WHEN MODERNIST PACIFISM MASQUERADES AS CATHOLIC PEACE

Prologue: The Seductive Slogan and the Catholic Question

“There is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy.”

So goes the modernist slogan.

At first hearing, the statement sounds thoroughly Christian. Does not Our Lord bless the peacemakers? Does He not command us to love our enemies? Did He not tell St Peter to put away his sword?

Yet a serious Catholic must ask: 

• Does the holiness of peace mean that every war is sinful? 
• Does charity forbid the use of force to defend the innocent, restrain an aggressor, or restore a just peace?

Traditional Catholic theology answers no.

The slogan contains a truth, but it can also conceal a serious error. Peace is a great good, and war brings terrible suffering. 

But if the statement means that armed force is intrinsically immoral, that no war can ever be just, or that Christians must never take up arms under any circumstances, it contradicts the traditional Catholic doctrine of just war.

The distinction is simple: the Catholic Church condemns unjust wars; she does not condemn every war as unjust.

True peace means more than simply stopping the fighting. What kind of peace allows the innocent to be oppressed, the weak to be crushed, and the aggressor to have his way? A peace built on injustice is no true peace at all.

1. Tracing the source of the slogan

The precise wording has a verifiable contemporary source.

• 27 October 2026: The Imitator of Leo, Assisi: In a video message to the international meeting Unarmed and Disarming Peace, held on the fortieth anniversary of the 1986 Assisi World Day of Prayer for Peace, the modernist-in-chief  declared: “There is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy.” 

He connected the statement with rejecting religious justifications for war, mediation, dialogue, and the continuing legacy of the Assisi gatherings.

•  28 October 2025, Rome: The Imitator of Leo had already used a closely related formulation at an international peace meeting promoted by the Community of Sant’Egidio: “War is never holy; only peace is holy, because it is willed by God.”

 He situated this declaration within the interreligious peace movement and its call for dialogue and a world without war. 

•  24 January 2002, Assisi: The earlier Assisi gathering, convened by John Paul II, included testimonies from representatives of different Christian communities and other religions. Its public message called for an end to violence and war and for religions to promote justice and peace. An official Assisi testimony by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I already used the closely related formulation that “only peace is holy, war is never holy.” 

This establishes the immediate historical setting of the slogan’s modern development.

The slogan, therefore, is not a quotation from Our Lord, St Augustine, or St Thomas Aquinas. Its contemporary wording belongs to the modern Assisi peace discourse. Its theological meaning must be judged against the perennial and authoritative Catholic doctrine of war, peace, justice, and charity.

2. The ambiguity hidden in the word “holy”

The statement can express three different propositions:

• No war becomes just merely because someone invokes God. Correct. Religious language cannot sanctify aggression, cruelty or unjust conquest.
• An unjust war cannot be made righteous by calling it a holy war. Correct. A noble-sounding intention does not excuse an unjust cause or immoral means.
• Every war is intrinsically immoral, and armed force can never be justified. Contrary to traditional Catholic moral theology.

The expression holy war itself requires care. It may refer to a war falsely presented as sacred, or historically to a conflict undertaken for a just cause believed to have religious significance. These are not identical meanings.

Traditional Catholic theology does not teach that every crusade or historically religious war was just. Neither does it teach that all warfare is necessarily sinful. The Battle of Lepanto (7 October 1571) is a striking historical example: the fleet of the Holy League defeated the Ottoman fleet, and Pope St Pius V attributed the victory to the intercession of Our Lady, whose Rosary the faithful had fervently recited. In thanksgiving, he instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory, later known as the Feast of the Holy Rosary. 

Note worthy is that Lepanto does not prove that every war fought under a religious banner is just. 

It does, however, illustrate that the traditional Catholic Church did not regard armed resistance to a serious threat as inherently sinful. The question is not whether war bears a religious name, but whether the cause is just and the means employed conform to the moral law.

The central error is to confuse the condemnation of unjust war with the condemnation of war as such.

3. What did the traditional Catholic Church teach?

The traditional doctrine is neither militarism nor absolute pacifism. It is the doctrine of the just war (bellum iustum).

• St Augustine: charity does not mean abandoning the innocent

St Augustine of Hippo distinguished the desire for peace from the passions that make war unjust. He condemned cruelty, vengeance, an unpacific spirit and the lust for power.

He also recognised that public authority might undertake war for the peace and security of the community. [St Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book XXII, §§74–75]

The underlying principle is clear: love of neighbour may require protecting the victim against the aggressor. To refuse to restrain violence in every circumstance is not necessarily charity.

The Christian must not love violence, but neither must he mistake indifference to another person’s suffering for love.

• St Thomas Aquinas: is it always sinful to wage war?

In the Summa Theologica, St Thomas explicitly asks whether it is always sinful to wage war. His answer is no. He identifies three conditions for a morally permissible war:

• Legitimate authority: war must be undertaken by the public authority responsible for the common good, not by private individuals pursuing personal quarrels.
• Just cause: those against whom force is directed must be opposed on account of a genuine injustice.
• Right intention: the purpose must be the advancement of good or the avoidance of evil, not cruelty, vengeance or the lust for domination.

He invokes St Augustine to show that even a war declared by legitimate authority and for a just cause can become unlawful through a wicked intention. [St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, q. 40, a. 1; St Augustine, Contra Faustum, XXII, 74.]

This is a direct rejection of the proposition that every war is necessarily sinful. 

• The pre-Vatican II papal tradition

The traditional framework is consistent with the wider Catholic teaching on public authority, justice and peace.

• Pope Leo XIII: civil authority has responsibilities towards the common good; government is not merely an exercise of power. [Immortale Dei, 1885.]
• Pope Pius XI: true peace must be founded upon Christian moral order, not merely upon political arrangements. [Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, 1922.]
• Pope Pius XII: in his address to the United States Senate on 17 November 1949, he recognised the legitimate role of reasonable force in protecting rights and defending values grounded in divine and human law. [Pius XII, Address to the United States Senate, 17 November 1949.]

The traditional position is not that war is holy in itself. It is that a morally justified use of force is not necessarily sinful, even when it entails the tragedy of war.

4. Does the Bible forbid all war?

Absolute pacifism often appeals to the Sermon on the Mount and Our Lord’s rebuke of St Peter. These texts must be understood in the context of the whole of Scripture.

• “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). Our Lord blesses those who make peace. He does not thereby declare every use of force immoral. Peace must be distinguished from the mere submission of the innocent to injustice.
•  “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). The Christian must reject hatred and personal vengeance. But love of enemies does not require allowing them to destroy the innocent. Even the use of force must remain governed by justice and the moral law.
•  “Put up again thy sword into its place” (Matthew 26:52). Our Lord rebuked St Peter for intervening in His arrest. Peter was not authorised to prevent Our Lord’s freely accepted Passion by his own initiative. The passage cannot be made into a universal prohibition of all armed force.
• “For he beareth not the sword in vain” (Romans 13:4). St Paul recognises the coercive authority of the civil ruler in punishing wrongdoing. 

This is not a blanket authorisation of war, but it shows that the New Testament does not treat every exercise of public force as intrinsically evil.

The Gospel forbids hatred and injustice; it does not abolish the moral distinction between the aggressor and the defender.

5. Tracing the roots of modernist pacifism

The issue is not whether peace is desirable. The issue is whether peace has been detached from the objective moral and religious order that gives it meaning.

Three tendencies deserve particular attention.

A. Replacing moral distinctions with an absolute prohibition

Traditional Catholic theology examines the concrete circumstances of a conflict:

• Who initiated the aggression?
• Is there a just cause?
• Does the authority have the right to act?
• Is the intention just?
• Are the means morally permissible?
• Is the force proportionate to the good being defended?

Absolute pacifism bypasses these distinctions when it declares all war immoral before considering the circumstances.

The slogan from the Imitator of Leo reeks of the same error, or does it not?

B. Making interreligious fraternity more important than religious truth

Traditional Catholicism does not regard peace among men as the highest or final end of human existence. Man is created to know, love and serve God and ultimately attain eternal beatitude.

Peace among nations is a genuine temporal good, but it must be ordered to the moral law and man’s ultimate end.

The modern interreligious peace movement emphasises the common responsibility of religious communities for peace, dialogue and human fraternity. The theological difficulty which cannot be overlooked is that the common pursuit of peace has become a substitute for the question of religious truth.

Pope Pius XI addressed the danger of religious indifferentism in Mortalium Animos (1928). He rejected initiatives that sought Christian unity by treating incompatible doctrines as secondary or by constructing a religious union that disregarded the divinely established unity of the Catholic Church. He warned that beneath attractive appeals to fraternity and unity could lie errors that undermined the foundations of the Faith. [Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, §§2–4, 9–10.]

The encyclical is principally concerned with religious unity, not the morality of war. Its relevance here is that peace and unity cannot be pursued by setting aside the truth that ought to govern them.

The traditional Catholic objection to the modernist Assisi framework is therefore not that religious leaders desire peace. It is that the religious significance of their common activity must be judged in the light of Catholic doctrine.

C. Making peace an absolute detached from justice

St Augustine defined peace as “tranquillitas ordinis” - the tranquillity of order.

Peace is not merely the cessation of fighting. It is the right ordering of human affairs.

Consider a tyrant who invades a peaceful nation, seizes its territory and forces its people into submission. The cessation of hostilities does not, by itself, establish a just peace.

If the victim’s resistance is condemned simply because it prolongs fighting, the aggressor may be rewarded for violence while the victim is pressured to surrender the very justice that peace should preserve.

This is the danger of making peace an absolute principle detached from justice. The outward appearance of tranquillity can be purchased at the expense of the innocent.

D. Erasing the moral difference between aggressor and defender

Consider two nations. One invades the other, kills civilians and seizes its territory. The victim nation resists.

If both are condemned merely because both employ force, the original injustice disappears from the moral analysis.

Traditional Catholic theology cannot make that mistake. The aggressor and the defender are not morally equivalent merely because both use weapons.

Of course, a nation that begins in legitimate self-defence can commit grave injustices during the war. A just cause does not make every subsequent action lawful. But neither does the defender’s use of force erase the original injustice.

The doctrine of just war exists precisely to preserve these moral distinctions.

6. The Assisi Connection: The Significance of the Setting

The Imitator of Leo’s  message of 27 October 2026 was delivered for an international gathering marking forty years since the 1986 Assisi World Day of Prayer for Peace. The message called for rejecting religious justifications for war and promoting mediation, dialogue, and the Assisi peace initiative.

The question is not whether Catholics should seek peace. They certainly should. The real question is whether peace is being pursued according to the truth of the Catholic Faith or elevated into an absolute that overrides other moral principles.

Consider the implications:

• Peace without religious truth: Are incompatible beliefs about God and revelation being treated as though they were equally true in the name of a common religious pursuit of peace?
• Peace without moral distinctions: Does the condemnation of war distinguish unjust aggression from the legitimate defence of the innocent, or does it treat every use of armed force as equally immoral?
• Peace without justice: Is peace understood as the fruit of justice, or merely as the absence of conflict; even when that absence is purchased through oppression and the surrender of the innocent?

These questions go to the heart of the Assisi approach. The problem is not the desire for peace, but the religious framework in which that desire is presented as a common undertaking among religions that make contradictory claims about God, revelation, and salvation.

From the traditional Catholic perspective, peace cannot be detached from truth, justice, and the right ordering of man’s relationship with God. An interreligious programme that places common religious fraternity at the centre while relegating doctrinal differences to the background risks turning peace into a substitute for religious truth.

The slogan “There is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy” must therefore be examined not merely as an appealing declaration against violence, but as an expression of the religious outlook in which it is being used. 

The traditional Catholic Church seeks peace, but she does not make peace an absolute independent of justice, nor does she teach that every war is necessarily sinful.

7. Were the Crusades contrary to Christianity?

The Crusades are frequently invoked in discussions of holy war. Neither blanket glorification nor blanket condemnation is historically or morally adequate.

Traditional Catholic arguments for particular crusades appealed to such considerations as the defence of Christians, the protection of holy places and resistance to injustice. Each historical campaign must be judged according to its circumstances, authority, cause, intention and conduct.

• A religious motive does not automatically establish a just cause.
• A just cause does not justify killing the innocent or committing other intrinsically evil acts.
• The defence of a religious community is morally distinct from forcibly converting people.
• An army’s invocation of Christ cannot sanctify unjust conquest, cruelty or vengeance.

The traditional Catholic doctrine does not teach that every conflict called a crusade was just. It teaches that the morality of war must be judged by objective moral principles, not by slogans or religious labels.

8. What should a traditional Catholic say instead?

A more exact formulation would be:

Peace is a great good, but peace must be founded on justice. War is a grave evil in its consequences, yet the use of force is not intrinsically immoral in every circumstance. A war of aggression is unjust; a war undertaken by legitimate authority, for a just cause and with right intention may be morally permissible. Even then, the means employed must remain subject to the moral law.

This preserves the essential distinctions:

• Peace is to be sought, not war.
• Aggression and unjust conquest are to be condemned.
• The innocent have a right to defence.
• Public authority has a duty to protect the common good.
• Military action must meet strict moral conditions.
• Invoking God does not make an unjust war just.
• A just cause never licenses intrinsically evil acts.

The traditional doctrine rejects both the glorification of violence and the absolutization of nonviolence.

Summing Up: peace without truth is not the whole of Christian peace

As a matter of fact, the slogan “There is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy” was used by the incumbent Modernist-in-chief  in his Assisi message of 27 October 2026. Its immediate historical setting is the modern Assisi peace movement, and its theological meaning must be judged against the traditional Catholic doctrine of justice, public authority and war.

• If it means that no nation may sanctify aggression, that religious rhetoric cannot excuse atrocities, and that peace should be pursued wherever justice permits, it expresses legitimate moral concerns.
• If it means that every war is sinful, that legitimate self-defence is immoral, or that the innocent must always yield to the avoidance of armed conflict, it contradicts the teaching of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.
• And if peace among religions becomes the governing principle while religious truth is pushed aside, the slogan raises a further question about the modern interreligious framework in which it is being used.

The traditional Catholic does not worship war. Nor does he worship peace as an abstract absolute.

He seeks the peace of Christ: a peace founded on truth, ordered by justice and animated by charity.

Peace is not made holy merely by being called peace. It must be the peace of a rightly ordered society, under the moral law of God.