LM#71--Applying Catholic Just War Teaching To The U.S. Fight With Iran

Iran’s Nuclear Clock Starts Ticking

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Those are the drums of liberty. In 10 days, Iran could have crossed the nuclear finish line. 11 bombs. That is what U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff says Iranian negotiators bragged about behind closed doors just before this war kicked off some 40 days ago. 460 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%, plus roughly 10,000 kilograms of fistle material ready to race to weapons grade in days, not months. And now just 40 days later, and into that moment steps Cardinal Robert McElroy from Washington, D.C., with a very activist rant, sounding like a Latin American dictator, not a churchman. From the pulpit in Washington this past weekend, he calls the U.S.-Iran war immoral. He claims we entered it by choice, not necessity. Got a standing ovation against further military action. Let's talk about it all on this Liberty Minute.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

Why Just War Still Matters

Just Cause And The Bomb Math

Right Intention Or Rescue Mission

Last Resort And Failed Diplomacy

Legitimate Authority In A Nuclear World

Precision War And Human Shields

McElroy’s Verdict And A Harder Question

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Hello, this is David, and welcome back to another Liberty Minute. Today, I'm gonna argue the opposite thing, Cardinal Robert McElroy. A just war in Iran is not only morally possible, given the facts, the overwhelming facts, it is morally unavoidable. And Cardinal McElroy's position, however sincere, echoes an old and dangerous pattern. It sounds less like the tough realism of Catholic just war teaching, and more like naive moralism that once helped Marxist tyrannies stabilize themselves in Europe and throughout Latin America. One of the great privileges of being Catholic is that we inherit a moral cheat sheet. For 2,000 years, the church has wrestled with questions of power, violence, and justice. Just war teaching is not a warm feeling, it is a disciplined framework. It helps us move from emotion to evaluation, from slogan to judgment. It lets us actually use that cheat sheet today. Let us walk through the classic criteria and see whether Cardinal McElroy is right or wrong about this war. We begin with just cause an intimate threat. Iran walked into negotiations in February, bragging that it had the material for around eleven nuclear bombs. Not someday, not if they try really hard. Right then. The numbers are stark. Roughly 460 kilograms at 60% enrichment, and roughly 1,000 kilograms at 20%. The rest at lower levels can be stepped up quickly. At those enrichment levels, experts say the timeline to weapons grade is measured in days, not years. That alone has to get our attention. But the behavior behind the numbers matters just as much. According to Witkoff, the lead negotiator, the Iranians were not ashamed of this cheating. And they had been cheating on the IAEA agreements for the last decade and a half. They were proud of it. Proud that they had evaded oversight, proud that they had maneuvered around the international system and brought themselves to the point where they could build 11 nuclear bombs. A regime that lies, cheats, and then boasts about having fuel for double-digit nuclear arsenal is not a hypothetical danger. Under Catholic teaching, that is the textbook definition of a lasting grave and certain threat. You don't wait until the first mushroom cloud to emit that. Now to move to right intention. Are we pursuing justice and peace or vengeance and domination? Here's where a lot of people get squeamish because they can't imagine that using force could ever be an act of protection. But let us be blunt, this is not a normal state. The Iranian regime has spent decades rolling through terror. Its own security forces have killed tens of thousands of Iranian citizens in past protests, crackdowns, and just some 30 to 40,000 in the last four to five months. Imagine two full Madison Square Gardens emptied by firing squads, the same regime funds and arms, its proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, militias across the region. It has American blood on its hands, some a thousand Americans in the last forty-seven years, Israeli blood, Arab blood, Christian blood. So ask a simple question Is neutralizing the Revolutionary Guard and dismantling its nuclear program an act of imperial cruelty? Or is it an act of rescue? Is it an attack on an innocent state, or is it a painful intervention necessary against a terror machine that slaughters its own people and threatens all its neighbors around it? Why are all the Gulf states on our side? Cardinal McElroy's homily pours emotional and enormous moral energy into criticizing American bombs. He calls the war a needless conflict. He laments the expansion of fighting and the disruption of the world economy, and he gives remarkably little, very little weight to decades of industrial scale repression and external terror that made this conflict inevitable in the first place. That's not balance. That's not selective outrage. Now let us talk about the last resort. Did the United States simply rush into this? Or did we have peaceful options genuinely exhausted? Throughout the whole month of February, six weeks, I believe, Steve Special Envoy Steve Wickoff and Jared Kushner sat down with the Iranians for multiple rounds of talks. The Western side came in looking for a deal that would cap enrichment, restore inspections, random inspections, not any time they could, you know, play the game, move the shell game around the country, restore real inspections, and push the nuclear threshold back from days to years. What did Iran insist on? It said, quote, it had an inalienable right to enrich. No serious verification, no meaningful access for inspectors. At that point, diplomacy is not a path to peace. It's a camouflage for weaponization, and these guys do it for the last 47 years. When one side uses negotiations as a shield to sprint towards the bomb, you're no longer in the realm of maybe one more round of talks. You're in the realm of self-deception. Under the Catholic catechism, legitimate defense requires that all other means be shown to be ineffective or impractical. If a regime is openly bragging that it has 11 bombs worth of fuel and refuses real inspection, then pretending you still have plenty of time to negotiate is not charity. It's moral cowardice. This is the perfect time to bring up another key fact. The United States and this many people just forget this. It only happened six, eight weeks ago. The United States actually offered to buy nuclear energy for Iran for peaceful civil purposes. We said we would pay for it. And they still flatly refused. Think about that. If they truly wanted nuclear energy for pu peaceful peep purposes, which only requires uranium enriched between three and five percent, not the sixty percent that they're currently boasting or we're currently boasting about, this negotiation would have been incredibly easy. The simple stark truth is that anything over 20% enrichment is considered highly enriched. That is highly enriched uranium, and it puts you well on the path to a nuclear bomb. Iran's actions speak louder than their words, and certainly louder than their excuses. They are acting like terrorists. That's what they are. Let's move to the question of what about legitimate authority? A lot of critics jump straight to the Constitution. They say Congress did not formally declare this war, so the whole thing is illegitimate. In a perfect world, Congress would debate and vote before every major operation, but we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a nuclear world. We live with hypersonic missiles, cyber attacks, and seven to ten day nuclear windows. The way the American system has tried to cope with that reality is the war powers framework. Frankly, that's probably unconstitutional if it's ever gets challenged in court. But that's where we've been for the last 50 years. The president can act quickly in response to a real threat. Congress then has to define a window to debate, fund, and cut off ongoing operations if it wants. It is messy, yes. Is it morally serious? It can be if both branches behave like adults. Now keep in mind the Senate voted to limit the president abil the president's ability to continue hostility against Iran, and that vote failed. It failed 53 to 47. In addition, I would also remind you in the chattering classes that President Obama bombed Libya for seven straight months without a peep from the radical Democrats. And what was Libya's aggressions? We had already had the nuclear material taken away. I believe President Bush had taken that nuclear material away from Libya in 2008, right before he left office. Now there's also a prudential question here that some Catholic commentators have raised. Anti-American sentiment inside Iran is at a relatively low point compared to past decades. Many Iranians have already turned against the regime. You can argue about that prudential call, but you can't simply pretend that any use of executive authority in this environment is automatically default unjust. Now we get to the Justin Bello argument, the conduct of the war. And certainly this is where emotions run hottest. And rightly so. Modern campaigns like Operation Epic Fury have been designed around precision. The targets are nuclear facilities, missile sites, IRGC bases, naval assets, command nodes. The goal is to destroy the regime's ability to build and deliver nuclear weapons and to project power through its terror network. Not to terror bomb cities into rubble. And largely that is what we have done, the United States. But even in a precision campaign, innocents will die. That's regrettable. One of the most painful examples is the strike that hit the girls' school. No serious Christian can look at that and shrug. We are required to grieve, to investigate, and to demand accountability. That investigation is still ongoing. Many difficult questions on both sides of that. Now at the same time, just war thinking forces us to ask the hard questions. Who bears the deeper moral responsibility when a school becomes a target? The pilot who drops the bomb on what intelligence shows at the time was an IRGC weapons depot and bedded on a civilian block? Or a terrorist regime that deliberate deliberately hides its weapons among children. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has a long history of putting military infrastructure in schools, hospitals, and mosques precisely to exploit the Western scruples on how we fight our wars. When you turn your own people into human shields, you're weaponizing their bodies. You're counting on Western moral revulsion as part of your defense plan. In that situation, the guilt is not symmetrical. The side using human shields commits the deeper crime, even when Western strikes, if they do, tragically kill those shields. That's just awful logic of a just war in a fallen world. So where does all this leave us? Cardinal McElroy in his homily declared the US entry into the war as morally illegitimate. He insists that it fails all the just war standards, calls on Catholics to tell the president no, not in our name. But when you actually apply the criteria, step by step, objectively, Cardinal McRoy's case collapses. He downplays the imminent nuclear threat. He sidesteps the regime's boasting about cheating. He minimizes the sheer scale of domestic repression and regional terror. He glosses over the failure of negotiations. He treats our constitutional mechanisms as if they don't exist. And he uses unavoidable tragedies in war as proof that the entire effort is immoral, rather than asking who is forcing those tragedies to happen. He's an unserious man in a very serious position. And that's the real tragedy. Now that pattern should sound familiar to students of recent history. In the 1970s and eighties, some Latin American church leaders immersed themselves in liberation theology and focused so relentlessly on condemning Western capitalism and American power that they effectively gave Marxist guerrillas and authoritarian regimes a moral pass. They were not card-carrying communists, but boy, in practice their preaching often weakened resistance to genuinely morally evil systems. Today Cardinal McElroy risks a similar role in a different key. Not with Marxist revolutionaries, but with an Islamic theocracy. Once again, the primary moral fire is directed at the West. Once again, the regime that jails, tortures, and kills its own people benefits from pacifist church rhetoric that undercuts the only force willing to stop it. In today's Liberty Minute, the iron dice of war have been rolling. That is true. The bombs have been falling. And right now they're doing their best to try and stay on the map. So the real question is no longer war or peace. The real question is this do we press forward with precision? With moral seriousness seriousness now? Or do we hesitate, retreat, and wait for a day when a fanatical regime holds eleven nuclear cards in its hands? Just war doctrine is not sentimental pacifism dressed up in Latin. Sometimes it says no, but sometimes when the threat is grave and certain, when diplomacy has failed at all cost, when innocents are already being slaughtered, it says something much harder. It says that refusing to fight can be more immoral than fighting. And here's the challenge I leave you with. If Iran had been allowed to finish its sprint to a nuclear arsenal, if Tel Aviv or Riyadh or a US carrier group vanished one morning in a flash of light, what would we say then? Would Cardinal McRoy's not in our name still sound prophetic? Or would it sound like a weak alibi? Use the 1500 years of just war application, study the criteria yourself, look at the facts, the hard facts, not the applause lines, and then have the courage, the real courage to work at reality, to make a difficult decision if you dare, and let your conscience lead you where the truth actually points. Cardinal McRoy is not on the right side of history.

Final Challenge And Where To Learn More

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at TeamMojoAcademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.