“Are we at war now, Dad?” That was the question my 10-year-old anxiously asked as the news broke over the car radio about the United States entering the latest war in the Middle East. As we listened to President Donald Trump address the nation following the bombing mission in Iran, we heard his notable conclusion: “I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America.”
While it is not new for a president to conclude a speech by invoking God, I quietly wondered what sort of deity was being invoked here—and how I, as an American citizen, parent and Catholic theologian, should respond.
For Catholics, the strikes on Iran raise significant moral, ethical and legal questions, particularly given the church’s growing skepticism of the possibility of any just war. In “Fratelli Tutti,” for instance, Pope Francis reaffirmed the Catholic commitment to the rule of law and the work of the United Nations in arbitrating peace. Hinting at the debates from 2003 ahead of the U.S. preemptive war in Iraq, Francis warns in his 2020 encyclical that “war can easily be chosen by invoking all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses, and even resorting to the manipulation of information.” This, he continued, could allow some to “wrongly justify even ‘preventive’ attacks or acts of war that can hardly avoid entailing “evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated” (No. 258).
Pope Leo XIV has echoed the appeal to international law and diplomacy found in “Fratelli Tutti.” Hours after the U.S. bombing began on Sunday, he urged during the Angelus prayer: “Let diplomacy silence the guns!” The Chicago-born pope reiterated this appeal during his weekly audience: “May all logic of oppression and revenge be rejected, and may the path of dialogue, diplomacy, and peace be chosen with determination."
How then should those of us who identify as American Catholics respond?
Driving home that evening, my heart turned to the feast being celebrated that weekend. I wondered what, if anything, the feast of Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, might have to say to us as the United States entered another unjust, and possibly illegal, war in the region.
This celebration offers a counterpoint to the god of war, power and vengeance invoked by so many today. In celebrating the feast day with processions and solemn veneration, however, this deeper expansive reality can often get lost; we might forget the radical social implications of proclaiming the real presence of the Eucharist.
In what would be his last celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi in 2024, Pope Francis reminded us how the Eucharist “speaks to us of a God who is not distant, who is not jealous, but close and in solidarity with humanity; a God who does not abandon us but always seeks, waits for, and accompanies us, even to the point of placing himself, helpless, into our hands. And his real presence also invites us to be close to our brothers and sisters wherever love calls us.” As in previous homilies for that feast, Francis then framed the procession as a way to go out into streets “reduced to rubble by war” to “bring back to our world the good, fresh aroma of the bread of love, to continue tirelessly to hope and rebuild what hatred destroys.”
Like many other servants of God, Dorothy Day also understood these profound links. Her social activism and pacifism were deeply informed by the theology of the Mystical Body and the belief that, through baptism and the Eucharist, we are connected with others across all borders. In her address to the 41st International Eucharistic Congress in 1976, for instance, she noted that the date coincided with the anniversary of the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima and urged penance by Americans. “Otherwise,” she said, “we partake of the Sacrament unworthily.”
We see this connection in the design of the liturgy. After the sign of peace, we recite the “Agnus Dei,” where, in the presence of consecrated elements, we ask God “who takes away the sins of the world” to “grant us peace.” But this is not a passive adoration or reception. The same person who invites us into an intimate relationship with him in the Eucharist, who takes away our sins, also exhorts us to put our faith into action, to become peacemakers and to love our enemies.
This, as both Day and Francis knew, is not easy; it is not a superficial, unrealistic vision of a “care bear” religion. Or, in a quote often used by Day from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." Perhaps the same can be said about the Eucharist.
Just outside of Jerusalem is one of my favorite chapels, the church of Dominus Flevit, Latin for “The Lord wept.” Perched on the Mount of Olives, the small space, built in the 1950s, is shaped on the outside like a tear. A clear window behind the altar overlooks the city of Jerusalem and commemorates the scene from the Gospel of Luke (13:34) where Jesus weeps as he contemplates the future violence and war unleashed on the city by the occupying Roman Empire. Above the clear glass window overlooking the holy city is the outline of bread and wine, the elements present in the Euchastic celebration of Corpus Christi.
As we continue to celebrate and venerate the real presence of Christ throughout the liturgical year, perhaps one response for us is to join Christ in weeping. May we weep for the mothers and fathers across the Holy Land mourning the loss of a child. May we weep for the children going to sleep in terror. For those who ask their parents about war. May we also pray that our tears, like those of Christ's, meet the sweat of action. And like the Corpus Christi processions, may we go out into the streets and work to “rebuild what hatred destroys.”
