Anzac Day this year falls shortly after a Vatican Conference on Non-Violence and Just Peace. The coincidence is intriguing. At their best both Anzac Day and conferences of this kind are about people and the cost war makes them pay.
Anzac Day invites us to remember the soldiers who have died in war, those who have survived with scars to their body and spirit, and those who have grieved the loss.
Conferences on war focus properly on the people and cultures that war damages. Both kinds of event at their best say, 'Never again'.
The contribution of the conference was to question the legitimacy of just war thinking as a Christian approach to war and peace, and to stress the priority of peaceful over violent ways of making peace.
Its reservations about the value of just war theory are well grounded. The classical arguments originated at a time when casualties were suffered mostly by soldiers.
In modern warfare, including in Syria and Iraq, civilians overwhelmingly suffer, largely at the hands of powers that are not defending their own people. It is increasingly difficult to justify any war by the principles of self-defence and proportionality, to name just two.
Just war theory, too, is largely used as spin to give specious justification to military campaigns in whose devising ethical considerations played no part. Wars that governments wage are always declared to be just; those waged by their enemies are declared to be unjust.
By joining seriously in such meretricious debate churches would seem to be co-opted into playing an intellectual game designed to make legitimate killing and destruction.
"Modern war leaves no excuse for endorsing wars as divinely sanctioned or as a battle of good against evil. That line can safely be left for government spinners to cast."
When used among Christians, too, just war language diminishes the radical edge of the Gospel. The Gospel emphasises non-violence in relationships, the priority of the poor and vulnerable over those who wield power, and the value in God's eyes of each human being, especially of strangers.
When we enter into conversation about just wars we join the powerful in talking about what they can do to the weak. This draws the Gospel's teeth.
In the Catholic Church, which gives authority to its history, it is argued, the focus on the justice of wars conceals and dishonours an essential element of that tradition: the witness of those who suffered because they refused to violently engage