Catholics and War

Fascinating excerpts from an interview with a Catholic veteran of the Iraq war. I found the most interesting part his thoughts on killing.

That’s the really nice thing about being Catholic; that you can make these blanket assertions, and also recognize the futility of being able to totally avoid sin at all times if you are in the world. I guess I am kind of an Augustinian in that sense. Yes, killing is evil. Killing is wrong. There’s no kind of killing that’s justified. And I don’t care about all the ‘interpretations’ in the Old Testaments where it really says ‘Thou shall not murder.’ I don’t care if that’s a distinction. I’ve seen killing. Killing is wrong. There’s no way to justify it. And I don’t care if the people that I was in some way participating in the killing of were innocent or guilty, I mean, both happened. They were human beings and killing them was wrong. It just is, and it always will be. I don’t think that we can apply some kind of temporal form of justice or legal system to human life and say ‘OK, in this particular instance, this is OK, this guy can be killed,’ or ‘in this particular instance, he can't.’

But I understand that sometimes the way that the world is killing is necessary. There’s just no way to avoid it. That doesn’t make it right. I don’t think there are too many people –too many soldiers –who would come away from the war and say, even if it were the cleanest war in history, who would still come away from it and say, ‘Yeah, that was all really good. All we did was really good stuff.’ It bothers you and it bothers you for a reason because it’s not the sort of thing that we ought to be doing. In an ideal world we wouldn’t do any of it.