The National Catholic Register (NCR) — a portal historically aligned with the post-conciliar establishment — publishes a commentary by “Bishop” James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, dated May 11, 2026, titled “Just War 101: Catholic Teaching for a Dangerous Moment.” The article invokes the story of Father George Zabelka, the chaplain who blessed the Enola Gay crew before Hiroshima, then spent decades repenting of that act. Conley uses this narrative as a springboard to address two contemporary issues: the U.S.-Israeli military strikes on Iran in February 2026 and the ethical dispute between Anthropic (developer of the Claude AI system) and the U.S. Department of War over autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. He frames both through the lens of the post-conciliar Catechism’s just war principles, acknowledges some moral ambiguity regarding the Iran strikes, and praises Catholic moral theologians who submitted an amicus brief opposing AI-directed autonomous weapons. He closes by expressing solidarity with “Pope Leo XIV” and urging prayers for peace. The article’s fundamental failure — characteristic of the entire conciliar enterprise — is that it treats just war theory as a self-referential ethical calculus divorced from the supernatural mission of the Church, the Kingship of Christ, and the reality of modern warfare’s intrinsic immorality, while simultaneously legitimizing the very structures of power that make such wars inevitable.
The Zabelka Narrative: Selective Conscience Without Supernatural Foundation
The article opens with the story of Father George Zabelka, who blessed the Enola Gay crew before the Hiroshima bombing and later publicly repented. Conley presents this as “a moment of prophetic grace and moral righteousness.” But what kind of “prophetic grace” is this? A priest who spent twenty years gradually arriving at the conclusion that incinerating hundreds of thousands of civilians was wrong — and who framed his repentance in purely naturalistic, humanitarian terms — is held up as a model. There is no mention in Conley’s account that Zabelka’s initial sin was not merely a failure of prudential judgment but a sacrilegious act: invoking God’s blessing upon an intrinsically evil action. A blessing is not a neutral ritual; it is a sacramental that asks God’s favor. To ask God’s favor for the mass murder of innocents is blasphemy, full stop. The gradual, decades-long “wrestling” that Conley admires is itself evidence of a formation deficient in the unchanging moral theology of the Church — the theology that would have told Zabelka immediately, without twenty years of agonizing, that the deliberate destruction of civilian populations is always and everywhere mortally sinful, regardless of military justification.
St. Augustine, whom Conley invokes, taught that even in a just war, the soldier should grieve the necessity of killing. St. Thomas Aquinas, also cited, placed the entire framework within the context of the supernatural common good ordered to God. The pre-conciliar Church understood that war is a punishment for sin, and its justice is measured not by human conventions but by the eternal law of God. Pius XII, in his 1954 address to military doctors, stated unequivocally that “the moral law does not permit the direct killing of innocent persons, even for reasons of national defense.” There is no evidence that Zabelka — formed in the pre-conciliar seminary system but operating in a military chaplaincy that had already absorbed the errors of proportionalism — was taught this with the clarity it demands. Conley’s admiration for Zabelka’s “courage to speak out” is the courage of a man who discovered, belatedly, what the Church had always taught but which the institutional Church had failed to enforce in practice.
The Iran Conflict: “Just War” Applied to an Illegitimate State Waging Aggressive War
Conley devotes considerable attention to the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran of February 2026. He acknowledges moral ambiguity: “Debatable” whether it was last resort, “unclear” goals, “dynamic” situation. He even quotes the Catechism’s four conditions for jus ad bellum and admits that “serious moral questions” remain. But this is precisely the problem: the entire framework is applied to a situation where it cannot possibly be satisfied, because the entity waging war — the United States of America — is not a legitimate authority in the Catholic sense.
The just war doctrine, as developed by the Church, presupposes that the “legitimate authority” declaring war is one that recognizes the sovereignty of Christ the King and governs according to His law. The United States was founded on the Enlightenment principle of religious indifferentism — the very error condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State”). Its entire foreign policy apparatus is built upon the Masonic-Capitalist-Imperialist project that the popes from Leo XIII to Pius XII consistently identified as antithetical to Christian civilization. To apply just war criteria to the actions of such a state is like applying medical ethics to a poisoner: the framework is sound, but the subject to which it is applied is fundamentally corrupt.
Conley writes: “Do we have to wait until an enemy is on the brink of attacking us before we can act? Certainly not.” This is presented as self-evident. But the Church’s teaching does not grant nations a blank check for preemptive aggression. The condition that “the damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave, and certain” (CCC 2309, which Conley cites) requires certainty, not speculation about whether Iran “probably” was rebuilding nuclear facilities or “probably” could eventually threaten the U.S. The entire intelligence apparatus that produces such assessments is the same apparatus that lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about the Gulf of Tonkin, about the Bay of Pigs. Conley, a bishop in a Church that claims to be guided by the Holy Spirit, treats the propaganda outputs of the Pentagon and CIA as neutral data inputs for moral analysis. This is not prudence; it is servility to the Prince of this World.
Moreover, Conley acknowledges that Iran “killed tens of thousands of peaceful protesters” — the January 2026 revolt — as though this fact is morally relevant to the question of whether the U.S. should bomb Iran. It is not. The internal governance of Iran, however brutal, is not the moral justification for the United States to wage aggressive war. The Church’s just war doctrine was never intended to serve as a fig leaf for imperial conquest. When Pius XI declared in Quas Primas that Christ’s kingship extends over all nations and that rulers who refuse His authority undermine the very foundation of their own power, he was speaking precisely against the kind of secular, militarist statecraft that Conley uncritically accepts as the operative framework.
The Anthropic Affair: Autonomous Weapons and the Abdication of Moral Responsibility
The second issue Conley addresses is the dispute between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of War over the use of AI for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Here, Conley’s analysis is somewhat more critical — he praises the Catholic moral theologians who submitted an amicus brief supporting Anthropic’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for these purposes. He quotes Charlie Camosy: “deadly actions in war require human beings to be the ones morally responsible.” He notes that “autonomous weapons do not possess a moral conscience.”
This is correct as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough. The Church’s teaching is not merely that autonomous weapons are impractical or imprudent — it is that modern warfare itself, particularly as waged by technological powers against civilian populations, is intrinsically incapable of satisfying just war criteria. Pius XII, in his Christmas Message of 1956, declared: “The justice of a war and the justice of particular wartime actions cannot be adequately judged by the parties themselves, but only by an authority which is not involved in the conflict and which is recognized as having a higher moral competence.” The United States, as a party to every conflict it enters, cannot be its own judge. And the “Catholic moral theologians” Conley praises are operating within a framework that accepts the legitimacy of the U.S. military apparatus as such — they are merely arguing about the means, not questioning whether the entire enterprise is just.
Furthermore, the principle that “human involvement is crucial” because “judgments of proportionality and discrimination are prudential” implicitly concedes that human judgment in modern warfare is sufficient to render it just. But the entire history of the 20th and 21st centuries demonstrates the opposite. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the sanctions against Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of children — all of these were authorized by human beings exercising “prudential judgment.” The problem is not that machines lack moral conscience; it is that human beings who have rejected the moral law of God lack moral conscience, whether they operate a drone or press a button on a nuclear console.
The Accommodationist Framework: “Pope Leo XIV” and the USCCB
Conley closes by expressing solidarity with “Pope Leo XIV” and “Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops,” urging prayers for peace. This is the tell. The entire article operates within the framework of the conciliar sect’s accommodation to secular power. The “Pope” — whoever occupies the Vatican apparatus at any given time — is invoked as a moral authority, but his authority is exercised not in condemning the structures of the modern state but in urging “prayers for peaceful solution” that never challenge the legitimacy of the state’s war-making power. This is the religion of the abomination of desolation: it uses the language of the Church to sanctify the operations of the Antichrist’s kingdom.
The USCCB, for its part, has been a reliable instrument of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy agenda since its founding. Its “just war” analyses have consistently served to provide moral cover for U.S. military interventions while occasionally scrupling about means (torture, autonomous weapons) that can be adjusted without challenging the underlying imperial project. Conley’s invocation of the USCCB is not accidental — it places him squarely within the mainstream of conciarist “social teaching,” which has always been a program for the Church’s subordination to secular power structures dressed up in the language of the Gospel.
The Omission That Condemns: Christ the King and the Supernatural Order
What is entirely absent from Conley’s analysis — and what condemns it as a product of the post-conciliar apostasy — is any reference to the Kingship of Christ over nations, the supernatural end of human society, or the obligation of states to recognize the Catholic Church as the one true religion. Pius XI’s Quas Primas, which established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism that Conley uncritically absorbs, teaches: “His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” And further: “Rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.”
There is no recognition in Conley’s article that the United States, by its constitutional commitment to religious indifferentism, is in a state of rebellion against Christ the King. There is no recognition that the “Iran conflict” is, at its root, a conflict between two powers that both reject the social reign of Christ — one a Masonic-Imperialist republic, the other an Islamic theocracy. There is no recognition that the only true peace is the Pax Christi that comes from submission to the Church’s authority. Instead, we get “Just War 101” — a freshman-level ethics seminar conducted in the language of the Church but emptied of her supernatural content.
The Syllabus of Errors condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (proposition 80). Conley’s entire article is an exercise in precisely this reconciliation. He takes the Church’s just war doctrine — a doctrine developed in an age when Christendom still aspired to order society according to God’s law — and applies it to the operations of a post-Christian empire waging war with artificial intelligence and drone swarms. He does not question the empire. He does not preach conversion. He does not call for the social reign of Christ. He offers “pray for peace” — the last refuge of a clergy that has abandoned its prophetic mission and settled for the role of chaplain to Caesar.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu, condemned the modernist proposition that “the Church is incapable of effectively defending evangelical ethics, because it steadfastly adheres to its views, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress” (proposition 63). Conley’s article is a living demonstration of this condemned proposition in reverse: rather than the Church judging modern progress by evangelical ethics, modern progress judges the Church’s ethics and finds them “debatable.” The moral theology of the Church is reduced to a set of criteria that can be applied, adjusted, and debated endlessly — never with the definitive clarity that the Magisterium once possessed, always with the cautious, bureaucratic language of a Church that has lost its certainty because it has lost its Faith.
Father Zabelka’s cry — “My God, what have we done?” — echoes still. But the repentance it demands is not the gradual, public, humanitarian repentance that Conley admires. It is the repentance of a Church that blessed the bombs, anointed the warriors, and told itself that the Kingdom of God could coexist with the kingdom of this world. That repentance has not come. It will not come from the conciliar structures. It can only come from those who remain faithful to the integral Catholic Faith — the Faith that knows that there is no just war waged by an unjust society, no moral calculus that can sanctify the machinery of a state that has rejected its Creator, and no peace except the Peace of Christ, which passes through the Cross, not around it.
Source:
Just War 101: Catholic Teaching for a Dangerous Moment (ncregister.com)
Date: 11.05.2026