Moral theologian Matthew Shadle has done something genuinely illuminating in this morning’s essay at Window Light: he has traced the intellectual genealogy of Bishop Barron’s recent reading of Catechism §2309 — and located it precisely where it belongs, in the decades-long debate among Christian ethicists over the “presumptions” of the just-war tradition.

What looks at first glance like a straightforward appeal to the Catechism turns out, on Shadle’s careful reading, to be a near-paraphrase of George Weigel’s 2003 case for the Iraq War, rooted in the deontological framework Paul Ramsey and James Turner Johnson articulated in opposition to The Challenge of Peace (1983). On that view, the jus ad bellum criteria most likely to expose the injustice of a particular war — proportionality, last resort, probability of success — are demoted to “merely prudential” matters reserved to civil authority alone. The tragic vindication of that demotion’s failure is, of course, Iraq itself.

Shadle is generous enough to engage my own recent post on Bishop Barron’s misreading of §2309, alongside Deacon Steven Greydanus’s careful documentation of papal moral judgments on particular wars going back decades. But his contribution is something neither of us provided: the longer arc — the “webs spun long before,” in Faulkner’s phrase — that explains why a thoughtful bishop in 2026 would reach instinctively for a framework whose intellectual scaffolding was built to justify a war the Church’s own pastors had unambiguously condemned.

This is the contextualizing essay this debate has needed. I commend it warmly to your reading.

— Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.