When Empire Demands the Fealty of Spiritual Leaders

Spiritual Field Notes in Response to Allegations Pentagon Officials Dressed Down Representatives of the Catholic Church for Its Public Criticisms of the War with Iran

I’m sitting in my Jeep, waiting for my son’s track meet to start. The sun is bright, and in my little insulated corner of West Virginia, all is well. A sharp contrast with the currents that I know are running fast against the eroding banks of the United States I grew up in.

One of my favorite pieces of context when talking about scripture is that water is almost universally associated with chaos. In the opening lines of Genesis, when the Spirit of the Creator hovers over the water and the Word, speaks the first notes of creation, what we are seeing is not magic, it’s a deep spiritual truth that when God gets involved, his Word (the Logos of St. John) brings life, logic, and order to the chaos of deep and death.

Oddly, that’s what I started thinking about as I sat in my Jeep, top off, with the physical wind blowing up the wide hollow that empties into the Ohio River. It took some time to figure out why because the article I was reading from the National Catholic Reporter seemed, at first, to be completely unrelated: Pentagon-Vatican meeting latest flash point in Trump’s clash with religious leaders.

I’ve linked the article above, but to summarize, it seems the Pentagon summoned high ranking representatives from the Catholic Church and, in no uncertain terms, demanded they publicly take the side of American interests in the war with Iran after Pope Leo XIV publicly denounced the war, rightly stating the position that it was immoral and blasphemous to assign God’s blessing to something that is antithetical to God’s loving nature.

Or, to say it more clearly, “Keep God’s name out of your mouth when you’re openly talking about human genocide.”

These are natural landing points when we use the name of God to rationalize our human ambition. When human empires invoke divine mandate or privilege, what else is there to do when any remnant of the prophetic voice of scripture contradicts that belief?

The answer, historically, is to demand the fealty of the church to the current political movement.

The true prophetic voice of the Kingdom will never seek the earthly powers of wealth and prestige through force and coercion because that is not the example left by the incarnated Word of God. If it seeks its own power and does not seek to serve the least of these, it is not of God at all. We know this because the Christ spoke that plainly on multiple occasions without stutter or storm.

I’m not a Roman Catholic, though admittedly, my theology and spiritual practice have been heavily influenced by them. But I applaud this new papacy for its consistent stand with scripture and tradition over the political whims of political extremism and the oppression of our most vulnerable brothers and sisters.

It’s easy to sit in our local communities and forget that the headlines we scroll past mean something. It’s just as easy to read those headlines and lose sight that no matter what happens, we will still wake up and have to live our lives, raise our kids, and find joy in the small moments.

So, where’s the balance?

The pentagon doesn’t care what I have to say. Neither does the Vatican. That’s not the point. The point is that Christian Nationalism is demanding we do the same thing they are demanding of the Vatican.

We are being told that to dissent is to be unchristian.
We are being told that to choose life is to love evil.
We are being told that God is ordaining chaos and genocide.
We are being told to shut up and fall in line.

We must not.
We can not.
We will not.

We must not call evil good.
We must choose this day who we will serve.
We can not serve both God and Mammon.