Fr Rob Esdaile: The Courage of the White Flag?

Jun 6th, 2024

Fr Rob Esdaile

Fr Rob Esdaile gave the following address entitled: 'The Courage of the White Flag?' at this year's Anthony Storey Memorial Peace & Justice Lecture on Tuesday, 4 June, 2024.

The invitation to give the Anthony Storey Memorial Lecture reached me just a matter of days after Pope Francis had been quoted as talking about 'The Courage Of The White Flag' in relation to the dreadful war which has afflicted Ukraine for the last two years and I was already mulling over his reported comments and what I thought about them. So rather than simply saying (as I felt in my heart): "I'm not the one you're looking for" I decided to take the bit between my teeth and use it as an opportunity to work out my own thoughts on the subject. I hope that the fact that I started preparing this on April Fool's Day won't prove significant.

The Pope's remark about "the courage of the white flag" certainly made a splash in the media but was often reported in a tendentious manner. My own response was itself emotionally charged. Like many commentators, especially those sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause - part of me felt that talk of a 'white flag' was worse than inappropriate, an undermining of a necessary western unity. (Others would have put it more strongly, viewing it as a 'stab in the back', or dismissing it as a sign of senescence or general 'out-of-touch-ness' in the Pontiff.)

Unsurprisingly, many Ukrainians were furious. President Zelenskiy pointedly contrasted the actions of military chaplains in Ukraine (who "support us with prayer, with their discussion and with deeds. This is indeed what a church with the people is" with the actions of those "2,500km away, somewhere, [offering] virtual mediation between someone who wants to live and someone who wants to destroy you." The Ukrainian Foreign Minister predictably wrapped himself in the Ukrainian flag of yellow and blue, "the flag by which we live, die and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags!" and urged the Vatican "to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past" (alluding to Pius XII's silence in the face of the Holocaust). The mood of national defiance was repeated by the head of the country's Catholic Church: "Ukraine is wounded, but not conquered! Ukraine is exhausted, but it stands and will stand." And "Believe me, no one has any idea of surrendering." (1)

The negative response was echoed around the Western world, if not elsewhere: "It's not the time to talk about surrender by the Ukrainians," thundered Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of Nato. "How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine?" suggested the Polish foreign minister. "One must not capitulate in face of evil; one must fight it and defeat it, so that the evil raises the white flag and capitulates," added the Latvian president.

I was surprised that I shared in some of that initial reaction - since I would not in any way describe myself as a follower of party-lines, ecclesiastical or otherwise, and deplore both war-making and preparations for war.

We rarely, if ever, appreciate the depth to which shared social narratives - especially those learned in infancy, can trammel our responses to new situations. I am a child of the 1960s. I was socialised into the Cold War, not least by Airfix kits and Action Man, toys which gave an acceptance of 'killing' without any understanding of what that might mean. We were also caught up in bloc-thinking and bloc-politics: better dead than red, as one UK foreign minister put it. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we all knew who 'the enemy' were: the Russians - with leaders and led, Politburo members and Proletariat, all undifferentiated in our minds. Of course, that assumption of Soviet threat was not inappropriate, given that Britain - 'the unsinkable aircraft carrier' as it was once called - was slated for oblivion in the event of the Cold War going hot. Moreover, my family knew refugees from both Poland and Hungary who had been robbed of their homelands by Soviet tanks. All of that shared memory kicked in when I read the first account of Pope Francis' words.

After 1989, we chose to forget the degree of enmity that the Iron Curtain had betokened - without seeing any need to resolve that hostility. Schadenfreude over the collapse of communism combined with a dangerous belief in 'the end of history' in Francis Fukuyama's sense: the final economic, political and moral victory of Capitalism. A humiliated Russia was the fertile soil from which Putin sprang, much as the troubles of the Weimar Republic provided the breeding ground for Nazism.

While I felt, in that first moment of reaction, that Pope Francis had 'let the side down', the assumption that a non-European Pope, or any Pope for that matter, should be 'on our side' is an interesting one. After all, the cardinals went "to the end of the earth", not Poland, to find this one. Yet it is scarcely surprising that the human tendency to wrap God in our flag should also wish to wrap 'the Servant of the Servants of God' in the same colours.

On the other hand, I had a hunch that the Pope was onto something very important - and the image that immediately came to mind was the story of the Emperor who had no clothes. Only a little boy in the crowd could see that the king had been taken for a ride by the maker of the magnificent (and non-existent) robes which he simultaneously was and wasn't wearing, because all the courtiers were so invested in keeping the monarch happy that they couldn't even see - never mind admit - the truth. Perhaps it takes the Pope, nearing the end of his days, in that second naivete which is not naïve at all but a purification of the human spirit, to name what is going on and what must be done. And I want to face the possibility that both horns of the dilemma - fight and sue for peace - might contain some element of truth. Indeed, what I want to explore is the possibility that the Catholic Christian calling might be to mediate between these two competing perceptions - the need not to back down or let down and the need to stop now before it is too late.

In the hope that we might achieve more light than heat, I would first like to return to the interview in which Pope Francis made his controversial remarks, translating for you the relevant passages; not in order to undertake any special pleading on his behalf - the Vatican's own swift response indicated a recognition that, even if he didn't 'mis-speak', the phrase 'white flag' was almost bound to provoke misunderstandings.

Firstly, the interview with the journalist Lorenzo Buccella(2) was for an episode of a Swiss TV programme (titled 'Cliché' - without any sense of irony); this episode being dedicated to the colour 'white' - "the colour of good, of light, but on which errors and dirt become most visible". The questioning was as clunky as the concept and it was off the back of the Pope's comments about the Israel-Gaza conflict, in which he underlined that "When we look to history, to the wars we have lived through, they all finish with an accord," that the journalist asked the following: "In Ukraine, some ask for the courage of surrender, of the white flag. But others say that that would legitimise the stronger: what do you think?"

The Pope answered as follows: "Well, that's one interpretation. But I believe that it is the one who sees the situation, thinks of the people and has the courage [to raise] the white flag and negotiate who is the stronger party. And today one can negotiate with the help of international powers. There are some. This word 'negotiate' is a courageous word. When you see that you are defeated, that things aren't working, have the courage to negotiate. You may be ashamed, but if you continue regardless, how many more dead will there be? And things will finish even worse. Negotiate in time, look for some country which can act as mediator. Today, for example with the war in Ukraine, there are many who wish to act as mediators. Turkey, for example … Don't be ashamed to negotiate before things get worse."

Having stated, in a further answer, that he, too is available (and speaking now of the situation in Gaza) he takes up the interviewer's reference to 'the white of courage' ("il bianco di corraggio"): "Okay, the white of courage. But sometimes the anger which gives you courage isn't white …"

So that's what Pope Francis actually said. Now what to make of it? Winston Churchill may not have actually said, "Jaw, jaw, not war, war" (actually uttered, it seems, by Harold Macmillan in 1958) but he did meet Stalin at Yalta. Perhaps more pertinently, Jesus asked his hearers, "What king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace." (Lk 14.21-32) The only possible objections to negotiation are either pride and a desire to punish or destroy the enemy, in the belief that one's own forces are capable of achieving 'total victory', or because of a belief that the enemy cannot be trusted and would simply use any pause in fighting to regroup.

Putin is certainly a 'Bad Actor' and an untrustworthy despot, cold, cynical, a 'poker-player' who uses his fellow citizen's lives as gambling chips, and - perhaps - a man now quite isolated from reality, perhaps even a little paranoid. So it is easy to understand the concern of the Czech theologian, Tomás Halik (who certainly deserves to be taken seriously - having lived through the Soviet occupation of his country and been ordained secretly as a Catholic priest in East Germany): "What is happening in Ukraine is reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's strategy, of which the nations in this part of the world have experience: first occupy the territories with linguistic minorities, and if the democratic world remains silent and succumbs to the illusion that agreements and compromises can be made with dictators the expansion will continue. If the West were to betray Ukraine and give in to Moscow's demands, as it did in the case of Czechoslovakia on the threshold of the Second World War, it would not save the peace but would encourage dictators and aggressors not only in the Kremlin but throughout the world."

Rather than compromise, in Halik's view we should "knock the murder weapon out of his hand."(3) Easier said, than done, however, given the worsening military situation in Ukraine as this summer progresses.(4) Few are talking anymore about Ukraine 'expelling' Russia from the Donbas or retaking Crimea. More are talking of 'postponing' their need to enter into peace talks. Ukraine simply cannot sustain the level of losses in materiel, infrastructure or soldiers which it is suffering. The number of Ukrainians living in the parts of the country controlled by Kiiv has reportedly halved, to 20 million and "Ukraine's population has an unusually small portion of men and women aged 15 to 30."(5) A Ukrainian priest recently told me that 41,000 people left the country in one week in April, 2024. A major Russian military breakthrough this summer is not impossible, even with a renewed flow of weapons.

As well as looking at the situation on the ground (and I acknowledge that my assessment is merely that of an interested reader, not a military expert) we have to look to the changing geo-political map of the world before we decide how best to act. The long-drawn out drama of the voting through of the latest US military aid package (held up for months in the Senate by right-wingers in order to seek party-political advantage ahead of November's elections) demonstrates the jeopardy which not only Ukraine but the whole world faces in the event of the re-election of Donald Trump. An 'America First' policy will leave not just Ukraine but the whole of NATO ill-equipped to resist any moves by Putin (other than by 'going nuclear').

Moreover, the willingness of Trump and others to throw everything up in the air would seem to put in jeopardy the whole 'Rules-Based Order' that was established in the wake of World War Two, together with the international entities - the UN, International Criminal Court and the rest - that were meant to provide a bulwark against adventuristic land-grabs. Already, the apparent emergence of a new Russo-Sino-Indian bloc - each of these nations currently under the leadership of chauvinistic nationalist leaders - means that Western sanctions won't have the 'bite' they might once have done. As we survey the geo-political changes already under way, it is certainly worth asking whether there might not be some wisdom in the 'Courage of the White Flag' - negotiating before the situation gets worst and the rug is pulled from under diplomatic channels. But, then again, maybe Trump won't be elected. Maybe other things will change. Ethical calculations depend also on political expectations.

Before we undertake a properly Christian reflection on how to respond to the Russian invasion, let's attend to the particular theatre of war that is Ukraine, because our social ethics have to be contextual and consequential, as well as principled and rationally founded. When we do attend to the history and geography of the conflict we begin to see the complexity of the situation. Ukraine literally means 'borderland' or 'on the edge'. Unfortunately, that means it's where you have to invade if you want to go anywhere else (a bit like Belgium in Western Europe). It also means that your identity and legitimacy is likely to be called into question - 'a marginal territory, not here, not there, not that important …' (even with its enormous significance in world grain - and sunflower oil - production). Think of the patronising epithet for the country popular before the Bolshevik revolution: 'Little Russia'.

More fundamentally, there is the question of the founding myth of the nation: who are the rightful heirs of the Rus and of the Christianisation of that realm under Prince Volodimir in AD 988: the Duchy of Muskovy, the Russky, or the Kiivian Rusyny, or Ruthenians. We don't need to chronicle the various competing regimes which have attacked or held parts of Ukraine down the years - Mongol, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Ottoman, German, Austro-Hungarian - but simply to note that this is a land of multiple competing and irreconcilable narratives.

Perhaps the most worrying of these narratives right now is Russkiy Mir - the 'Russian World' promoted under Vladimir Putin and invoked in justification of the Ukraine 'Special Military Operation'. According to Patriarch Kirill, Russkiy Mir is "the common civilisational space founded on three pillars: Eastern Orthodoxy, Russian culture and especially the language and the common historical memory and connected with its common vision on the further social development." According to him, it is "a spiritual concept, a reminder that through the baptism of Rus', God consecrated these people to the task of building a Holy Rus."(6) Russia's manifest destiny, on this account, is to act as the sole remaining bastion of Christian civilisation against a godless West and the threat of Islam.

We should also take account of the amount of pain visited on the country in its successive divisions and despoliations. Confining ourselves solely to the 20th century, that includes the absorption of the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia by Poland in the Treaty of Versailles; the carvings-up of territory as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939; and then, in 1954, the equally arbitrary gifting of Crimea (60% Russian-speaking at the time) to Ukraine by Nikita Kruschev. Presumably which Soviet Republic the land belonged to was slightly academic at that stage of the Cold War. Now after two years of the present conflict Russia currently occupies 18% of Ukraine's soil.(7)

If the changes of territory in Ukraine's recent past are dramatic, they are as nothing compared to the losses of life in the last century. Perhaps 7 million died in the Soviet 'Great Hunger' of 1932-3 (5 million of them in Ukraine), in a famine caused entirely by Stalin's expropriation of food rather than by crop-failure. People literally dropped dead on the streets. On top of this another 6.5 million were killed across the Soviet Union in the process of 'dekulakisation' - the collectivisation of farms and associated killing of successful peasant farmers - and, again, many of these deaths were in Ukraine. Then there are the dead of World War II - 5.3 million in Ukraine (one in six of the population), including 2.25 million Jews, a not inconsiderable number of them at the hands of fellow Ukrainians.

And we should also take note of one more layer of pain, the forced deportations of Tatars from Crimea under Stalin, 24% of whom died within 5 years according to NKVD figures, or 46% according to the Tatars themselves.(8) More normal patterns of migration also mean that in the disputed Donbas region there is a higher Russian and Russophone population. Whatever President Zelenskiy may say and however illegitimate the Russian invasion of 2014, the prospects of reintegrating that part of Ukraine into the country seem weak and not just for military reasons.

Of course, Ukrainian pain has to be set alongside perhaps 27 million Soviet casualties in World War II, including maybe 8.7 million casualties from the armed forces. Putin's declared war-aim of the 'de-Nazification' of Ukraine builds on the pain of this loss. We also need to note the historical willingness to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives in order to gain of military advantage. It is not just a different actuarial calculation but a different attitude to the loss of combatants which separates out Russian and western military traditions.

When it comes to casualties in the current conflict, the first casualty of war is, as we all know, truth, but it would seem that by March, 2024 at least 44,000 members of the Ukrainian armed forces had died, with Russian deaths estimated at nearly three times that number. Non-fatal casualties will be a significant multiple of these numbers. A US Military intelligence report claims that by the end of 2023, Russian casualties (killed or injured) totalled 315,000.(9) And then there are the civilian deaths - hard to estimate but perhaps in the region of 30,000.(10) In addition there are the numbers of refugees - with a third of Ukrainians forced to flee their homes, 5 million displaced within the country and 6.3 million abroad, with 17.6 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the UNHCR.(11) From the safety and comfort of the UK, it is hard to imagine the degree of hardship involved in surviving Ukrainian winters with the electricity grid pulverised and so many buildings damaged.

All of these losses - and the level of them - are significant in assessing the morality of the conflict. So too are the economic costs and the amount of military materiel expended - including copious cluster munitions (banned under the 2008 Convention On Cluster Munitions - now signed by 124 states(12)) and, according to the Halo Trust, 2 million landmines (banned under the 1997 Ottowa Treaty, itself signed or ratified by 164 states(13)). The damage to Ukrainian infrastructure in the first 24 months of the war has been estimated as £119bn(14), while the military support given to Ukraine by its allies in the first two years of the invasion amount to £199bn. Drone strikes on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant have risked causing nuclear contamination, even if a Chernobyl-style full meltdown would seem unlikely. But let us take it as read that across the disputed territory ecological damage through contamination, leakage and lack of working sewage treatment plants has been caused.

After this survey of the background, who could dispute Pope Francis' repeated insistence that everyone loses in war? As the recent Vatican document on Human Dignity, Dignitas Infinita, puts it: "war is always a 'defeat of humanity.' No war is worth the tears of a mother who has seen her child mutilated or killed; no war is worth the loss of the life of even one human being, a sacred being created in the image and likeness of the Creator; no war is worth the poisoning of our common home; and no war is worth the despair of those who are forced to leave their homeland and are deprived, from one moment to the next, of their home and all the family, friendship, social and cultural ties that have been built up, sometimes over generations." All wars, by the mere fact that they contradict human dignity, are conflicts that will not solve problems but only increase them. This point is even more critical in our time when it has become commonplace for so many innocent civilians to perish beyond the confines of a battlefield."(15)

If we turn now to the 'Just War' tradition, Ukraine's justification in waging war would seem pretty easy to establish - although I think that the term 'Just War' should be considered an oxymoron in the face of the reality of modern weaponry and the levels of destruction involved in prosecuting a war (despite the propaganda about 'smart bombs', surgical strikes' and the rest). War never causes justice. War never heals wounds. War never reconciles enemies. It always leaves those tasks for later and makes their accomplishment infinitely more difficult.

But, nonetheless, let's work our way through the tradition, which can be found in summary form in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.(16) You may be aware of the distinction in argumentation between Ius Ad Bellum - the conditions which legitimate a resort to armed conflict - and Ius In Bello - the standards which must be adhered to by combatants in the conduct of hostilities. While the legitimacy of armed conflict might be established to the satisfaction of those taking up arms, that does not let them off the hook when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the conflict. The Catechism underlines "the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict [quoting Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes]: The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties."(17)

The legitimacy of Ukraine's going to war is fairly easy to establish in the terms of Just War theory. It was the victim of an unprovoked attack (whether or not one accepts the thesis that the government in Kiiv (or the whole of the West) had been poking the Russian bear in a foolhardy manner since 1989). The call to arms came from a legitimately constituted government (whatever concerns there might have been about corruption in the judiciary at the time of the invasion and whatever the risks to democracy caused by the suspension of the electoral cycle for the duration of the conflict(18)).

A third criterion for Ius Ad Bellum is that it must be a matter of last resort, diplomatic channels and negotiation having failed. Diplomatic channels were not even tried, so far as we can see - certainly not by the Kremlin, while the international community was asleep at the wheel - failing to respond to the 2014 invasions of both Crimea and the Donbas region. It was not international reaction which stalled the Russian invasion in the spring of 2022 but the ferocity of local defenders, combined with the military incompetence of Russian commanders.

The legitimacy of Ukraine's resort to war is also underlined by the actions of Russian forces in the field. While battlefield atrocities will inevitably have been committed by combatants on both sides, the crimes committed by Russian forces in Bucha and elsewhere (now being recorded with a view to future War Crimes trials) in the early stages of the invasion were particularly blatant and grizzly and will be remembered by history. These included failure to observe non-combatant immunity, ignoring the Geneva Convention, torturing prisoners and using rape as a weapon of war(19). These, together with the 'Meat Grinder' tactics of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner group, would seem to reinforce the rightness of Kiiv's resistance.

A more difficult criterion, both regarding the decision to fight and the prosecution of the war since, is the question of the prospect of success and the balance of benefit gained versus damage done. The scale of the damage to infrastructure and economic life and the cost of the armaments can be put on a balance sheet, even if the sums are unimaginable and the scale of the Marshall Plan that will be required after the fighting stops unprecedented.

The human cost - both in lost lives and in scarred minds and damaged bodies does not so easily admit of such reckoning. It has to be quantified in terms of multigenerational trauma and a legacy of hatred which will endure long after the combatants have all gone to their graves. It is perhaps psychologically impossible for combatants to ask at the time whether the consequences of resistance could undermine the justification of resistance. But history will arrive at a judgement - or a series of competing judgements - on this.

The ecological effects will probably only fully become apparent once the front lines have ceased to be no man's land, although there will doubtless be some species that do well out of the interruption of vast acreages of monocultures and a reduction in the use of petrochemical-based fertilisers. Minefields will remain off-limits and continue to wreak carnage for generations. Nor is it impossible that there may yet be a failure of containment at Chernobyl, Zaporizhzhia or one of the other nuclear power plants in the war zone.

When it comes to Ius In Bello, the horrible reality of contemporary warmaking calls into question in a far more direct and obvious way the entire enterprise. Western propaganda in the invasion of Iraq often played on the ability of 'smart bombs' and missiles to achieve pinpoint accuracy, so that we could watch people killed live on TV, as though it were a video-game. But most bombs and missiles do not aspire to accuracy, be they cluster bombs designed to 'clear' an area of any life or Grad rockets launched in salvos. Behind the front lines it is housing, heating, electricity generation, transport infrastructure and the population's morale which are the target. Another contemporaneous conflict, the IDF's operations in Gaza, have shown what 'non-combatant immunity' looks like in modern high-intensity warfare: 37 million tonnes of rubble, which it would take 100 trucks a day 14 years to clear; rubble which is laced with 10% of the ordnance expended still unexploded.(20) There a new term has been coined to describe it what is happening: 'Domicide', making a land uninhabitable by destroying the built environment. Nor is there respect by the occupying power for the rights of those they have in their control.

But Ius In Bello also has to reckon with the law of unintended consequences in military operations - especially in an area which has nuclear weapons pointing at it from all sides. Putin theatrically announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus in May, 2023. The twin risks are that he might deliberately fire such a weapon to call NATO's bluff and that miscalculation by either side could lead to a full-scale exchange of nuclear weapons (in which case, effectively, we are probably all dead, either immediately or as a result of radiation, the ensuing nuclear winter and subsequent crop failures).

There is no steady state possible in the Ukraine conflict, even if the $61bn of military aid now being delivered by the USA can prevent a rout of the exhausted Ukrainian forces through the summer ahead. This gaping wound in the heart of Europe leads us inevitably back to Pope Francis' comment in the interview which provoked this reflection: "When we look to history, to the wars we have lived through, they all finish with an accord." The fighting in Ukraine is resolving nothing, healing nothing, achieving nothing - beyond the (of course, very important) resistance to the aggressor.

Moreover, it can't even be viewed as a holding operation. We are in a period of deterioration of international relations, partly due to the 'Great Disruptors' (Donald Trump and his ilk; the silo-ed thinking of Social Media and the confrontational algorithms of the internet), partly due to the logic of a re-ignited arms-race with the concomitant temptation to exploit any momentary perceived technological or strategic advantage before the other side catches up. In an increasingly chaotic world, with multiple confrontations on different continents all happening at the same time, Mutually Assured Destruction ceases to be an effective mechanism of détente.

I said above that our ethical reflection needs to be contextual and consequential. One of the chief problems with current approaches to warfare (including the framework of Just War theory) is that the consequences appear to be not a furthering of the prospects of peace and a limitation of violence but an increase in the probability of future conflict. We need to be alert to the deliberate sowing of a new rhetoric in political discourse by military leaders and politicians alike. "We are moving from a post-war to a pre-war world," according to Grant Shapps, while the head of the British army has called for us to prepare for a major conflict on European soil. Some are even willing to put a date-stamp on the future war, a possibility maybe 5-8 years away, according to the German Defence Minister.(21) In addition, the ramping up of military expenditure (to the great benefit of arms manufacturers and to the cost of everyone else - especially the poor, out of whose mouths bread is being taken by the investment in guns and bullets in every country, rich or poor) is creating a lobby-group fuelled momentum towards conflict.

Whatever the 'cold-light-of-day' strategic calculations provoked by military intelligence and whatever the scenarios being played out by war-gaming commanders, what is essential is the rejection of the inevitability of war. There is a duty of political leaders to reinvigorate the United Nations (instead of sniping at international institutions and denigrating the very bodies which could provide the platform for real negotiations and real sanctions against wrong-doers). There is a duty of governments to have back-channel negotiations with regimes which are put in the ever-shifting rhetorical category of 'The Axis of Evil'. There is a duty to listen to and understand the real motivations and grievances that prompt the actions of potential aggressors (however much we may disagree with their perceptions) in order to answer them and to build relationships which can lead us beyond conflict. There is a duty to educate the public in their understanding of other nations and, perhaps especially, of different religions, in order to overcome prejudices that see them solely in terms of enmity and threat.

Moreover (and just as importantly as these duties that can be laid at the door of those in power), as always in politics it is the duty of voters to create the political space which allows politicians to 'think the unthinkable', to 'walk the extra mile', to take risks for peace. Church leaders and Church members should be at the heart of this building of a space for seeking peace and justice by means other than war.

And now I want to turn to another matter before closing. Pope John Paul II used to like to say that the Church is an expert in humanity(22) - although it might be added that we've sometimes been quite good at hiding that fact. Even more so, the Church ought to be an expert in Christ. And, if you've listened through the whole of my discourse so far - and in particular through my reflections on the application of Just War theory to the Ukraine war - you will have noticed that I have only mentioned Jesus Christ or the Gospel once, and that only en passant.

Whether or not my sketch of the history of Ukraine or my understanding of the current conflict has any validity, how on earth could it be that Catholic Christianity could content itself with such a God-less, soul-less approach to the major questions of our time? Of course, talk of Natural Law was developed to provide some tools for ethical reflection in a cultural situation which no longer had the shared presuppositions of 'Christendom'. Of course, attempts at objectivity in describing the historical roots of conflict are important - and a good counterbalance to the inflamed rhetoric of the combatants. But the task of the Church and of Christians is to offer lived testimony to the Gospel.

That Gospel is above all else the Gospel of peace. If we can follow Matthew in making the Beatitudes the key presentation of his message, then mourning, gentleness, hunger and thirst for righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, peace-making and persecution for righteousness' sake are the necessary expressions of the purity of heart to which he calls us. The calling to be salt and light is made concrete in the series of antitheses which end that same fifth chapter of Matthew: the move beyond anger to the search for reconciliation, the refusal to objectify the others, which is the sinful heart of lust, the outlawing of the economic abandonment of wives (which was the effect of divorce in the ancient Jewish world), being a man or woman of one's word, rejection of the lex talionis and of the logic of retaliation; all of these culminating in "loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you." That is the 'perfection' - or rather the goal - to which Jesus' disciples are called. (Mt 5.21-48) That is the vision which we are meant to give flesh to in our community life and to which we are to invite others.

That is the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to bring. That is eternal life, in Johannine terms. That is Justification, to use Pauline language - right relationship founded in God's gracious gift rather than in our own exaggerated estimation of our goodness or competence.

If we turn to the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10.28-37), in particular. We discover the horrific truth that our presumed enemy - Jesus' hearers would likely have regarded 'Good Samaritan' as a contradiction in terms - is our neighbour. Moreover, 'neighbour' is something you become by behaviour, rather than something which happens by mere juxtaposition. Jesus leaves no 'wriggle-room'. The lawyer asks who he is allowed not to love and where the boundaries of obligation are. Jesus sweeps those boundaries away.

But he goes beyond that. He pays the price of love, accepting death as the consequence of his way of life, his refusal to condemn, his friendship of sinners, his challenge to hypocrisy - unarmed, vulnerable. That great peace-campaigner and teacher, John Dear, puts it well: "They're in the Garden of Gethsemane. Here come the Roman soldiers. What does Peter do? He is thinking, 'If violence is ever divinely sanctioned in all of human history, if there ever was a just war in all of human history, if there ever was a moment to kill for a good cause, it's here in the Garden of Gethsemane to protect our God.' And he's right. We should kill to protect the holy one. And just as he goes to kill to protect the holy one, the commandment comes down, 'Put down the sword.' Dear friends, those are the last words of Jesus to the church. It's the last thing he said to the community of men and women around him before he died. It's the last thing they heard. And, I think it's the first time they understood who Jesus is."(23)

There's power in those words. And we might point out that "Peace be with you" are the first words that the gathered disciples hear from the Risen Jesus, speaking through their fear in the locked Upper Room. (Jn 20.19, 21) What shall we do, then?

At the very least, we need to shun hatred. The Russians (or the Chinese or the Iranians or whoever) are not our enemies. They are our brothers and sisters, fellow children of God. We cannot stand as disciples before the Cross without hearing Christ praying for the men of violence: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." (Lk 23.24) We cannot simply accept the divisions in our world - even though we'll doubtless be accused of naivete if we make any efforts to extend a hand of friendship across the barricades that divide our world.

At the very least, we need to affirm with renewed force: Whatever the question, warfare is not the answer. It is the road to nowhere, the deferral of solutions and the compounding of problems.

At the very least, we need to affirm that the use of weapons of mass destruction which make no distinction between combatant and non-combatant, young and old, human life and natural world is morally abhorrent; as is the expectation that others be ready to deploy them unthinkingly on our behalf - committing war-crimes by simply "following orders"; as are all nuclear war preparations and the refusal to live up to our obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to negotiate in good faith for the reduction and eventual removal of nuclear weapons from our world.

At the very least, we need to be unsettled and unsettling, questioning people whom others will view with suspicion, as not quite 'on-side', because we have a patriotism larger than "my country right or wrong" and a loyalty to more than to our national flag; the King's good servants, certainly, but God's first - to quote St Thomas More. And perhaps at times that will involve the courage of the white flag - not of surrender but of parley; walking across the sterile No Man's Land of partisan politics and bloc-thinking, as Francis of Assisi walked through the lines separating Crusader and Arab armies, to say, with the modern Popes: "No more one against the other, no more, never! … War never again, never again war!"(24)

NOTES

1 See e.g. Ukraine criticises Pope's 'white flag' comment - BBC News 10.3.2024 After backlash, Vatican clarifies Pope Francis' call for Ukraine to have 'courage of the white flag' | America Magazine Other quotes from a Reuters report no longer available online

2 See Il Papa sulla guerra in Ucraina: non abbiate vergogna di negoziare - Vatican News

3 Tomás Halik, 'Transcending Boundaries', The Tablet, 16 September 2023

4 See The Observer view: as the world dithers, Ukraine's plight grows ever more precarious | Observer editorial | The Guardian April 21, 2024

5 See Analysis: Ukraine's Impending Demographic Crisis (kyivpost.com) - referenced in The west defends Israel's skies. Not doing the same for Ukraine is a deadly mistake | Nathalie Tocci | The Guardian

6 See Russian world - Wikipedia accessed 21.04.2024

7 Two years of war in Ukraine: Russia's invasion in numbers | The Independent 24.02.2024

8 Anna Reid, Borderland, p.182

9 U.S. intelligence assesses Ukraine war has cost Russia 315,000 casualties -source | Reuters

10 UNHRC verified 10,582 civilian deaths, alongside 19,875 wounded by February 2024 Two years of war in Ukraine: Russia's invasion in numbers | The Independent 24.02.2024

11 Ukraine | UNHCR, accessed 11.04.2024