I must admit some disorientation watching and reading the reactions to JD Vance’s suggestion that Pope Leo “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” I understand the shock, of course. The vice president was not doing what you might expect a politician to do, instructing the pope to stay in his lane with respect to the justice of the Iran War. There is, after all, a good argument that prelates are not well-positioned to make judgments on particular military operations, and should limit themselves to reminding civil leaders of the criteria for justly going to war. The judgment concerning any particular conflict lies within the purview proper to the laity. There is also a good argument that Church leaders not only have the responsibility, but also sufficient information to make judgments of this kind. Recently in First Things, Ed Feser argued that limited expertise is offset by the requirement of moral certainty for a just war. While this dispute is interesting, it leaves Vance’s comment untouched.

The vice president prefaced his criticism by saying that “part of preaching the gospel is talking about how the gospel applies to the issues of the day.” He even said that he “likes it” when the pope and other religious leaders talk about immigration, even when they are critical of the Trump administration’s policies and practices. The ensuing conversation, he believes, helps the American people discern the best course to take in addressing complex matters of public policy. This also pertains to Leo’s criticism of the Iran War. The difficulty arose when the pope went beyond a moral assessment of this particular conflict and pronounced that “God is never on the side of those who wield the sword.” Vance raised what he considered obvious counterexamples, such as those who liberated France from the Nazis or opened the gates of the Holocaust camps. He then points to a “more than a thousand-year tradition of Just War theory” and its set of criteria to discern when war can be justified. Vance, of course, allows that disagreements regarding the application of the various criteria will happen, but he worries that the pope seemed to short-circuit such disputation by suggesting that war itself is unjust. In Vance’s judgment, this showed a lack of theological care on the part of the pope.