A Solution to Ending the Church’s Leadership’s Loveless Indifference Toward Those It Groomed via the Just War Theory to Go Into the Military and War

A Solution to  Ending the Church’s Leadership’s Loveless Indifference

Toward Those It Groomed via Just War Theory to Go Into the Military and War

It is with more than a modicum of moral doubt that I have entered upon this moral-legal issue of the U.S. rejecting selective conscientious objection as a matter of law, that is, of the flagrant disrespect of the consciences of everyone who is religiously brought up to believe in the just war theory as the standard to determine whether they can morally participate in the lethal combat of war.

As a follower of the Jesus of the Gospels, I know that the Christian just war standards are radically and logically incompatible with what Jesus taught as God’s will when He walked on earth. I also know that the U.S. Government gives total legal protection, that is, it gives total  immunity from participating in the lethal combat of war to the Catholic Church and to Catholics as long as the Church and the Catholic teach and live what Jesus in the Gospels taught and lived in relation to violence. That is, it gives conscientious objector ( CO) status.

But as a Catholic I know that my Church has rarely taught its members for the last 1700 years to follow the Way of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels. Instead, for most of its existence, it has aggressively nurtured billions of Christians into believing that they do not have to follow the Way of Jesus but can follow some reasonably devised substitute way called the just war theory which they are told is spiritually, morally and logically compatible with the teaching of Jesus regarding God’s will. This is done while simultaneously callously and  ruthlessly abandoning all Catholics who follow this theory to legally fend for themselves when in a war they are confronted with a military command to unjustly kill another human being.

As a human being I know that most of my fellow human beings have consciences that communicate to them that they are to do good and avoid evil, however they may understand good and evil, and most of those consciences prohibit murder, the unjust killing of another person, albeit their definitions of unjust differ widely.

It is this sweeping and far reaching “fend for yourself” chosen “lovelessness by indifference” of my Catholic Church and its leaders that brings me to spend a segment of the life’s time God bestowed on me to raise and confront the institutional Catholic Church and its leaders on leaving its just war members and adherents without a scintilla of legal protection if they refuse to kill in a particular war because it is unjust or because a particular act of killing in war is seen as unjustified killing, murder. For example, if a Catholic college Navy or Air Force ROTC graduate is ordered to strafe or bomb from a multi-billion dollar fighter jet, a village, wherein the vast majority of human beings are pregnant women,  babies, women and civilian men, how does he or she legally refuse to follow this order? Or, can he or she simply go ahead and in his or her conscience murder these people because they were ordered to do so under threat of very serious punishment? Morally equivalent murderous situations to this occur every day on land, sea and air in modern high tech war. Yet, the Church, after serving Catholic boys and girls up to the military via Catholic Just War Theory, like Pilate, washes its hands when the concrete issue of following orders and committing murder arises.

Yet, there is so much, which an extremely powerful, wealthy and massively influential institution like the Catholic Church  could practically and effectively do to legally protect those just war Catholics in the U.S. Military. For example, in my estimation and that of many legal scholars, a pastorally and legally sound, non-speculative action with a high probability of success would be the following.

In the U.S., Gillette v United States, 401 U.S. 437 (1971) is  the only obstacle standing between  you or your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren or the Catholic Church or all Christians and Christian Churches that  prevents them, if they are just war Churches or Christians, from legally saying, “No,” if the state or military attempts to force them  to unjustly kill an innocent person(s), that is to murder people in war.

Whatever the factually artificial  legal legs Gillette had to stand on in 1971, whatever fictitious factual feet it had under it in 1971,that were employed to justify legally forcing people to kill innocent people, when such a killing was in their conscience understood to be the intrinsically grave evil of murder, those factual peg-legs and feet of clay no longer legally exist due to The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)is a 1993 United States Federal Law that “ensures that interests in religious freedom are protected.” The law was passed by a near unanimous vote in the House and in the Senate in response to the United States Supreme Court‘s 1990 decision which held that “neutral laws of general applicability” that burden the free exercise of religion do not violate the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. RFRA now  requires that strict scrutiny be applied to any law that burdens religious freedom, providing that such law can then only be justified if it is the least restrictive means of pursuing a compelling government interest.

Attached below is the finest legal article to date on why and how The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) ends the reign of Gillette as the governing law of the land in relation to selective conscientious objection. It has already been decided  by the U.S. Supreme Court in cases involving Covid vaccination that RFRA  applies to the Military. So the only step that remains to remove the Gillette legal albatross from the backs of Catholics, Christians and all religious just war SCOs is for someone or some institution,

with the financial resources and the competent  juridical advocacy skills necessary, to pursue such a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, to bring a specific, contemporary case of SCO denial by the Military into the Federal judicial system.

A multi-billion or trillion dollar institutional Church that teaches just war theory as a component of its religion—with a legion of exquisitely competent Federal attorneys and Constitutional lawyers on retainer at its beck and call as well as twenty-five American Bar Association accredited U.S. law schools and their faculties under its canonical and legal wing—would be the ideal support system behind the effort to free just war religious believers from ever finding themselves in the position, whether in or out of the military, of being forced to kill a fellow human being when in conscience he or she discerned such a killing to be unjustified, that is, morally murder.

The attached article is a scholarly legal gem. Yet it is not burdened with legal jargon that would render it uninterpretable by legally untrained people. It is, however, lengthy but should be enthralling reading once it is realized that it is all about flesh and blood Christians and people in North America who have struggled across centuries to be Christian and to be human against what the New Testament calls “The Beast,” aka, the intrinsically violent and deceitful state.

If it turns out that someone does not have the motivation to read the entire text, I would suggest to begin about half way through it at the section titled, The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. I have highlighted and underlined a significant amount of this section of the article to assist in grasping its importance in preventing the state from ordering anyone to kill when his or her conscience dictates that such killing would be for them murder, and hence absolutely morally impermissible.

But, if one cannot find the motivation to fully read the attached article or even half of it, here are its conclusions, although they cannot possibly be grasped as the powerful statements in fact they are without being aware of the content, logic and evidence from which they were derived.

“The different treatment of SCOs and GCOs (General Conscientious Objectors) has rested on faulty premises for over forty years. There is no evidence that allowing a combat exemption for SCOs 

will result in a flood of false CO claims.

In addition, the view that SCOs are more likely to base their objections on political rather than religious considerations fails to appreciate the necessary interplay between political facts and religious conclusions as illustrated by the just war doctrine. That interplay, however, does not render the just war doctrine any less of an exercise of religion. The General Conscientious Objection exemption has been expanded con-sistently from the Civil War until the Supreme Court’s Gillette decision in 1971. Through RFRA, Congress has reasserted the primacy of religious liberty, and it appears that SCOs may finally receive protection from being forced into combat service in violation of their religious beliefs.”

If the institutional Church and its overseer or governors do not want to do this, then in the name of Christ, do something! Your chronic lack of interest in the spiritual,  moral and psychological destructiveness of the absence of  legal protection for the just war Catholic selective conscientious objector in the military borders on individual and collective grave evil. Where more is required, silence and indifference are sinful! Unjustified killing via a high tech fighter jet over Iran or Syria is no less murder than unjustified killing via a high tech suction machine in an abortion clinic or hospital. Do something for the Catholic selective conscientious objectors in the military being forced into unjustified killing. Do something that is on a par with what it has done to protect Catholics from being forced into supporting abortion procedures in hospitals and clinics. As I have previously written “a murder is a murder is a murder.” Christlike love mandates infinitely more than abstract detachment and blasé apathy in this situation in life. Options to help exist. The motivation to pursue them by those that have the wherewithal to successfully pursue them is what is missing.

Of course, as said in the beginning, if the Catholic Church would simply teach about violence what Jesus teaches by word and deed in the Gospels about violence, namely He rejects it,  instead of slavishly following Augustine and his Stoic philosophical illusion called just war theory, every legal-moral issue related to SCO would vanish like smoke in the fire because there would be no Catholics in a military anywhere to kill anybody. Parenthetically but not incidentally, wouldn’t that witness to loving as the Nonviolent Jesus loves every sons and daughters of the Father of all, to living the love that raised Jesus from the dead, be a near unsurpassable means of evangelization, of inviting human beings to believe in the Jesus and His Way of Nonviolent Love of all at all times and to follow Him in life and in death along that Way to the empty tomb?

But, the situation as it presently exists is so personally spiritually and morally destructive that the Catholic Church, its Bishops and its laity must help in a Christlike manner where we have some practical means to help our brothers and sisters in Christ, today and apparently for many tomorrows into the future, who are and will be in dreadful eternal and temporal need of some recourse other than becoming a murderer or becoming a martyr if they go into the U.S. Military under the auspices of Catholic Just War Theory and are confronted with an order to kill an innocent human being(s).

Doesn’t the love of Christ, the love that is Christand the love of God who is love urgently impel the institutional Catholic Church, its leaders and its laity to rectify this morally abominable snare of evil into which the just war Church has and still is “Pied Pipering” so many unaware Catholics?

Reconsidering Selective Conscientious Objection (1)

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy