Trump administration has riled head of Catholic church over use of theology to justify conflict in Iran
The contrast in experience between the two men disagreeing over war and theology was striking.
On the one side was Pope Leo XIV, the first North American to head the Catholic church and the first cleric from the Augustinian order, who this week visited the modern Algerian city where Saint Augustine once lived. For Leo, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine’s ideas, it was the culmination of a lifelong intellectual interest.
On the other, the US vice-president, JD Vance, a very recent adult convert to Catholicism with no academic background in the history of the church’s thinking.
At the heart of their disagreement: how Augustine, the fourth-century thinker, framed the idea of a “just war” after centuries in which the early Christian tradition had rejected war and violence, even in self-defence. It is one of the most persistently important ideas in western thinking. Every major philosopher, jurist and theologian on the subject has weighed in on it over the centuries.
