God's will in war and peace
The cardinal also sees war and peace as a central theater of God's action. It is often difficult to determine God's will when military conflict beckons, and Cardinal George noted that new situations call for refinements of the traditional “just war” criteria.
“There are two challenges to just war theory as we have it now,” he explained. “The first is terrorism, which doesn't fit into a just war theory that presupposes sovereign states invading sovereign states.”
The second challenge is a matter of especially urgent concern, as the U.S. and other Western powers deepen their involvement in the conflict between Libya's government and rebel forces: “How do you protect citizens from their own government, when it's oppressive?”
Cardinal George said that the United Nations, despite serious flaws, is “the best means we have” to “act in the name of humanity as such.”
He observed that humanity's rights derive from God “long before there are any governments established, as we ourselves say in the Declaration of Independence.”
“God's job is to forgive”
The cardinal's reflections on war in his new book address the value of mercy, as well as justice. “Forgiveness,” he said, is also “a condition for being free.”
He said that events such as the death of Osama Bin Laden showed that victory was not simply a matter of defeating evil.
“The challenge to us is: how do we make peace?” he asked. “How do we, in defeating him, nonetheless try to create a more peaceful world, rather than just going from one war to the next?”
“That's where forgiveness comes in,” Cardinal George noted. “You may win, but you're still not free unless you forgive.”
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He explained that this act of forgiveness, which binds Christians whether in war or peace, is an invitation to cooperate with God.
“God's job, in a sense, is to forgive. That's what he does again and again,” he reflected. “You can be free only by acting with God.”
Profit and the gifts of God
The Archbishop of Chicago also hopes that businesses can find new ways of placing God first in economic decisions, in ways that Pope Benedict XVI sketched out in his 2008 social encyclical “Caritas in Veritate.”
“Is there a way,” he wondered, “in which the sense that 'everything is gift,' which we believe in faith, can enter into the economy itself?”
It's a difficult question that relatively few business people have tried to pose, perhaps for fear of appearing “unrealistic.”