Pope Is Wrong on 'Just War'; Iran Would Annihilate Israel

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | June 9, 2026

Pope Leo has again declared that the war against Iran does not qualify as a just war under Catholic teaching. "I believe it has been already declared clearly," Leo told Italian journalist Franca Giansoldati of Il Messaggero. "There is no just war there," he said, referencing the conflict.

The remark came in response to Vice President JD Vance, who invoked just war theory in April to justify the military campaign against Iran. Vance pointedly told the pope to "be careful" when venturing into theology. He was right to say so.

In the Gaza war — which has been systematically misrepresented by the Western media — the IDF routinely dropped leaflets and sent text messages before strikes to warn civilians. They do not intentionally target civilians.

John Spencer, the American military scholar and firsthand observer of the Gaza war, has testified repeatedly that the IDF has done more than any military in history to avoid civilian casualties.

But because Hamas deliberately embeds itself within civilian homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques, it invites attacks that will necessarily produce civilian deaths. That is a war crime — Hamas's war crime, not Israel's.

Israeli forces consistently try to avoid civilians. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC purposely target them. This is the central moral disparity the mainstream media refuses to report.

The joint American-Israeli strikes were not aggression. They were prevention — protecting the world from nuclear war and nuclear blackmail.

The true Augustine would call this a just war.

The Just War Tradition

Just war theory has a long and distinguished pedigree. Its roots lie in classical Roman philosophy, particularly Cicero, who argued that war must be declared by proper authority, waged for a just cause, and conducted with restraint. Christian theology absorbed and deepened those principles. Augustine gave them their first coherent theological framework. Aquinas systematized them. Medieval and early-modern legal thinkers extended them into the foundations of international humanitarian law. The through-line across twenty centuries is consistent: war can be morally justified, but only under strict conditions, and its conduct must remain bound by moral law.

The conditions are well established: just cause, right intention, legitimate authority, last resort, probability of success, and proportionality. Iran's theocratic regime — which has enshrined "Death to Israel" and "Death to America" as state policy, which funds proxy armies across the Middle East, which has launched direct missile strikes against Israeli territory, and which openly pursues nuclear capability for the purpose of annihilation — meets the threshold for just cause by any honest application of the tradition. If this does not constitute just cause, one must ask the pope what would.

Jews and the Question of War

It is worth noting that just war theory, as a formal category, is a Christian construct. Jewish religious tradition approaches warfare differently — not from abstract philosophical principles but from concrete, historically conditioned reasoning rooted in Torah and rabbinic law.

The Hebrew Bible and rabbinic texts do not traffic in philosophical categories. Jews did not engage in systematic philosophical thought until the Middle Ages, and their tradition is marked by patterns of reasoning that diverge sharply from both Christian and Islamic frameworks. Jews have no Augustine.

A more practical reason explains the gap: between 70 CE and 1948, the Jewish people existed in diaspora. Without political sovereignty, they neither needed nor had opportunity to develop a theology of warfare. The question was largely theoretical for nearly two millennia.

Judaism's approach to violence is governed instead by the principle of self-defense and the priority of preserving life — pikuach nefesh. It is neither bellicose nor pacifist. The biblical narratives of conquest have historically been treated by mainstream Judaism as bound to their specific historical context, not as templates for contemporary statecraft.

Modern Israel has changed that equation decisively. The IDF operates under a formal code of ethics — Tohar HaNeshek, purity of arms — that draws in part on Jewish tradition. In practice, this means warning civilian populations before strikes, accepting operational risk to avoid non-combatant casualties, and maintaining legal accountability for battlefield conduct. Critics may dispute Israel's execution of these standards. But the standards exist and are enforced. No equivalent framework governs Hamas, Hezbollah, or the IRGC. The contrast is not subtle.

The Pope's Blind Spot

Pope Leo writes in his encyclical like a liberal Protestant of the 1930s — with faith that war can be abolished in this fallen world, that all we need is to listen to one another and reason together, and that world bodies like the United Nations can broker peace between civilizations. Only an observer with his head firmly in the sand would say such things in 2026.

There is nothing in his encyclical about Communist totalitarianism or terrorist governments ruled by religious fanatics. As if a seminar room with the IRGC, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu might produce world peace.

Israel may not use the language of just war. But that is precisely what it is waging — a war of survival against adversaries who have stated plainly and repeatedly that their objective is annihilation.

Pope Leo's statement is not merely mistaken on the merits. It reflects a failure of moral imagination. He appears not to have reckoned seriously with what Iran actually is — a regime that calls for the erasure of a sovereign nation, that arms terrorists, that fires ballistic missiles at civilian populations, and that pursues nuclear weapons for purposes it has never disguised. To declare that resisting such a regime fails the test of just war is not a sophisticated theological position. It is a category error wrapped in the language of peacemaking.

It also reflects a failure of historical memory. The Jewish people carry within living memory the systematic murder of six million of their own. They have watched a genocidal ideology arise again, this time wrapped in Quranic language and backed by state power. The pope's sympathies, if not his theology, appear to lie elsewhere. That is his prerogative. But he should not expect Jews — or the many Christians who stand with them — to follow.

I am willing to die for Christ. I am not willing to stand aside while Islamic fundamentalists determine the fate of the Jewish people or the free world. Neither, it seems, is Israel.

The pope would do well to reconsider. History will not be kind to those who called a war of survival unjust.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and publisher of VirtueOnline (virtueonline.org), one of the most widely read orthodox Anglican news and commentary sites in the world. His Substack on the Middle East: davidvirtue2.substack.com