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OPINIONTrue Catholics Should Be Pacifists and Need Not Condone Any Military Expeditions
Written on 25 August 2024by Juan P. Flores
Written on 25 August 2024by Juan P. Flores
The infallible words of Holy Writ cast fighting amongst faithful Christians in a negative light: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.” Certainly, organized warfare in the present cannot be pleasing in the sight of the Lord. In His sermon on the mount, Our Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed that peacemakers are blessed, for they shall be called sons of God. In His parable of the tares, the Lord suggests that people wait until the Last Judgment for perfect justice to be dispensed by Almighty God. There should be no reason now for any faithful Catholic to ever take up arms.
Before the coming of the Messias and the promulgation of His Gospel, when man was under the yoke of the old Mosaic law in arduous preparation for His coming, there was no shortage of carnage executed by the infallible word of God. The Levites killed thousands of people in one day, having consecrated their hands on that day to the Lord. Through the prophets of old, the Almighty Lord of Hosts let it be known that He willed the destruction of nations through war.
“Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations, and over the kingdoms, to root up, and pull down, and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant.”—Jeremias 1:10, DRA
Both before and after the birth of Christ, the State has employed war as the Hand of God to avenge His wrath against evildoers. God used ancient Israel to safeguard the purity of monotheism and to transmit the moral principles of divine law to the whole world. The Lord Almighty foresaw the evil intentions of entire groups of people, such as the Babylonians, and arranged that even its infants be annihilated at the hands of the Israelites.
“Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock.”—Psalm 136: 9, DRA
Since the original sin of Adam, human nature had been an enemy of God, but God ordained that it be reconciled and united to him by His incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 25 March 1 AD, so that the angelic choir at the nativity of Christ on 25 December sung “glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will.” Pacifism was the ideal promulgated by Christ from His birth, to His public ministry in which He taught men to “turn the other cheek,” and even until His bitter passion when He pronounced to St. Peter that he who lives by the sword shall perish by it: from this the Church reproves taking the sword to arm oneself in order to take the life of anyone, without the command or permission of superior or lawful authority. Love of God and of neighbour is a divine command which His apostles and their successors have since echoed.
“If it be possible, as much as is in you, have peace with all men. Revenge not yourselves, my dearly beloved; but give place unto wrath, for it is written: Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”—Romans 12: 18-19, DRA
St. Thomas Aquinas puts forth three criteria for a just war: the legitimacy of the authority waging it, the justice of its cause, and it the rightfulness of the intentions for which it is fought, namely to advance good and prevent evil. Like Gratian in his Decretum, he refers in his Summa to St. Augustine of Hippo, who recognized that war could be justified only by the injustice of the aggressor.
“True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.”— Decretals of Gratian, Cause XXIII, Question I
In his treatise Weltkirche und Weltfriede, Dominican Franziskus Stratmann (1883–1971) argues that modern war is inherently unjust, outlining ten conditions that must be met for any war to be just.
As he then contends, it is absurd for a State to be its own judge as to whether the war it has declared is just or not. To appease non-Catholic rulers or anti-Catholic mobs, unscrupulous clergymen have compromised these values by voicing support for unjust wars, yet the voice from the throne of St. Peter has consistently been one of peace, as the Church abhors the flowing of blood: Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine. Countless martyrs of the Christian faith let themselves and their entire families by killed by the enemies of Christ, bearing testimony of the true faith by not impeding the will of God, neither by denying the true faith nor by taking up arms against their persecutors. For example, the Roman Martyrology on 28 November commemorates “St. Rufus, who, with all his family, was made a martyr” by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, and on 30 November, the crucifixion of St. Andrew is widely remembered as an example of Christian meekness exercised for the greater cause of eternal Salvation.
“Therefore do ye also keep silence, quietness, and peace; and hinder not my martyrdom, but rather get yourselves also ready beforehand as athletes to the Lord, in order that you may overcome threatenings by a soul that has no fear of man, and that you may get the better of injuries through the endurance of the body. For this temporary fall is not to be feared; but that should be feared which has no end. The fear of men, then, is like smoke which, while it is raised and gathered together, disappears. And those torments ought to be feared which never have an end.”— Acts and Martyrdom of the Holy Apostle Andrew
The focus of the Church is not the military subjugation of the world but the salvation of all the souls therein. She did not gain power by military conflict as the sect of Muhammad did, but by formerly non-Catholic leaders such as Emperor Constantine I gradually acknowledging the veracity of Catholic claims. Against the wars of the barbarians of the Middle Ages, Pope St. Gregory the Great inserted into the Canon of the Roman liturgy a prayer for peace: diesque nostros in tua pace disponas. Medieval canon law, going back to the Council of Toledo (400 AD) which decreed that no prayers be said for a priest killed in war or strife, forbade clergymen from participating in armed conflicts, and it implemented measures for tempering discord among Christian princes. Archers were forbidden to shoot during three Lents every year, and from Wednesday to Monday every week, arms were to be laid down under the Treuga Dei of the Pope.
“The Church knows only one sword, the sword of the spirit which does not kill but gives life.”— Pope Nicholas I, Patrologiae cursus completus, Jacques-Paul Migne, Volume CLXI, Chapter CXXIV
Non-Christian warlords amongst the Nordic Vikings and Arab Saracens took advantage of Christian pacifism, raiding holy sites and abusing pilgrims. Most of Scandinavia converted without Christian nations waging war against the heathens, but with demonstrations of the folly of idolatry. The crusades officially sanctioned by Pope Urban II and others chiefly consisted of armed pilgrimages to land which had long been under Christian rule; it is the Muslims who invaded Christian land and impeded the religious processions which could have been otherwise peacefully carried out, as in the Sixth Crusade (1228–1229), in which Emperor Frederick II regained dominion over the holy city of Jerusalem chiefly through diplomatic means.
It is also true that Popes such as Alexander VI in his bull Inter caetera (1493) deliniated spheres of influence for Christian rule, but not explicitly through the use of organized armed conflict. One can speculate that the conquest of the West Indies and the Americas was chiefly the work of Eurasian germs divinely arranged to facilitate a benign colonization of lands previously occupied by uncivilized barbarians. The 1521 conquest of Central Mexico can be characterized as a civil war between Amerindian tribes struggling alongside the Catholic Spaniards to overthrow the harsh yoke of Aztec subjugation, and in general, the battles waged by Catholics against indigenous Americans were never unequivocally condoned by the Catholic Church, as Francisco de Vitoria explained in his 1532 dissertation De Jure Belli Hispanorum in Barbaros.
Rather, the firm rock of the Church has consistently stood in opposition to needless war. “War must cease and be driven off the earth,” wrote Pope Pius IX in a letter at the beginning of the Crimean War (1853-1856). As the Second World War spread in 21 December 1939, Pope Pius XII composed a prayer for peace to be recited by the faithful, which again implies that world peace is not an impractical delusion but an imperative.
“Most sweet Heart of Jesus, grant that peace, the fruit of justice and charity, may reign throughout the world.”—No. 243, The Raccolta: A manual of indulgences, prayers and devotions enriched with indulgences, 1957
Some may point to Catholic saints who served in armies in ancient times, yet it should be noted that soldiers were not always used to kill and injure people in an organized, deliberate fashion: Roman legions were also used for clearing thickets, and building roads and bridges, such as those of Julius Caesar over the River Rhine, famously completed in only ten days. Neither does the Church condemn even sanguinary police work, so actions such as a violent raid against a criminal cartel, the quelling of street brawls, and a mass execution of political dissidents all would fall outside of the scope of the organized warfare being outlined here.
The punishment of evil doers, from the apprehension of trespassers to the execution of murderers, is a chief duty of any earthly government. It is the universal teaching of the Church that “to civil authorities is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent,” as the Roman Catechism teaches, subsequently extending the idea to contemporaneous soldiers.
“[T]he soldier is guiltless who, actuated not by motives of ambition or cruelty, but by a pure desire of serving the interests of his country, takes away the life of an enemy in a just war.”—The Catechism of the Council of Trent, translated by Jeremiah Donovan, 1829
One needs to keep in mind that the catechism was issued for the use of parish priests at a time when Catholic states, whose sovereignty was recognized by a reigning Pontiff, still existed in the present world. Irrespective of the century, Catholics recognize that the Church of Rome visibly headed in ordinary times by the Roman Pontiff has spiritual and temporal authority over the state.
“We are informed by the texts of the gospels that in this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal. [...T]he latter is to be exercised on behalf of the Church; and truly, the former is to be exercised by the Church. The former is of the priest; the latter is by the hand of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.”—Pope Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, 1302
The power of all secular princes comes to them from the Roman Pontiff, as Henry of Segusio (XIIIc. AD), St. Antoninus of Florence (1389–1459), and Augustinus of Ancona (1243–1328) wrote, for the earth and the fulness thereof belong to the Lord: to Jesus is given all power both in heaven and in earth, and the Pope is the vicar of God and of Christ, as the Summa of Sylvester went on to explain in the XVI century.
“The power of the Emperor and all other princes is sub-delegated as regards the Pope, being derived from God through the medium of the Pope[...] all their power is dependent on the Pope.”—Sylvester Mazzolini of Priero, Summa Summarum, 1516, Volume 2
Given that all papal claimants since the Second Vatican Council have been formal and manifest heretics, neither any bishop since consecrated nor any king since anointed exercise any ordinary jurisdiction. Hence, no human creature remains alive on earth to positively sanction any military action. Also, many of the regimes recognized under the latest universally accepted Catholic Pope have ceased to exist as such. No matter how justified it might seem outwardly, Catholics should take no part in any armed conflict as there is no just regime on the face of the planet to declare it.
“I do not doubt that the Pope, by means of punishment and censure, can forbid any war until it is proved to him to be justifiable.”—John Lupus of Segovia, De Bello et Bellatoribus, 1584
As there is no way for a war to be declared just, there can be no justification in the present for any Catholic to partake in any organized armed conflict whatsoever. At this time, Catholics are bound to refuse to participate in organized warfare anywhere in the world.
“No authority can command the death of the innocent, and in an unjust war the enemies are innocent, therefore it is not permissible to kill them. The ruler who declares such a war is guilty, and not those only who do evil but those also who agree to it, are worthy of death (Rom. I., 32). Even if the ruler gives the order, a soldier must not put innocent citizens to death and it follows that if a soldier is convinced of the injustice of a war he must not take part in it, for anything that is against a man's conscience is sin.”—Francis of Vitoria, De Jure Belli Hispanorum in Barbaros, 1532, Part II, 2
As dueling has been forbidden for Catholics under pain of excommunication, so could we expect that a future pope will definitively ban any participation whatsoever in organized armed conflict. Until a holy pope is able to enforce such a sweeping interdiction with temporal power, one can pray that the Lord grant us peace in our times, while being at ease knowing that, as it stands, it is not any Catholic's duty to take up arms to slaughter fellow human beings.
“Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations, and over the kingdoms, to root up, and pull down, and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant.”—Jeremias 1:10, DRA
Both before and after the birth of Christ, the State has employed war as the Hand of God to avenge His wrath against evildoers. God used ancient Israel to safeguard the purity of monotheism and to transmit the moral principles of divine law to the whole world. The Lord Almighty foresaw the evil intentions of entire groups of people, such as the Babylonians, and arranged that even its infants be annihilated at the hands of the Israelites.
“Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock.”—Psalm 136: 9, DRA
Since the original sin of Adam, human nature had been an enemy of God, but God ordained that it be reconciled and united to him by His incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 25 March 1 AD, so that the angelic choir at the nativity of Christ on 25 December sung “glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will.” Pacifism was the ideal promulgated by Christ from His birth, to His public ministry in which He taught men to “turn the other cheek,” and even until His bitter passion when He pronounced to St. Peter that he who lives by the sword shall perish by it: from this the Church reproves taking the sword to arm oneself in order to take the life of anyone, without the command or permission of superior or lawful authority. Love of God and of neighbour is a divine command which His apostles and their successors have since echoed.
“If it be possible, as much as is in you, have peace with all men. Revenge not yourselves, my dearly beloved; but give place unto wrath, for it is written: Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”—Romans 12: 18-19, DRA
St. Thomas Aquinas puts forth three criteria for a just war: the legitimacy of the authority waging it, the justice of its cause, and it the rightfulness of the intentions for which it is fought, namely to advance good and prevent evil. Like Gratian in his Decretum, he refers in his Summa to St. Augustine of Hippo, who recognized that war could be justified only by the injustice of the aggressor.
“True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.”— Decretals of Gratian, Cause XXIII, Question I
In his treatise Weltkirche und Weltfriede, Dominican Franziskus Stratmann (1883–1971) argues that modern war is inherently unjust, outlining ten conditions that must be met for any war to be just.
- Gross injustice on the part of one, and only one, of the contending parties.
- Gross formal moral guilt on one side-material wrong is not sufficient.
- Undoubted knowledge of this guilt.
- That war should only be declared when every means to prevent it have failed.
- Guilt and punishment must be proportionate. Punishment exceeding the measure of guilt is unjust and not to be allowed.
- Moral certainty that the side of justice will win.
- Right intention to further what is good by the war and to shun what is evil.
- War must be rightly conducted: restrained within the limits of justice and love.
- Avoidance of unnecessary upheaval of countries not immediately concerned and of the Christian community.
- Declaration of war by lawful authorised authority exercised in the name of God.
As he then contends, it is absurd for a State to be its own judge as to whether the war it has declared is just or not. To appease non-Catholic rulers or anti-Catholic mobs, unscrupulous clergymen have compromised these values by voicing support for unjust wars, yet the voice from the throne of St. Peter has consistently been one of peace, as the Church abhors the flowing of blood: Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine. Countless martyrs of the Christian faith let themselves and their entire families by killed by the enemies of Christ, bearing testimony of the true faith by not impeding the will of God, neither by denying the true faith nor by taking up arms against their persecutors. For example, the Roman Martyrology on 28 November commemorates “St. Rufus, who, with all his family, was made a martyr” by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, and on 30 November, the crucifixion of St. Andrew is widely remembered as an example of Christian meekness exercised for the greater cause of eternal Salvation.
“Therefore do ye also keep silence, quietness, and peace; and hinder not my martyrdom, but rather get yourselves also ready beforehand as athletes to the Lord, in order that you may overcome threatenings by a soul that has no fear of man, and that you may get the better of injuries through the endurance of the body. For this temporary fall is not to be feared; but that should be feared which has no end. The fear of men, then, is like smoke which, while it is raised and gathered together, disappears. And those torments ought to be feared which never have an end.”— Acts and Martyrdom of the Holy Apostle Andrew
The focus of the Church is not the military subjugation of the world but the salvation of all the souls therein. She did not gain power by military conflict as the sect of Muhammad did, but by formerly non-Catholic leaders such as Emperor Constantine I gradually acknowledging the veracity of Catholic claims. Against the wars of the barbarians of the Middle Ages, Pope St. Gregory the Great inserted into the Canon of the Roman liturgy a prayer for peace: diesque nostros in tua pace disponas. Medieval canon law, going back to the Council of Toledo (400 AD) which decreed that no prayers be said for a priest killed in war or strife, forbade clergymen from participating in armed conflicts, and it implemented measures for tempering discord among Christian princes. Archers were forbidden to shoot during three Lents every year, and from Wednesday to Monday every week, arms were to be laid down under the Treuga Dei of the Pope.
“The Church knows only one sword, the sword of the spirit which does not kill but gives life.”— Pope Nicholas I, Patrologiae cursus completus, Jacques-Paul Migne, Volume CLXI, Chapter CXXIV
Non-Christian warlords amongst the Nordic Vikings and Arab Saracens took advantage of Christian pacifism, raiding holy sites and abusing pilgrims. Most of Scandinavia converted without Christian nations waging war against the heathens, but with demonstrations of the folly of idolatry. The crusades officially sanctioned by Pope Urban II and others chiefly consisted of armed pilgrimages to land which had long been under Christian rule; it is the Muslims who invaded Christian land and impeded the religious processions which could have been otherwise peacefully carried out, as in the Sixth Crusade (1228–1229), in which Emperor Frederick II regained dominion over the holy city of Jerusalem chiefly through diplomatic means.
It is also true that Popes such as Alexander VI in his bull Inter caetera (1493) deliniated spheres of influence for Christian rule, but not explicitly through the use of organized armed conflict. One can speculate that the conquest of the West Indies and the Americas was chiefly the work of Eurasian germs divinely arranged to facilitate a benign colonization of lands previously occupied by uncivilized barbarians. The 1521 conquest of Central Mexico can be characterized as a civil war between Amerindian tribes struggling alongside the Catholic Spaniards to overthrow the harsh yoke of Aztec subjugation, and in general, the battles waged by Catholics against indigenous Americans were never unequivocally condoned by the Catholic Church, as Francisco de Vitoria explained in his 1532 dissertation De Jure Belli Hispanorum in Barbaros.
Rather, the firm rock of the Church has consistently stood in opposition to needless war. “War must cease and be driven off the earth,” wrote Pope Pius IX in a letter at the beginning of the Crimean War (1853-1856). As the Second World War spread in 21 December 1939, Pope Pius XII composed a prayer for peace to be recited by the faithful, which again implies that world peace is not an impractical delusion but an imperative.
“Most sweet Heart of Jesus, grant that peace, the fruit of justice and charity, may reign throughout the world.”—No. 243, The Raccolta: A manual of indulgences, prayers and devotions enriched with indulgences, 1957
Some may point to Catholic saints who served in armies in ancient times, yet it should be noted that soldiers were not always used to kill and injure people in an organized, deliberate fashion: Roman legions were also used for clearing thickets, and building roads and bridges, such as those of Julius Caesar over the River Rhine, famously completed in only ten days. Neither does the Church condemn even sanguinary police work, so actions such as a violent raid against a criminal cartel, the quelling of street brawls, and a mass execution of political dissidents all would fall outside of the scope of the organized warfare being outlined here.
The punishment of evil doers, from the apprehension of trespassers to the execution of murderers, is a chief duty of any earthly government. It is the universal teaching of the Church that “to civil authorities is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent,” as the Roman Catechism teaches, subsequently extending the idea to contemporaneous soldiers.
“[T]he soldier is guiltless who, actuated not by motives of ambition or cruelty, but by a pure desire of serving the interests of his country, takes away the life of an enemy in a just war.”—The Catechism of the Council of Trent, translated by Jeremiah Donovan, 1829
One needs to keep in mind that the catechism was issued for the use of parish priests at a time when Catholic states, whose sovereignty was recognized by a reigning Pontiff, still existed in the present world. Irrespective of the century, Catholics recognize that the Church of Rome visibly headed in ordinary times by the Roman Pontiff has spiritual and temporal authority over the state.
“We are informed by the texts of the gospels that in this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal. [...T]he latter is to be exercised on behalf of the Church; and truly, the former is to be exercised by the Church. The former is of the priest; the latter is by the hand of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.”—Pope Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, 1302
The power of all secular princes comes to them from the Roman Pontiff, as Henry of Segusio (XIIIc. AD), St. Antoninus of Florence (1389–1459), and Augustinus of Ancona (1243–1328) wrote, for the earth and the fulness thereof belong to the Lord: to Jesus is given all power both in heaven and in earth, and the Pope is the vicar of God and of Christ, as the Summa of Sylvester went on to explain in the XVI century.
“The power of the Emperor and all other princes is sub-delegated as regards the Pope, being derived from God through the medium of the Pope[...] all their power is dependent on the Pope.”—Sylvester Mazzolini of Priero, Summa Summarum, 1516, Volume 2
Given that all papal claimants since the Second Vatican Council have been formal and manifest heretics, neither any bishop since consecrated nor any king since anointed exercise any ordinary jurisdiction. Hence, no human creature remains alive on earth to positively sanction any military action. Also, many of the regimes recognized under the latest universally accepted Catholic Pope have ceased to exist as such. No matter how justified it might seem outwardly, Catholics should take no part in any armed conflict as there is no just regime on the face of the planet to declare it.
“I do not doubt that the Pope, by means of punishment and censure, can forbid any war until it is proved to him to be justifiable.”—John Lupus of Segovia, De Bello et Bellatoribus, 1584
As there is no way for a war to be declared just, there can be no justification in the present for any Catholic to partake in any organized armed conflict whatsoever. At this time, Catholics are bound to refuse to participate in organized warfare anywhere in the world.
“No authority can command the death of the innocent, and in an unjust war the enemies are innocent, therefore it is not permissible to kill them. The ruler who declares such a war is guilty, and not those only who do evil but those also who agree to it, are worthy of death (Rom. I., 32). Even if the ruler gives the order, a soldier must not put innocent citizens to death and it follows that if a soldier is convinced of the injustice of a war he must not take part in it, for anything that is against a man's conscience is sin.”—Francis of Vitoria, De Jure Belli Hispanorum in Barbaros, 1532, Part II, 2
As dueling has been forbidden for Catholics under pain of excommunication, so could we expect that a future pope will definitively ban any participation whatsoever in organized armed conflict. Until a holy pope is able to enforce such a sweeping interdiction with temporal power, one can pray that the Lord grant us peace in our times, while being at ease knowing that, as it stands, it is not any Catholic's duty to take up arms to slaughter fellow human beings.
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