In an article entitled "No, Pope Francis, it is not hypocritical for the good to make weapons," Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe took issue with Pope Francis' recent declaration that weapons manufacturers who call themselves Christians are hypocrites. “It is hypocritical to talk about peace and make weapons,” the pope told an audience of young people in Turin.

Jacoby points out that Francis previously had denounced the arms business as an “industry of death” run by people who “don’t want peace,” and labeled weapons dealers “merchants of death” guilty of “furthering a cycle of hate, fratricide, and violence.” Jacoby dismissed this talk as "sweeping calumny" and "sheer demagoguery." He notes that there is room for good Christians in the church: Saint Adrian of Nicomedia has even been honored as the patron saint of arms dealers, and Jesus himself urged his apostles, “Let him who has a purse take it and also a bag, and let him who has no sword sell his garment and buy one.”

And, seriously, would the pope want it any other way? Would the world be improved if the industries that make weapons and military equipment didn’t employ people who aspire to live ethically? The Vatican itself is defended by a military force, the Swiss Guard, that is well-supplied with sophisticated firepower, including assault rifles and submachine guns. When Francis slams weapons-makers and firearms-sellers as “hypocrites” and “merchants of death,” does he include those who provide the guns that keep him and the papal offices safe?

"There is nothing moral about pacifism," Jacoby rightly continues. "In the here and now, evil exists and the decent must fight it. And unless they are to fight unarmed, they will need the tools of violence."

At the very same rally in Turin in which he excoriated those who make and sell munitions, Francis retroactively decried the failure of the Western democracies to do more to stop the Nazi genocide and Stalin’s terror. “The great powers had photographs of the railway routes that brought the trains to the concentration camps,” he said. “Tell me, then: Why did they not bomb them?”

Does the pontiff hear his own words? He laments the failure to bomb the rail lines and save millions of lives. Who would have made those bombs? Who would have made the bombers to deliver them? Who made the guns and tanks and missiles that did, in the end, defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? Were all of them conniving merchants of death?

"If the peaceable cannot defend themselves," Jacoby concludes, "they will have no peace. A moral world requires moral violence, and the wisdom to know when to use it."