In the early morning of January 3, U.S. forces carried out a lightning operation in Venezuelan territory that ended with the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, without significant confrontations or known casualties. The event, of enormous political and historical significance, demands an analysis that cannot be limited to superficial moral categories or automatic ideological reflexes.
Among Catholics today, there is a real risk of disoriented analyses, marked by a simplistic pacifism closer to an NGO ethic than to the Church’s political and moral tradition. Catholic doctrine has never held that peace is an absolute value detached from justice, nor that every form of violence is intrinsically illegitimate. On the contrary, it has developed over centuries a sophisticated thought on sovereignty, just war, tyranny, resistance, and the limits of intervention. This text does not intend to close the judgment but to order the variables that must be taken into account to formulate it rigorously.
Sovereignty of nations in the Catholic tradition
National sovereignty is a central principle of Christian political thought. From Saint Augustine, who links political legitimacy to the order of justice in De Civitate Dei, to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the political community is understood as a moral reality with the right to govern itself. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, establishes that war can only be considered just when legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention concur. From this formulation derives a decisive principle: the overthrow of a tyrant corresponds primarily to the political body itself and not to an external force.
The right of resistance and even tyrannicide, developed later by Francisco Suárez, are always conceived as internal acts of the nation, an extreme expression of its self-defense, and not as a function delegable to foreign powers.
Now, sovereignty is not merely a legal or formal category; it is also a sociopolitical reality sustained by the effective support of the national body. In the Venezuelan case, there is flagrant evidence that the regime maintains reduced social support, around 20%, as was evident in the last electoral process, widely perceived—inside and outside the country—as lacking credibility and marked by an almost grotesque character in its forms and results. From a technical point of view, the regime can be considered de facto sovereign, insofar as it exercises control over the state apparatus, but it is an extraordinarily weak sovereignty, disconnected from significant popular adhesion and sustained more by inertia, fear, and institutional hollowing out than by real legitimacy.
This fact is crucial because it introduces a fracture between formal sovereignty and material sovereignty that Catholic political doctrine has always taken into account, although not always explicitly.
The exception: prior aggression and legitimate international defense
The Catholic tradition, however, does not absolutize the principle of non-intervention. Authors like Francisco de Vitoria admit that a political community can legitimately resort to force when there is a real and objective aggression, even if it does not take the form of a classic military invasion. The systematic export of violence, drugs, organized crime, or deliberate destabilization can constitute a form of indirect aggression that enables a defensive response, provided it is proportional and oriented toward the restoration of order.
This was one of the arguments initially put forward by the United States: not so much the tyrannical condition of the Venezuelan regime, widely known, but the objective damage that said regime would be causing to third States from state or para-state structures. The legitimacy of this premise depends, naturally, on the veracity of the grievance and the proportionality of the response.
Moral selectivity and economic interests
This analysis cannot ignore an uncomfortable issue: moral selectivity. The Church’s social doctrine has repeatedly warned against the instrumentalization of ethical principles in the service of strategic interests. Venezuela possesses enormous oil reserves, while other equally authoritarian regimes do not receive the same attention or the same level of international pressure. The question is inevitable: is action taken for justice or for convenience?
Thinkers like Jacques Maritain warned of the danger of emptying moral language when it becomes mere cover for geopolitical decisions. If the real cause of the intervention is not justice but economic or strategic interest, the moral legitimacy of the act is seriously eroded.
The principle of self-government and the Venezuelan anomaly
Catholic doctrine holds that peoples must determine their own destiny, and this principle is solid in general terms. However, it presupposes a concrete reality: the existence of a politically alive people. The Venezuelan case introduces a profound anomaly, for the decisive fact is not only the fall of the regime but the total absence of resistance.
The capture of the head of state without confrontations, without casualties, and without significant military reaction forces us to pose a radical question: can one fully speak of sovereignty when there is no disposition whatsoever to defend it? Sovereignty is not a legal abstraction but a reality embodied in people willing to sustain it even at the cost of their lives.
The monopoly of force and the disposition to sacrifice
Following both the classical tradition and modern state theory, sovereignty implies an effective monopoly of force. But that monopoly is not merely technical; it is sustained by a concrete human will to sacrifice. Nations are historically constituted when there are thousands of people willing to give their lives for them. Without that disposition, the State becomes an empty formal structure.
In Venezuela, this element has been absent both in the regime’s environment and in the opposition. There have been individual acts of valor, even heroic ones, but not a collective national nerve capable of articulating a real defense of the political order or its transformation.
Historical comparison: when blood exists
The difference with other recent cases is eloquent. In Libya or Iraq, beyond the moral judgment those interventions may deserve, there was armed resistance, prolonged combat, and massive human sacrifice. There was blood, tragedy, and real confrontation. In Venezuela, on the other hand, power has revealed itself as a decor without substance, and the opposition as a force incapable of embodying a project of national sacrifice.
This absence of conflict is not a sign of peace but a symptom of political emptiness.
Empty nations and political theology in the 21st century
Here emerges a new variable that classical political theology barely addressed: the existence of nations emptied of historical will. The traditional doctrine presupposes living political communities, with identity and capacity for self-defense. But what happens when a nation retains symbols, anthems, and borders but has lost the real capacity to sustain its own existence?
In these cases, nations inevitably become subject to external tutelage, whether by criminal tyrannies or foreign powers. Not by violent conquest, but by internal abandonment.
Sovereignty surrendered?
It is even possible to pose an uncomfortable hypothesis: that Venezuelan sovereignty was not violated but exercised in its terminal form, through surrender. Not fighting, opening the doors, not defending one’s own head of state can be interpreted as a negative sovereign act, the sovereignty of renouncing existence as a political subject. This reading does not automatically legitimize the intervention but substantially modifies the framework of moral judgment.
Open conclusion: variables for a prudent judgment
This text does not offer a closed conclusion. It deliberately exposes the variables that must be taken into account to formulate a serious Catholic judgment: real and not merely formal sovereignty, the existence or not of prior aggression, the proportionality of the intervention, the moral coherence of the alleged motives, and above all, the anthropological reality of the affected nation.
Reducing this situation to pacifist slogans or ideological reflexes constitutes a form of intellectual irresponsibility. The Catholic tradition demands prudence, realism, and love of truth, even when it is uncomfortable. Only from there can one aspire to a just judgment.