The brutal massacre of Israeli women and children by Hamas terrorists on October 7th momentarily shocked the world. What seemed to shock people even more was the almost immediate demonstrations of “solidarity” with the Hamas killers on American college campuses.
I wonder about those “spontaneous” demonstrations. I was on a bus the next day riding through Georgetown with a young lady who had apparently just come from the pro-Palestinian demonstration at the White House. I found it curious that—a day after the attacks and on a federal holiday weekend—she managed to have a professionally printed and neatly tacked to an appropriately long stick placard to express her “spontaneous” sympathies.
America’s reaction to those demonstrations was one of at least momentary disbelief. Writing in The New York Times October 17, Penn bioethics professor Ezekiel Emanuel opined: “We have failed.” When college students—nominally “educated” people—demonstrate in favor of killers, “we have failed.”
Yes, we have, but not for the reasons I suspect Emanuel thinks. The reason we have failed is that we have abandoned the idea of intrinsically evil acts.
There is no justification to kill innocent women and children. None. Period. Full stop.
Your politics, your historical grievances, your religion—none of it—justifies killing innocent women and children. There is not going to be any case that justifies that. That act in and of itself, regardless of any intentions behind it, can never be allowed. It is intrinsically evil.
I would like people to say that out loud. I would have liked to see Professor Emanuel say that. He gets close to it. “The Hamas massacre is the easiest of moral cases. … They killed babies and children … who could hardly be responsible for the decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence, as if that could be any justification.” So far, so good.
But I fear that’s when the confusion started setting in. “Ethics is rarely either/or ….” He believes “[t]his case offers an unambiguous base to elucidate clear, shared moral principles.” It could … but then Emanuel calls in John Rawls to help him explain how the “clarity of this easy example helps identify principles that allow us to wrestle through harder cases ….”
Maybe. But I wouldn’t take John Rawls as my mentor. More on that in a moment.
Emanuel staggers around in pursuit of a solution. Maybe requiring students to take two ethics courses—one general, one applied—would help. He explicitly salutes Catholic colleges for largely retaining such requirements in core curricula. He asks whether the minimalization of general education requirements have done away with forcing “hard questions.” He takes a backhanded swipe at contemporary wokeness, admitting today’s collegiate ethos “avoid[s] forcing [students] … to articulate and justify their opinions. All opinions are equally valid, we argue. We are fearful of offending them.”
He wants to conduct institution-wide discussions of what being “educated” means and how that compels students to wrestle with difficult moral choices. He wants everybody in on that, including college presidents whom, he argues, should spend a little less time fundraising and a little more time value raising in classrooms. (Good luck on that one!)
Now, I wouldn’t disagree with much of what Emanuel thinks, but I doubt he or most institutions have the nerve to do this. It would require goring a lot of sacred oxen. It would require tossing more intellectual baggage overboard than the sailors on Jonah’s ship. It would require abandoning the dictatorship of relativism.
It would require admitting there are intrinsically evil acts, in theory and in practice.
You’d probably have to fire more than half the faculty to pull that off.
Emanuel wants students to grapple with ethical questions across the curriculum and to have intensive exposure to at least two courses focused on ethics. My question: what ethics?
This is where the dictatorship of relativism will come right back into the picture. The incoherent cacophony of “ethics” on offer today will be buttressed by the relativistic claim that we cannot choose one of them. (Rawls, though not a relativist, himself gets uneasy about more moral judgments in public life than the minimal he thinks necessary.) Indeed, relativism will argue that “critical thinkers” will constantly be “searching” for the “right” ethical “tool” to “speak to” a moral conundrum
Get those signs printed for the solidarity-with-massacres demonstration.
The only “ethic” that is going to give you firm moral guidance on intrinsically evil acts is the Catholic moral tradition, with its natural law grounding and its Aristotelian antecedents. It will talk about acts in themselves, independent of intentions and circumstances, and insist that moral goodness lies in rectitude on each and all those levels. That is not going to be found among the main “ethical” competitors on offer on today’s campus.
It’s not going to be found in Rawls, whose “liberal” philosophy is essentially proceduralist. The problem with proceduralism is that it establishes a process and generally treats conformity to the process as the rectitude of the decision. Rawls’s outsized influence in contemporary America is precisely that focus on process.
In one sense, this is warmed-over Kantianism. Kant, too, “universalized” norms and then made his decisions based on processes. As long as one could “universalize” one’s “imperative,” one was on good ethical ground.
But, as Alasdair MacIntyre noted forty years ago, the only person Kant ever stopped was the person insufficiently creative to formulate his “imperative” so narrowly and so precisely that it fit his case and no other, leaving room for reformulation in future cases. And, if there’s one thing ethicists—especially modern secular ethicists—excel in, is words and word games.
But if we don’t take the proceduralist feint in ethics, where else can we go? The primary competitor is utilitarianism, some version of Mills or Bentham’s morality-by-calculation according to a “pleasure/pain” or “benefit/bane” calculus. Revisionist moral theology in Catholic circles was largely utilitarianism with a dash of holy water. But could these systems ever produce a priori judgments of intrinsic evil? Or, at best, could they only point to “virtually exceptionless norms” (the normative equivalent of “half pregnant”)?
Utilitarianism also requires creativity, but in a different way than proceduralism. Utilitarianism asks for creativity about what factors should be counted when doing one’s moral arithmetic, what counts (and what doesn’t). And how does one argue about that? A may be B’s “inviolate victim” but C’s “ethnic bearer of historical responsibility for my situation of oppression.” B would say one cannot attack A. C would say “you have to crack some eggs to make historical omelets.” How does one adjudicate that seemingly non-quantifiable disagreement?
Utilitarianism in an American context is often, in practice, accompanied by pragmatism. “Democratically” counting up who wins and who loses in a particular moral calculus does not always result in clear moral guidance, as just indicated. So, rather than try to formulate a comprehensive moral theory to “solve” the dilemma once and for all, let’s just handle the “immediate” issue in a “pragmatic” way, while kicking the bigger problem(s) down the road? That will guarantee fodder for at least three years of arguments in the faculty club.
(I fear there is an ecclesiastical strain of the pragmatist virus against which we need to be inoculated. It admits that there are intrinsically evil acts, at least in theory, but then quickly attempts to dissociate that principled insight from how one “pastorally” addresses them. St. John Paul II provided us with solid vaccination against such dichotomies 30 years ago in Veritatis Splendor. We may be due for a booster).
One can, of course, then turn to emotivism, which handles the ethical question by disemboweling ethics. There’s no such thing as “good” or “evil.” “Moral” judgments are simply expressions of feelings: “X is good” means “I like X,” while “Y is bad” means “I don’t like Y.”
But if it’s your feelings (truths) versus my feelings (truths), why should yours prevail?
The Anglo-American world has, of course, also been strongly affected by “linguistic analysis.” Here, the truly creative can bog down in the meaning of words—what they are, what their author might have intended (if that is intelligible), and what their reader interprets—romping through word games about “life” and “innocent” and “victim” and “responsibility,” while life goes on and innocent people die.
Yes, we can teach undergraduates many different ethics, though I fear they will both remain as morally ignorant as they were before but now be tempted to believe they actually know something about morality.
Consider Professor Emanuel’s own field: bioethics. It’s supposed to be the study of the “ethics of life.” But we find “bioethicists” making the case for “post-natal abortion,” i.e., abandonment of unwanted newborns. It’s where linguistic analysts apply euphemisms to justify doing what they want to do by renaming it. Where utilitarians calculate the “benefit” versus “bane” of abandoning a handicapped newborn. Where proceduralists argue for whatever you choose that as long as “autonomy”—choice–is respected. Lots of “ethics” there. Now pick the one most convenient to your agenda.
How did bioethics originate? I will not be simplistic: developments in the biological sciences in the 1970s and subsequently posed new questions that ever broader numbers of people needed to wrestle with.
It’s not that there was no way to address those questions before secular bioethics showed up on stage. By that time, there was a highly developed Catholic medical ethics tradition. But that tradition, with its insistence on intrinsically evil acts, would say “no” to a lot of things to which people wanted to say “yes.” Daniel Callahan, a Catholic who helped co-found the prestigious Hastings Center (a bioethics think tank), saw that something had to go. His choice was the ethic, jettisoned to be replaced by one with a more pliable, “yes” to some of those intrinsically evil “no’s”—like abortion–that Callahan wanted to justify.
If the ethic doesn’t get you to where you want to go, find another ethic.
I fear that is exactly what will happen with Emanuel’s hopes that “ethics” courses will clear up the “skull full of mush” which today’s undergraduates bring to college. But, adapting Professor Charles Kingsfield, I don’t think they’ll leave thinking morally (though they might think like some brand of “ethicist”). The truth is that the substantive morality in most brands of “ethics” being vended in the secular academic marketplace isn’t really very thick.
Like a kidney stone, the current controversy over the intrinsically evil act of killing innocent women and children will likely pass as new items enter the news cycle, moral equivalencies are peddled, and people realize the herd of other sacred cows they’d have to butcher to be consistent with an ethic that countenances intrinsically evil acts.
Which is why this controversy is much bigger than some students at Harvard.
Looking at those protesting students, Americans got a glimpse of the “skull full of mush” to which modern ethical thinking has led Western man—and didn’t like what they saw. They didn’t like what they saw because it seemed so deeply to clash with their instinctive moral sense about the murders of women and children in Israel two weeks ago.
But have they thought about what else is implied in following that insight to its logical conclusion?
A deeper problem is whether we really believe that there is such a thing–theoretically and practically—as evil. Most Americans likely would say “yes” but, if cornered, would also begin temporizing, in the name of being nice, about how frequent or common such things might be in everyday life. Once upon a time, Catholics would have acknowledged the threat of its proximity, if not its frequency: we used to talk regularly about “mortal sin” and didn’t think that it maybe occurs only in the lives of a Hitler or Stalin.
But taking evil seriously requires a transcendent horizon and we’ve also lost that, often substituting some generic “spirituality” for it. Our agnosticism about a postmortem moral judgment with eternal consequences has led to cultural babble about all dogs and people going to heaven and a practical ignorance about what we really think happens after death. The practical upshot is what William Buckley warned against: “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!”
That’s a nice way of saying: don’t compress God’s eternal moral judgments into time. Don’t do it because (a) you’re not God; (b) those moral acts are still being played out in history (which is under Divine Providence); (c) history is too short a timeframe to render eternal verities; (d) earth is not heaven and (e) can only be transformed by divine grace, not human agency. Nevertheless, people try to do all those things: woke-ism is the latest in a long line of failed experiments—“history realizing itself,” “justice bending moral arcs,” and “socialism building the new man”—in which human beings tried to make “heaven a place on earth.”
In the end, however, such experiments cannot take evil seriously because the full malignancy of evil cannot fit into human time. Woke-ism “overcomes” that problem by ignoring its transcendent dimension: it tries to deal with its temporal consequences while feigning ignorance about any eternal ones.
But, since justice cannot be inaugurated in its fulness in this world, at least by human agency, their efforts become misdirected. The quest for identifying evil becomes endless, the futile drive for its temporal eradication more vociferous. The “passionate intensity” that drives such “social justice” votaries derives from failing to have hope in a second coming while trying to achieve a secular parody of it using the inadequacy of human strength alone.
Feigning ignorance about what happens after death while impotent to fix moral evil in this world, evil ceases to be a malignant privation requiring supernatural intervention. It instead becomes a flaw, a weakness that perhaps a change of consciousness about one’s “privilege” or “microaggressions” might fix. This slow motion nihilism thinks it can produce a secular chorus of Kumbaya.
Evil broke out in heaven (Rev 12:7) before man’s time on earth, and hell will burn after the Second Coming. That is so because God will not destroy what is (because what is, is good) yet He cannot, at the same time, remake evil as good, pretend the privation of good in evil is just a “different” kind of good. “All things are subject to Him” (Heb 2:8, Eph 1:22) means, even in freedom—misused freedom—good is good and evil, evil. And while man may have brought evil about in his world (albeit with diabolical encouragement), he is impotent to close that Pandora’s Box.
That is why, contrary to the immanentizers of the eschaton, we are given Hope. That is why within two months we will again recognize that the Solution–that takes evil in its full transcendent dimension seriously–is Emmanuel, God-with-us come in the flesh.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
The time for these kinds of academic discussions about ethics and morality – their philosophical underpinnings, their historical proponents, the subtleties of their arguments – is long passed. We have no option as Catholics but to review the time-honored and perennial teachings of our Church on this topic. And, then, we have no choice but to speak out boldly – both within or Church (for we have rogue players among us) and in the public square – and to proclaim these ethics and morals truthfully and boldly. It might get is censured; it might get us killed; we might lose our jobs; we might lose family and friends; we might be persecuted. But despite it all, we will save our souls from eternal damnation because God will have our back. And while we’re reviewing the truth-claims of our Catholic Church and proclaiming them with ardor, let’s never forget that we must also live them out in our personal lives and, when we fail to do so, to seek reconcilation in the Sacrament.
We must stop compromising with evil talk, evil ideas, evil minds and evil men. Finally, we must remember that you can NEVER have Christian charity without first being truthful. Love can NEVER be in our heart where it is based on lies.
Less talk; more truth.
OK, but the world is talking about it now, so perhaps we need to enter that discussion? Is this an opening?
Agreed. My impatience is with academic discussions that don’t eventuate in the proclamation of what we know (or should know) to be the revealed Truth.
Agreed, except that the voices that should be proclaiming it — inside the Church — are also largely silent. Yes, Franciscus condemned killings and called for peace and justice in jus in bello. So did everybody else, in one form or another. What we needed from the Church is saying that moral views which allow this kind of intrinsic evil need to be banished from the public square — and WHO said that?
Yes, Jesuit-speak is the sickening language of non-proclamation.
Bet on it.
I’m sick of the hypocrisy of these people since they and their political masters, I have no doubt,also support the destruction of the unborn!!! Try telling them this is wrong and they go mental! The only good thing that has come out of this, so far, was that a Planned Parenthood “clinic” took a direct hit! Well done to the Israeli pilot who did this 👌
We read: “The only ‘ethic’ that is going to give you firm moral guidance on intrinsically evil acts is the Catholic moral tradition, with its natural law grounding…;” AND “The problem with proceduralism is that it establishes a process and generally treats conformity to the process as the rectitude of the decision.”
On the FIRST point, natural law is grounded and directly baked into the very nature of each human person. It’s this “concreteness” which seems to elude the current attentiveness to “concrete” imperatives, as falsely polarized from disdained “abstractions” (as in Evangelii Gaudium’s “realities are more important than ideas”?).
So, about the “Catholic moral tradition,” “The Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 95).
So why the synodal votes on moral issues, as if possibly reduced/mitigated personal culpability creates an entirely new category of exemption from moral absolutes?
On this activated SECOND point of “proceduralism,” rather than Grech and Hollerich (or even the Holy Spirit), how much of the “leadership” of synodality is John Rawls (and Kant)? That is, how can the synodal “mission” of the Church consist of kneading moral absolutes and ecclesial identity into the same dough as addressing homelessness or whatever? While synodality is said to be “not a parliament”…is it still the unquestioned idea (“proceduralism”) that presumes itself to be exceptionally privileged as “concrete” and NOT another idea?
Parsing Marshall McLuhan, “The process [not the magisterium] IS the message.”
“When college students-nominally “educated” people- demonstrate in favor of killers, “we have failed.” We’ve had five decades of people, including college students, marching and demonstrating in favor of abortion and only now this idea that we have failed occurs to someone. Any mention of God in public life has been done away with. Many so called leaders have championed the ability of a mother to kill her own child. Many others continue, election after election, to vote for those who support this intrinsic evil. So I now ask, is it really any surprise that many of our young, and old, people are so deformed in their moral compass that they march and demonstrate in support of what hamas did?
Thank you: Michael Pakulak made the same observation last week in The Catholic Thing–why are we surprised people march to support killing when they have spent fifty years marching to support killing? I intended to comment on that but the essay was already too long. But thank you.
This article rests on a wholly irrelevant premiss. The discussion should not be about intrinsically evil acts.
The first thing to understand about Hamas is that everything it does is based on Islamic law, which according to Islam was revealed to Muhammad.
Islamic law alone dictates that Palestine is an Islamic endowment (waqf) which belongs to the Muslims for all time. The State of Israel (or the Zionist entity as Hamas puts it) is a manifestation of rebellion against Islam by Jewish infidels who, according to the Qur’an, are the sons of apes and pigs. Article Seven of the Hamas Charter contains what in Islam is the divine warrant for genocide:
“The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslems, O Abdulla [servant of Allah], there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).”
In Islam, the killing of all Jews everywhere is not an intrinsically evil act, but is intrinsically good and of obligation for the Muslims.
In this light, it would be an intrinsically good act, because in accordance with the Law of the true God, the LORD, for Israel to identify Islam as the service of a false god at the word of a false prophet, and to criminalise it on pain of capital punishment.
You seem to have missed the entire point of the Dr. Grondelski’s piece. The essay was about reaction in the United States, not about the motivation behind the attacks.
I’ve certainly missed your characterisation of the point of the article, though I should have expected an exploration of the roots of the genocidal violence of Hamas.
I would insist it is about intrinsically evil acts because, whether or not Islam uses the term or recognizes them, the Catholic discussion of intrinsically evil acts is grounded in human nature–something shared by Muslims–and, therefore, is binding on them, whether or not the tenets of Islam admit it.
“…the Catholic discussion of intrinsically evil acts is grounded in human nature–something shared by Muslims–and, therefore, is binding on them…”.
Not true!
The Koran is the “cornerstone” upon which eveything else is subservient including the concept of human nature! Please refer to Pope Benedict’s masterpiece of Western Civilization and Christianity known as “the Regensburg Address” of 2006…
Let me tease your argument a little further. If “everything” in Islam is based on revealed Islamic law, on what basis did the Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb sign the “fraternity” document with Pope Francis? I’d go a step forward and ask: in contrast to Francis, who has pleaded for peace, has anybody heard anything from the Grand Imam condemning this “lack of fraternity?” If so, please point it out.
I would refer you to the website http://www.memri.org, but I imagine that you already know about it. There are some truly frightening pieces there.
Hamas has stated over and over that it will settle for nothing less than the complete destruction of the state of Israel, IOW the state of Israel has no right to exist. The state of Israel, understandably, disagrees. Therefore it is fair to conclude that this war will go on and on.
I looked up two of the pro Palestinian groups that were protesting in DC recently & both have received funds from George Soros’s foundation. Ditto for Amnesty International.
I attended an auto workers union rally in MS several years ago. I don’t believe there was much local support for bringing in the union. The auto plant workers were paid way, way more than the average income for that area. But we saw busloads of people arrive with placards & tshirts, probably at the expense of the union.
One tshirt said “Students Against Slave Labor” or something equivalent. Which didn’t really fit the situation since every auto worker there made a great deal more than I’ve ever earned or expect to earn.
Good to ‘hear’ the secular ethics arguments, Utilitarianism, Linguistic Analysis and so on again, a reminder of the folly of what W Buckley warned as immanentizing the eschaton. It features the brand of ethics now in vogue in the Synod on Synodality Follies.
Grondelski, well versed having taught ethics focuses on intrinsic evil. There are acts that in any situation whatsoever remain intrinsically evil because of the nature of the act, homosexuality being one. Insofar as killing we’re dealing with a very wide spectrum of both circumstantial and conscientious considerations. Killing itself is not always murder, nor is it intrinsically evil. Mutilation has more of the feature of intrinsic evil. Although Judith, heroine and Judge of Israel decked herself out to seduce Assyrian general Holofernes, when plied with beauty and wine then severed his head and returned victoriously to her Israelite people. Castilian Spaniards during the Reconquista meted out the same brutal dismemberment of Muslims as did the Muslims.
Aquinas centers moral judgment on the act, and it’s been my standard since doctoral studies that what determines the final judgment of good or evil is the act itself, what the act does rather than intent. Although, the intent must be good. Now there are difficulties on this score. For example, if the Saudis responsible for the Twin Towers tragedy conscientiously believed they were pleasing God, were they exempt from culpability? It seems that some situations need to be weighed regarding instances that in all appearances are intrinsically evil may not be. John Paul II had difficulty in compliance with the ban on Jericho, when scripture says God demanded that all citizens, women and children included be slaughtered. Even animals. That Saul kept some of the cattle for himself God censured him severely for disobedience, resulting in his rejection in favor of David. Although, as Aquinas thought, God is the ultimate ‘decider’ on what is evil and what is not. David committed a more heinous act committing adultery with Bathsheba, then arranging for the murder of her husband Uriah, and was forgiven. Although, both Saul and David sought forgiveness.
From this writer’s perspective it’s likely that the perceived good, or the malevolence of such acts may determine culpability, such as the malevolence of implacable hatred. Nevertheless, Grondelski is correct that what is revealed as intrinsically evil, both to the intellect in accordance with natural law, and as determined by God must be the gold standard for ethical evaluation.
Your reference to King Saul has nothing to do with Jericho. It has everything to do with God’s punishment of the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15) for what they did to the Israelites as they came out of Egypt. Such was their genocidal hatred for the Israelites that they had no fear of God even in the face of His signs and wonders by which He delivered the Israelites out of Egypt.
Thanks for the correction Michael.
Insofar as America’s one sided reaction, Emanuel’s “We have failed”, Grondelski agrees with the failure, disagrees with the approach to resolution. Unfortunately not all Catholics agree with the spontaneous response of Israel condemnation since academia has assured that irrational response. Nevertheless, the acts of savage mutilation, sexual atrocity display contemptuous disregard of persons and are therefore intrinsically evil .
“The cause of evil is the defection of the will of a being who is mutably good from the Good which is immutable. This happened first in the case of the angels and, afterward, that of man. This was the primal lapse of the rational creature, that is, his first privation of the good. In train of this there crept in, even without his willing it, ignorance of the right things to do and also an appetite for noxious things. And these brought along with them, as their companions, error and misery. When these two evils are felt to be imminent, the soul’s motion in flight from them is called fear. Moreover, as the soul’s appetites are satisfied by things harmful or at least inane–and as it fails to recognize the error of its ways–it falls victim to unwholesome pleasures or may even be exhilarated by vain joys. From these tainted springs of action–moved by the lash of appetite rather than a feeling of plenty–there flows out every kind of misery which is now the lot of rational natures.” St. Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope & Love 23-24
There’s not much with to disagree in this essay. It is surely relevant, however, to consider the composition of the pro-Hamas crowds both here and in Europe. While there are contingents of Marxist indoctrinated white students in these mobs, they don’t come close to making up the majority. I also wonder about the background of the young woman on Dr. Grondelski’s bus.
I don’t think Muslims consult the Magisterium of the Catholic Church when evaluating whether whatever acts of violence they may be contemplating meet the requirements of the just war doctrine. Nor should we expect them to. The same is also true, of course, of the other side of this Middle Eastern conflict. In the span of a week, it has bombed a hospital and a church in Gaza.
While there are certainly grave problems in Western society, they are not at all being solved by bringing in people who celebrate these acts of utter depravity.
Which other side besides Hamas bombed a hospital & school?
I wonder about those “spontaneous” demonstrations
They aren’t spontaneous. They are orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood-funded Islamists at work in America, e.g., CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, Students for Justice in Palestine. Worth noting that CAIR and ISNA are official “dialogue” partners of the USCCB.
If people in Gaza were being treated so horribly that pro-Hamas protestors worldwide now claim that the brutal mass murder of innocent civilians by Hamas was justified (which, of course, it wasn’t), where were such protestors before the Hamas attack on Israel?
If the injustices the people of Gaza were enduring were that horrific, why weren’t they protesting long before the attack? That would have increased public awareness of the situation, which, if it was truly that horrific, could have been the beginning of a peaceful correction of the situation. Hamas murdering innocent civilians was not going to gain public sympathy for their cause. Doing so was stupid.
These pro-Hamas protestors have obviously been indoctrinated and are just as obviously being manipulated by powers that couldn’t care less about the well being of the people of Gaza or of Israel. In fact they hate both.
Who are these powers? What is their true agenda?
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
–Ephesians 6:12
I have recently written (https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2023/07/18/we-need-to-discuss-just-war-theory/ ) that we need to adapt just war theory to current circumstances. By “adapt,” I do not mean deform: I mean discuss how its principles apply to current circumstances, e.g., what constitutes aggression, particularly when conducted with elements of plausible deniability? I do not deny the combatant/noncombatant distinction, but I also think we need to address how do we deal with that distinction when combatants deliberately hide themselves and their warmaking capacities behind noncombatant shields? I also think we need to address the question of the AFFIRMATIVE obligations of people living under unjust regimes to fix matters on their own, which is why I am replying to this comment. At what point do Gazans, living for decades under a terrorist organization that uses them as shields, have an obligation to act to extract themselves from that situation? These would be valuable issues for Catholic moralists to address, but I fear that discussion is inhibited by a general reactive pacifism that thinks engaging with just war theory sanctions war and, therefore, is best “dealt with” by being ignored.
Thank you for your extremely thoughtful reply.
In the span of a week, [Israel] has bombed a hospital and a church in Gaza.
The hospital was “bombed” by an errant rocket launched by Hamas. Surely you know this.
I know no such thing. The errant Hamas rocket theory is very doubtful for a number of reasons that you can easily look up.
Feel free to name those reasons and the sources, “Tony W” (mock quotes for anti-semites who hind behind quasi-anonymous online identities fully intended).
The Anglican archbishop who administers the hospital and cannot be easily dismissed as a Hamas stooge, claims that the IDF repeatedly sent phone and text warnings to evacuate. Hamas rockets are generally not thought to be powerful enough to cause the kind of damage inflicted here; bombs used by the Israeli Air Force are. The IDF then claimed that the Hamas rocket hit ammunition being stored at the hospital which then magnified the destruction, but no secondary explosions were detected. The video produced by the IDF does not prove that a rocket hit the hospital; on the contrary the rocket appears to break up in midair.
Sorry Tony, but you are wrong. First of all, the hospital was not bombed. It is still standing. The missile, fired by islamic jihad hit the parking lot…not the hospital. Secondly, yes…islamic jihad fired the missile. There is video and still photo evidence of this. It is FACT. You may want to believe that those dirty jooz blew up a hospital and killed 500+ people, but that does not make it true.
There is no “utter depravity” on “the other side” (as you call them). The Israelis are simply doing what they must do to protect their citizens from muslim savages slaughtering, raping, dismembering, and kidnapping said innocent citizens.
They should be lauded for ridding the world of those animals.
I fully support Israel’s right to self defense and they absolutely need to target terrorists who behaved worse than animals but I don’t think we should call human beings animals.
Hamas indoctrinates Gazan children from an early age and creates a culture that elevates terrorists to freedom fighters for a righteous cause.
The Jerusalem Post has had two articles about the drugs given to young Hamas terrorists to enable them to commit the most barbarous acts.
Evil lurks in each of our hearts and given the right culture, brainwashing, and drugs who knows how anyone might behave? Massacres and murders of the innocent are a fallen human nature tragedy that we’ve seen play out in any number of societies.
A former Hezbollah member who converted to Christianity has spoken about this in a recent interview on a Christian tv network.
I quite agree about calling people animals and unfortunately, the Israeli government has done much over years to fuel Hamas terrorism not least by acting (as it is now) with dreadful, indiscriminate violence themselves. Even as I write there is a hideous carpet-bombing of Gaza that really qualifies as genocide. Israeli attempts to justify this as ‘targeted’ need to be taken with more than a grain of salt – not least as spokespeople have actually said recently they’re prioritising damage over accuracy and that no Gazan civilians are innocent (not even babies it would appear!) A war crime is a war crime is a war crime – in the words of the wonderful Israeli human rights organisation B’TSelem, one crime does not justify another. Recently I noticed that one pro-Palestinian protester held a sign to similar effect while another read ‘Gaza is not Hamas’. We mustn’t assume all protesters are supporting Hamas war crimes as opposed to protesting Israeli ones (which are no less real, Israeli propaganda notwithstanding).
I’m going to reply to a comment below just to clarify that I absolutely do not consider Israel’s self defense actions to be “war crimes “.
It seems we only tolerate and have sympathy for Jews when they are docile victims. When they defend themselves all the old stereotypes and conspiracy theories emerge.
It’s been very disheartening to hear myths circulating that should have been debunked centuries ago. I don’t specifically direct this at the commenter but at other Catholics who should know better. Our separated Protestant brethren seem to understand this and historically have a better record concerning antisemitism. Not a perfect record by any means, but a better one.
As for beginning a discussion, there is little to no scenario by which I would ever now expect a homily on “intrinsic evil” from our pulpit here though the “promotional response” “eye-for-an-eye” would be encouraged if not supported if not first discouraged as not to be discussed in polite company. To many, “intrinsic evil” is too Calvinistic or “totally depravity” to be addressed by the laity independent of well supported and sustained theology. A minimum of a pastoral letter may be required to introduce the topic for further rational discussion…..”intrinsically evil” suggest that God may have abandoned these souls to their chosen behaviors while we are learning that many of the behaviors ares drug induced. As Catholics, we believe that God is All Good, Will Only the Good, incapable of evil…certainly sharing that Islam believes that Islamic God can will be good or evil, even intrinsically evil strongly infers that intrinsic evil is outside the bounds of redemption and salvation. So where do we go from here, only to Jesus, only to Jesus.
Israel’s savagery is worse and more calculated and more helpless. Israel relishes sharing in savagery and outdoing what was shared with it.
Israel wants to be lauded for its own savagery. Israel wants the the laud the terrorists want for themselves and Israel wants to outdo it.
Israel wants to attain its own exceptional behaviour of beastliness.
Whoa. Self defense doesn’t equate to savagery.