A Consistory to Square a Circle

Pope Leo will convene an extraordinary consistory of the College of Cardinals at the Vatican on June 26-27, 2026. The Consistory is slated to discuss Catholic just war theory. Therefore, it is a consistory to discuss what Jesus never taught. It is a consistory to discuss what is logically incompatible with Jesus and what He taught and hence is logically impossible to square with Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels. Even if the Consistory finally removes just war theory forever from Catholic teaching—a step that the Church should have taken 1700 years ago when Ambrose and Augustine where introducing it into the Church’s “moral” theology, and replaces it with another justification for Catholics to participate in the bestial, savage, cruel realities of war— this Consistory will be and will be known in the future as the Consistory to Square a Circle!

The geometric problem of trying to square a circle goes back to 2000 BC in Babylonia, China, and India. All attempts failed. In 451 BC, the Greeks tried to use mathematics to square a circle but failed, as has everyone else in history to this day. In fact, it was proven with mathematical certainty that squaring a circle was impossible, but to this hour people continue to try to figure out how to do it. In literature dating back over thousands of years, authors have employed the symbolism of trying to square a circle to illuminate a character flaw in people who with pseudo-logic convinced themselves that taking a certain course is the way that best serves their interests when in fact it leads to destruction and emptiness. Squaring the circle has been mentioned over a wide range of literary eras, with a variety of metaphorical meanings. Its literary use dates back at least to 414 BC, in the play, The Birds, by Aristophanes. Dante,  Lewis Caroll, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, O. Henry, Alexander Pope, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc., utilized it to creatively portray the obsessive pursuit of the logically impossible.

There is no logical way to square the circle as there is no logical way to derive a Christian just war theory or any theory of justifying Christian participation in imposing the horrors of war on other children of God from the words and deeds of Jesus in the Gospels. As the leading Catholic Biblical scholar of the mid-twentieth century, Rev. John L. McKenzie, wrote,

“If Jesus did not reject any type of violence for any purpose, then we know nothing of him. The life, which Jesus proclaimed, cannot be fostered, advanced, or protected by any kind of war, holy or unholy. The simple see at once that the “way” of Jesus is very hard to do, but easy to understand. It takes real cleverness and sophisticated intelligence to find ways to evade and distort the clear meaning of what Jesus said. The Church has tried to produce a form of Christianity that will be tolerable to those who believe that the best way to deal with your enemies is to beat their heads in. And, it has  produced this. It has produced the Christian ethic of the just war. This is not the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels and this not the New Testament, and every theologian knows it.”

Let us hope that the Cardinals at this Consistory know it.

The long overdue and desperately needed Gospel dialogue and discernment in this Consistory should be how, the means by which, the Church can genuinely repent, 1, of  spreading throughout the world for over a thousand years, Catholic just war theory as consistent with Jesus’ teaching, and, 2, how the Church, beginning with its hierarchy can find the faith and trust in the Risen Jesus to return to Jesus’ total rejection of violence and enmity as proclaimed unequivocally in the Gospels and in the original Sacred Tradition of the Church for its first 300 years. That Original, 300 year-long, Sacred Tradition of the Church—capital “T” Tradition—does not  contain a single sentence that says it is legitimate for a Christian to participate in war. That is historical fact, not opinion.

Audio-Video: https://youtu.be/AMtZ08XHptA

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy