Can you find God in yet another outbreak of war, this one launched this past weekend by our own country against Iran?  If we can’t find Him, does it mean that He has finally abandoned us to our follies as we again demonstrate that man’s inhumanity to man seems to know no bounds?

It is easy to get lost and utterly confused.  Is this a just war?  The Iranian government, oddly a theocracy, oppresses and represses its people, perverting religious devotion in the zealous way the Holy Crusades did.

But, even if so, is war the moral way to correct the abuses?  How is real lasting change effected?  Can brute power bring that about?  Why now?  Is there legal justification?   Are sinister and debased objectives the real motivations?  For instance, a politics of distraction, wealth protection for your friends and the elites cloaked as economic security for the masses, or an insatiable and egomaniac lust for power and dominance.

These are very important and deeply unsettling questions that people of faith must be at the forefront of asking, for they go straight to the question of our humanity.  Underlying such questions must be an intense focus on individual people living in community.  Do we advance in harmony, tolerance, understanding, and peace?

President Trump, we have seen time and again, revels in absolutism and basks in displays of power.  Restraint is not a hallmark of his administration.  His crusade mentality, his fondness for Christian nationalism, and his penchant for invoking God to justify his actions are especially dangerous.  A lesson in this regard could well be learned from Trump’s often cited foil, former President Obama, who spoke about the concept of war in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:

“No holy war can ever be a just war.  For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint — no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one’s own faith. Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but I believe it’s incompatible with the very purpose of faith – for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”¹

Though a moral theologian I am not, Catholic Social Teaching about a just war is instructive in discerning the answers to the questions above.  Some key principles include²:

• A presumption for peace and against war must be the starting point.

• The war itself must be based on legitimate authority, have the right intention, be undertaken only as a last resort, and be proportional in the damage expected to be inflicted, measured against the harm underway or imminently anticipated.

Moral theologians debate whether a just war can ever be launched pre-emptively.  Suffice it to say that the bar for launching a just war must be very high, if it even exists.  Efforts to achieve peace in other ways – diplomacy, we would call it – must be exhausted and beyond the pale of reasonable human expectation.

Five years ago, our own A Faith That Does Justice Vice President and moral theologian Fr. Thomas Massaro SJ and his colleague Father Fred Kramer SJ wrote about this very matter in a Weekly Word column, “Catholic Social Thought and War.”  Just this month, America, the Jesuit review of faith and culture, published as its cover story an insightful and stunningly timely article entitled “‘Just War’ After Trump” with a catchline introduction exclaiming “Just war theory is withering away when we need it more than ever.”

A Faith That Does Justice has always stood for justice for all the Creator’s people, with passionate attention paid to those on the margins who are least able to speak and act for themselves.  Invariably, these are the disproportionately large victims of war, just or not.

In the past, A Faith That Does Justice has taken stances calling for restraint, ceasefires, peace, and international aid in other worldwide conflicts.  Though we focus more often on domestic social justice issues – Lord knows we have more than enough of those – we are keenly aware that these transgressions of human dignity exist and proliferate the world over.

Whether domestic or international, these are all violations of God’s law, and the victims and indeed, even the protagonists, are children of God.  Indeed, precisely because we recognize the protagonists to be also the children of God, we persist in appealing to their inherent humanity to stop war and other injustices, and we continue to pray that God’s grace will penetrate their hearts and change their conduct.

With this as our moral framing, please look with me at the war with Iran and other present-day conflicts and see if you see what I see.  Let us try to discern together.

In the U.S., hypocrisy from our President about his newly launched war (and his past military escapades in Iran and Venezuela and overtures about potential adventurism in Cuba and Greenland) pours from every pore.

He claims to stand with the Iranian people who want freedom from tyrannical rule, freedom to dissent, and the right to govern themselves meaningfully.  Yet here in our country, he squashes dissent, intimidates and mocks with a cruelty seen heretofore only on elementary school playgrounds, and disregards law, norms, and basic tenets of civilized life and discourse.  He proudly proclaims that his only restraint is his own morality.  He lusts for unbridled power.  He wants our borders closed and our sovereignty respected, but thinks nothing of meddling and intervening militarily in the sovereignty of other countries.

To the extent that he has tried to justify a war on Iran to we, the American people (let alone asking Congress for authority as the Constitution requires), his reasons are muddled at best, short-sighted, and transactional.  On all the generally accepted morality tests, my discernment is that this is not a “just war.”

Also deeply disturbing is our partnership in prosecuting the Iranian war with the current governmental leadership in Israel.  This is a government whose conduct of its war against Palestine has been widely seen as grossly disproportional in its response to the acknowledged atrocity of the Hamas attack on Israelites in October 2023.  The Israeli government’s unrelenting bombing campaign and its closure of borders to desperately needed international relief aid of food, medicine, and temporary shelter created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza that many, including some Jews and Israelis, credibly called genocide.  Telling it is that Israel is our only partner.

When Russia invaded Ukraine slightly more than four years ago to the day, our now deceased founder Fr. Peter Gyves SJ, MD, directed our focus to concerns very similar to those we today spotlight.  He worried about those innocents whose lives would be lost, and what the war would prove in the final analysis – an analysis that is far from even starting to be written.

Despite all the supposed strategic planning and intelligence-gathering by top-level governmental security councils, defense or war agencies, intelligence units, and so on, war unleashes unforeseen and devastating consequences every time. That is why “last resort” is an integral component of the “just war” moral theory.

“As people of faith and good will,” Father Peter wrote in his February 2022 message on the Ukraine war,  “we are called to seek and do God’s will, to foster the common good of all, and to denounce those who sow hatred and the desire for dominance over others. To do so, we must live our faith beyond our synagogues, churches, and mosques, and even beyond the well-intentioned temples in our hearts.”

Seeking and finding God’s will is the universal demand of faith traditions, including those who use a different name for the Almighty.  As always, it calls for discernment, which means fundamentally that we do not accept the easy or quick platitudes of the moment, that we dig below the surface, that we look ahead with a wide lens, and that we search for guidance in Scripture and our faith’s teachings.

It also demands that we focus on people and community, not abstractions like government.  Governments exist to serve the people, not the other way around. We tend to forget that so often. That tendency is especially dangerous today when so many governments are tilting toward authoritarianism, which brooks no dissent and equates unswerving loyalty with patriotism.

In recent Weekly Words, our writers have stressed the importance of witness, compassion, and action, especially as it impacts immigrants in our country.  Important though that is, the call to faith-filled social justice applies to all of humanity.

In his Ukraine War message, Father Peter reiterated a theme common to him.  We must, he said, “move beyond our assent to dogma and the ritual observance of faith we profess in our religious institutions, to living faith in action in service to the love, compassion and justice that is the essence of the kingdom of God, a world where we believe God’s love will one day triumph over hate, and God’s desire for life in its fulness will overcome death and human sinfulness.”

In this new tragedy of yet another war:

• What will be your witness? 
• How will you show your compassion? 
• What actions will you take? 

Will you write a letter to the editor calling for tolerance and restraint from a President who seems not to understand either word? Will you write to your U.S. Senators and Representatives demanding that international aid be resurrected and funded again so “soft power” can have a chance to replace the “hard power” of war? Will you protest at the next national No Kings Rally Day on March 28th against authoritarianism? Will you donate to a cause that promotes peace?

Will you accompany an immigrant to court to signal we are all neighbors and ensure the immigrant is treated properly and respectfully? Will you not back down and speak out kindly but firmly when a friend or neighbor says something abhorrent and morally offensive about another, or who shows support for a policy you find cruel and inhumane?

We know you will pray, but prayer is not an escape hatch from action.

1 Barack Obama Nobel Prize lecture, 2009
2 Summary drawn from America, March 2026: “’Just War” After Trump” by Tobias Winright

Tom Dwyer is the President and Executive Director of A Faith That Does Justice. He writes and speaks frequently about the imperatives of faith-filled social justice in building the common good and guiding our responses to political questions.