Steven Riddle posts about "Just War" theory and wonders how objective or subjective it is. Clarity is often elusive. Our Dominican friar has said that Church doctrine is a fence on the far edge of the landscape pointing to cliffs that have already been discovered and we can enjoy the diversity of opinion in the field with a certain abandon. But having the freedom to believe wrong things seems a mixed bag.
For example, I'm suspicious when someone says "God told me to do..." XYZ. It is entirely possible that God did tell them to do XYZ, through an inspiration, a calling of the heart. Certainly those impulses to obey are most likely to be true if in line with Church teaching like, "volunteer at the local food bank".
But private revelation is not always reliable, even among saints. St. Vincent Ferrer felt that God told him that the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the world would come in his generation (the 15th century). He was still a saint, he just believed a wrong thing. For much of his life Pope John the 23rd believed and preached, heretically, that the dead would not see God until after the Last Judgement. Trust in the Church seems to be the best possibility that what we believe is true.
So what about the "Just War" theory? I don't know, other than it's not prudent to abandon it until the Church does, and the Church has not. The Pope seems to have an intuition towards pacifism...he may be a saint but that doesn't mean what he feels God is telling him is correct.
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