"Magisterium? We don't need no stinkin' Magisterium!"

So goes the attitude of too many Foolable Catholics. Like this.

Note the convenient catch-phrases in this blogger's excerpt from a recent U.S. Catholic story by Mark Graceffo:

If we wouldn’t invite speakers who contest our [Church] leadership’s instructions on other moral issues [such as abortion — Ed.], why do so when it comes to war? Why aren’t our schools instead paying tribute to peace activists, conscientious objectors, or other emissaries of nonviolence and hope?

It’s time for Catholic school educators to shelve the jingoism and begin ensuring that our children are conversant in Catholic social teaching…

As parents, educators, and church leaders, it behooves us to consider carefully the messages we’re giving our children about war and patriotism. By extolling the actions of our military in Iraq, we negate our teaching on the sanctity of human life and love of neighbor. War is granted our implicit approval.

Mr. Graceffo writes with the passion of the convicted. He equates war--unqualified, but presumably the Iraq War based on the context--with abortion as a "violation of the sanctity of life."

He abhors the inconsistency of Catholic school educators inconsistently upholding this sanctity of life through their differentiations of abortion and the war. He might have a case...

Except that the Catholic Church has made no authoritative declarations that the Iraq War is morally unjustified, and therefore as immoral as abortion. Don't take my word for it. Ask Jimmy Akin:

I'm quite happy to explain the Church's just war teaching, and in fact I have done so on numerous occasions. But when it comes to applying those criteria to particular conflicts, who says that I have any obligation to tell people what to think about a particular war when even JPII and B16 have not (despite what you may have heard) chosen to make authoritative statements on the subject and bind the consciences of the faithful?

Addresses, press releases, quotes to reporters and speeches to Vatican officials like the Diplomatic Corps. do not typically carry the authority of the Pope to bind the conscience of the Faithful. Again, ask Jimmy:

If the pope really wants to say something in an authoritative way, he says it in a document of a higher order, like a motu proprio, an encyclical, or an apostolic constitution (the last being the most authoritative)

Mr. Graceffo either knows this or doesn't. If he doesn't it, he's uninformed and passing his ignorance on to his readers. If he does, he's deliberately distorting the Catholic Church's position on the Iraq War to make a shrill political point. Either way, he does not exercise the prudent responsibility to communicate Truth that journalists are called to do. Especially Catholic journalists, presuming Mr. Graceffo is.

Until the Church makes an authoritative judgement on it, no Catholic can in good conscience appeal to the Church to support a moral equivelancy between the Iraq War and abortion.

I respect those Catholics and other Fools that question the casus belli and ius en bellum of the US vis a vis the Iraq War. I don't suffer Foolables that look to justify their doubts by saying, "The Church agrees with me; the war's immoral." The former and current Pope believed that it was. However, neither Pope has used his authority to make that conclusion binding on the Faithful.

Therefore, Catholics and other Fools can disagree. I respect that, as well.

I appreciate those Foolables that have legitimate disagreements over the War. But I have a simple message for them: Just stop trying to be your own magisterium, please. You stand on your own opinion or you don't. You have no right to insist that your deeply held pacifism is the only legitimate moral position on war.

And you have no right to condemn our veterans for obeying the just orders of their Commander-In-Chief in a time of war!

That attempt at protest will earn you nothing but my contempt. Mr. Graceffo has lowered himself to the level of those Vietnam war protesters who spit upon returning veterans and called them "baby killers!" He has no right to imply that to do otherwise is un-Catholic. The sooner he grows up, the better off his readers will be.