So it's at best incongruous for Bp Conley to cite Fr Zabelka if he wants us to understand Catholic just war doctrine -- Fr Zabelka thinks the Church's Magisterium is in error here. But in addition, Bp Conley's explanation of the Church's teaching in the Catechism is incomplete and thus misleading. He correctly cites CCC 2309's four conditions for just war:

(1) The damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave, and certain
(2) All other means of putting an end to it must have shown to be impractical or ineffective
(3) There must be serious prospects of success
(4) The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the principle of proportionality)

But he leaves out CCC 2309's key conclusion, "The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good." On one hand, Fr Zabelka explicitly rejects this aspect of Church teaching, although he died in 1992, before CCC was published -- but if he knew of it, he'd say, as he said above, "This is a lie." There's no legitimate way either the Church or civil authorities can evalate the conditions for "just war", there's no such thing.

But the actual teaching of the Church places the responsibility for evaluating the moral conditions of just war on civil authorities, using their prudential judgment. Edward Feser, who recommends Conley's essay in his tweet embedded above, says of prudential judgment:

In contemporary debates in Catholic moral theology, a distinction is often drawn between actions that are flatly ruled out in principle and those whose permissibility or impermissibility is a matter of prudential judgment.

. . . The more complicated and variable the circumstances, the more difficult it can be to decide on a single correct answer and thus the greater the scope for reasonable disagreement.

. . . Abortion and euthanasia are flatly prohibited in all circumstances because they violate the negative precept “Do not murder.” But principles like “Pay a living wage” or “Ensure health care for all” are affirmative precepts, and how best to apply them to concrete circumstances is highly dependent on various complex and contingent economic considerations. There can be no reasonable disagreement among Catholics about whether abortion and euthanasia should be illegal. But there can be reasonable disagreement among them about whether a certain specific minimum wage law is a good idea, or which sort of economic arrangements provide the best way to secure health coverage for all.

The same point can be made about other contemporary controversies, mutatis mutandis.

I'm a little troubled that Bp Conley uses the word "prudential" only once in his essay, and not in the context of the specific designation in CCC 2309, which places the responsibility for evaluating the moral conditions for just war within the prudential judgment of civic authorities. The meaning of CCC 2309's statement as Prof Feser would explain it is clear: these are matters on which reasonable people can disagree; indeed, they're matters on which people can be mistaken. But Feser endorses Bp Conley's pronouncement: "There are certain standards for which we stand, regardless of consequences. Period."

As I read this, Bp Conley is trying to place "just war" theory in territory where certain actions are ruled out in principle -- "period" -- when the Church's teaching explicitly places the evaluation of these actions within prudential judgment. In fact, Bp Conley cites a thinker on "just war" theory whose criticism says the Church is explicitly wrong to place evaluation of moral conditions within prudential judgment -- except that the Church in CCC 2309 does explicitly teach this.

So all I can conclude is that Bp Conley's understanding of Fr Zabelka is imperfect; Fr Zabelka in fact rejects the Church's teaching on "just war", which makes him an odd authority to cite in support of it, especially when he claims to be explaining "Just War 101". But it also suggests that both Conley and Feser are trying to move an argument against the Iran war into territory where certain actions are ruled out in principle, when the Church's teaching makes it clear that they are matters on which reasonable people can disagree.

Why are they doing this? Bp Conley on one hand simply may not be familiar with Fr Zabelka's full career, but I call logical inconsistency on Feser, who after all is a philosophy professor. I'll try to get into this tomorrow if nothing intervenes.