Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Responsibility to Protect

There is an interesting new website, called Catholic Moral Theology (http://catholicmoraltheology.com/), by a group of young moral theologians committed to the respectful, temperate discussion of moral issues and principles. In a recent post, one of the authors, Meghan Clark, begins a discussion of Obama's speech on Libya, where the president justifies intervention in terms of the Responsibility to Protect. Clark argues that this R2P framework, which Pope Benedict XVI also uses in Caritas in Veritate, offers a better framework than Just War Theory.

But are Just War Theory and R2P mutually exclusive alternatives or is the latter assimilable to the former if due weight is given to the just cause criterion (Fr. Barron's second criterion) so that, in line with Aquinas's teaching, righting wrongs is not excluded?

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