The casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that Pope John Paul II is the leader of the antiwar movement. He is certainly the most famous opponent of an American-led war against the Iraqi regime in the world (with the possible exception of Saddam Hussein). Even in the aftermath of the sex-abuse scandals, he is the opponent with the most moral authority. Again and again, he has urged that President Bush and other world leaders exhaust all the alternatives to war, which is, he said in January, “always a defeat for humanity.” Most recently, he urged that Ash Wednesday be the occasion for Catholics to pray for peace.

It would be strange, to say the least, if the pope were gung-ho for war. No decent person is “for war,” of course; all of us would prefer that it didn’t have to come to that. But one expects the pope to be even less for war than the rest of us. It is part of his job description. A papal endorsement of a war would have mixed effects. It would make some in the West more willing to support Bush. But it would also make it easier for the West’s enemies to portray the war as Christian aggression against Islam.

It is also part of the pope’s job to reject pacifism, as he has done. But his statements and the less restrained comments of other Catholic officials have combined to make the church’s teaching seem more pacifistic than it actually is. This is a pity, because the church has the intellectual resources to enrich our thinking about the morality of war. Just-war theory was originally developed by Catholic thinkers—its patrimony goes back to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas—and even today the church is the chief institutional custodian of the just-war tradition. That tradition has force for non-Catholics, however, because the conclusions the tradition has reached are reasonable.

In the just-war tradition, a war can be judged just only if it is waged for a just cause, has a reasonable likelihood of success, is unlikely to cause more evil than it prevents, is declared by a competent authority, discriminates between combatants and non-combatants, and is a last resort. Several of these criteria involve disputable judgments of probability. The just war tradition is a guide to thinking through the issues, not a formula for reaching the right answer. Moreover, the church does not claim that the clergy possess any special insight into contingent matters of fact and probability. The tradition leaves those judgments to statesmen.

Catholic leaders are, alas, doing their best to blur that point. The pope’s secretary of state has said, “We want to say to America: Is it worth it to you? Won’t you have, afterwards, decades of hostility in the Islamic world?” It is entirely reasonable to suggest that American policymakers should consider those questions. There is, indeed, no reason to doubt that they are considering them without instruction from the Vatican. When church leaders speak in this manner, they are saying the same things that a liberal congressman would say on Crossfire. They are cheapening the church’s moral witness.

When it comes to the question of “competent authority,” church hierarchs are leading the flock astray. They have come close to saying that war must have United Nations approval to be just. Nothing in traditional Catholic doctrine supports that view. Does the church really wish to invest so much moral authority in an institution that regularly opposes it?

The Catholic leaders’ performance during the debate over the war has led people to believe that the just-war tradition begins with a “presumption against violence.” This is not the case. As Catholic writer George Weigel has written, the tradition “begins with the presumption—better, the moral judgment—that rightly constituted public authority is under a strict moral obligation to defend the security of those for whom it has assumed responsibility.” What that means is that war can be not only morally permissible, but morally obligatory. Indeed, it means that war is morally obligatory whenever it is morally permissible. To which category this contemplated war belongs is a question on which faithful Catholics can disagree—and Catholic leaders would contribute to everyone’s understanding of these matters if they would say so.