Just War, Moral Injury, and the Question Pope Leo XIV Left Open

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (May 25, 2026), includes a phrase that Edward Pentin, writing in the National Catholic Register, has flagged as genuinely ambiguous: that just-war theory, as classically formulated, may no longer be adequate to the realities of modern conflict. Pentin is not disputing Leo's concern for peace. He is asking what the Pope actually means — and he wants more clarity on the point.

The question matters practically. If Leo XIV is implying that no war can be just under contemporary conditions, several concrete problems follow immediately. How are Catholic troops to operate under rules of engagement? What moral framework governs a soldier who is ordered to fire? Is a preemptive strike ever permissible when the possibility of dialogue is tenuous — when, for instance, a hostile state has already demonstrated bad faith in negotiations? Is diplomacy a sufficient answer when the adversary has no interest in it? Pentin's critique is that the encyclical raises these questions without resolving them, and that the unresolved ambiguity is not a minor pastoral gap. It is a structural one.[^1]

Partristics scholar John Rist, responding to the encyclical in the same publication, locates the stakes historically. From Augustine's analysis of Rome's decline to the administrative machinery of the Holocaust, the failure to reason clearly about the permissibility and limits of violence has never been merely a geopolitical failure. It is a failure of persons — of the interior formation that makes it possible to name what one is doing and to bear the moral weight of that naming.

The one psychological point worth holding

Moral injury is the specific wound this ambiguity can inflict. The concept, developed by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in work with combat veterans and extended by Brett Litz and colleagues, describes the damage that results when a person acts against their own moral beliefs — or witnesses others doing so — in contexts where institutional authority has either blessed the transgression or failed to provide clear guidance about it. Moral injury is distinct from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is a crisis of conscience, not only of fear, and it requires engagement with questions of guilt, meaning, and the possibility of repair.

The just-war tradition, properly understood, is a counter-formation to moral injury. Its categories — proportionality, discrimination, right intention, legitimate authority — are not bureaucratic checkboxes. They are habits of moral attention that, when internalized before a soldier enters the field or a policymaker signs an order, give the person a framework for holding the weight of their decisions personally. Albert Bandura's research on moral disengagement identified the mechanisms by which ordinary people participate in harm while maintaining self-regard: displacement of responsibility, dehumanization of the enemy, euphemistic relabeling of violence.[^2] The just-war framework, by requiring agents to name the harm even when judging it necessary and to maintain the humanity of the adversary throughout, works directly against each of these mechanisms.

When that framework is withdrawn — or declared obsolete without a replacement — the person in the field is not liberated from moral complexity. They are abandoned inside it.

What clarity would require

If Leo XIV means that the specific conditions of modern warfare (autonomous weapons, cyberattacks, asymmetric conflict, nuclear deterrence) have exceeded the categories Augustine and Aquinas used, that is a serious philosophical claim and a defensible one. It would require, however, a new account of the conditions under which lethal force remains permissible, not simply a declaration that the old account no longer applies. The Catholic anthropological tradition, as Vitz, Nordling, and Titus articulate in the Meta-Model of the Person, holds that the human person's physical, rational, volitional, and moral dimensions form an integrated whole.[^3] A framework for action in extremis must address that whole person — not simply the political actor, but the human being who will carry the memory of what they did.

Pentin's demand for clarity is, in this sense, a demand for pastoral seriousness. Diplomacy may be the preferred path in every case where it is genuinely available. But the history Rist cites — from the fall of Rome to the gates of Auschwitz — is largely a history of moments when dialogue was not available, when the adversary's intentions were not negotiable, and when the failure to act constituted its own moral catastrophe. A teaching that cannot address those moments does not replace just-war theory. It leaves a vacuum where theory used to be.

For Catholic mental health practitioners accompanying veterans, military chaplains, or policymakers in conscience, the practical implication is this: moral clarity is not an optional refinement of psychological resilience. It is a structural component of it. A person who acts without a framework for judging their own actions — because the tradition that supplied that framework has been declared obsolete — is more vulnerable to moral injury, not less.

These questions are not brought to Leo XIV in a spirit of opposition, but in the spirit a son brings a hard question to his father — trusting that the father sees what the son sees, that the concern is shared, and that the silence is not the final word. The encyclical is a beginning, not a boundary. What those in conscience need is not a different Church, but the full weight of this one: its memory, its categories, its hard-won precision about what human beings owe one another even in extremity. Leo has shown that he understands the gravity of the moment. The hope of those who wait for his further teaching is the clarity necessary to apply it practically.

References

[^1]: Edward Pentin, reporting on Magnifica Humanitas and the just-war tradition, National Catholic Register, 2026. [^2]: Albert Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986); see also Bandura, 'Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities,' Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999): 193-209. [^3]: Paul C. Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Divine Mercy University Press, 2020), pp. 145-168.