Saint Joseph Catholic Church

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In his new encyclical letter, Pope Leo XIV wrote that “today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated” (n. 192).

Pope Leo cited Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical letter Fratelli tutti:

In recent decades, every single war has been ostensibly ‘justified.’ The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the possibility of legitimate defense by means of military force, which involves demonstrating that certain ‘rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy’ have been met. Yet it is easy to fall into an overly broad interpretation of this potential right. In this way, some would also wrongly justify even ‘preventive’ attacks or acts of war that can hardly avoid entailing ‘evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.’

Addressing the World Health Assembly, a Vatican diplomat called for international cooperation to address “disparities in life expectancy and health quality across and within countries.”

“Shared responsibility is a call for civil authorities to consistently uphold the God-given dignity of every human being, by promoting the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health in policymaking and improving the conditions that enable people to live in good health,” said Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, apostolic nuncio and Permanent Observer to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva, Switzerland.

Archbishop Balestrero added that “the ethical litmus test of any reshaped global health architecture is how it treats those whose inherent dignity is most easily forgotten: the child in the womb, the elderly, persons with disabilities, the poor, the displaced.”

Three years after the outbreak of ethnic violence in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur (map), the state’s leading prelate discussed the Church’s efforts to foster reconciliation.

“The Church has been deeply affected, just as the wider society in Manipur has,” said Archbishop Linus Neli of Imphal, India. “Thousands were displaced, and even after three years, only around 10% have been resettled, while many continue to live in relief camps.”

In an editorial on Pope Leo’s first encyclical letter, a Vatican spokesman wrote that “in the age of artificial intelligence, with human dignity in danger of being obscured by enormous concentrations of technological power beyond all control, and by new forms of dehumanization, Pope Leo XIV recalls us to the ‘urgent duty’ to remain deeply human.”

Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication, said that “the Successor of Peter invites us to let technology to advance ‘without allowing the heart to regress,’ even amid our times filled with polarization and violence, which see the expansion of a ‘culture of power’ and war rehabilitated as an instrument of international politics.”