>From *The Catholic Herald,* Diocese of Madison, September 20, 2001. "Using Force against terrorism: Justifiable under strict conditions," by Stephen Steele (Assistant national editor and reporter for Catholic News Service, Washington, DC). Excerpt: A military response to the Sept. 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center is justifiable once responsibility for the act is determined with moral certitude, said leading U.S. moral theologians. Fr. J. Bryan Hehir, the new head of Catholic Charities USA and chairman of the executive committee at Harvard Divinity School, said the use of force could be applied under certain restrictive conditions. "First, you have to be certain who caused this, where they are, what kind of effective action can be taken, and whether that action can be taken without causing harm to civilian society," he said. "But to say that it's permissible to use force is not to say that it's inevitable that this is the way to address the problem," he said. Hehir said the application of the just-war theory to fighting terrorism is unprecedented because the theory normally applies to sovereign nations. "In order to make that jump you have to say that these terrorist groups are acting in a way that makes them analogous to states. Lots of the organizations do operate in a way that makes them analogous to states," he said. ACT OF WAR Msgr. William Smith, professor of moral theology at St. Joseph Seminary in Yonkers, NY, told Catholic News Service that the attacks on the World Trade Center constituted an act of war. "This was certainly not a domestic act. It would be exceptionally difficult that someone could coordinate the different airlines [sic] at the same time. It takes money, intelligence, faked passports, cells in our own country," he said. He said that responding to terrorism with military force is allowable under the just-war theory once all peaceful measures to end a potential conflict have failed. Smith said the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center were particularly heinous because it was an attack on a civilian population. The attack on the Pentagon fell into a different category because it is a military installation. PROTECTING ONESELF The Second Vatican Council stated that every country has the right to protect itself against unchecked aggression, "which this certainly is," he said. "People have made the comparison to Pearl Harbor, but at least they had the decency in an indecent act to attack a military base. This here was an attack of civilians with complete disregard for innocent life," he said. "If a response requires the use of military force, in my judgment it's justifiable. Otherwise you cannot have a civilized society," Smith said in a telephone interview. He said that if an investigation determines that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the attacks, then any force used to bring the Saudi-born terrorist to justice would be justified, even if it meant invading another sovereign nation. "One government cannot deal evenly with another, if they don't honor the basic rules of human co-existence," he said. "That murderer Bin Laden says he's doing all of this in the name of religion, but no religion on this planet justifies the killing of innocent people," Smith said. --And there's more, but it mainly has to do with a symposium on terrorism held after the attacks at Georgetown University Law School. Note: Some may see a tension between the concern for "innocent human life" in this application of the just war theory (i.e., attack on the attackers of innocent human life is justified), and the ever-increasingly-accepted opposition on the part of the Church to the death penalty in, say, individual murder cases. And I'm not at all sure I would disagree with that assessment. However, asking the questions, and stumbling toward answers, has to start somewhere. Mary P.
