Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

Many will say to me on that day, o ‘Lord, Lord… did we not do mighty deeds in your name?’

The most remarkable line of the president’s address announcing to the nation the bombing of Iran came at the end:

And I want to just thank everybody and, in particular, God. I want to just say, we love you, God.

The entrusting of God’s name to man is an act of divine vulnerability; to invoke such mendaciously and so bring His reality into disrepute lies squarely within our freedom.

Fr. George Benedict Zabelka, the U.S. Army Air Force chaplain who blessed the bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then converted, testified:

War is now, always has been, and always will be bad, bad news. I was there. I saw real war. Those who have seen real war will bear me out. I assure you, it is not of Christ. It is not Christ’s way. There is no way to conduct real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus.

To conjoin an act of love for God and a proclamation of war is therefore highly suspect.

Pope Benedict XVI writes, masterfully, in Jesus of Nazareth, that violence in the name of God is a “favorite instrument of the Antichrist,” serving neither God nor humankind, but serving rather the dynamic of inhumanity itself.

The same seventh chapter of Matthew which contains the discourse on the true disciple (as an antithesis to the ostentatious ones), is the reference point for the shortened form of the Eucharistic Sequence which will be proclaimed before the Gospel at every Mass this Sunday:

Lo! the angel’s food is given
To the pilgrim who has striven;
see the children’s bread from heaven,
which on dogs may not be spent.

In the Eucharist — as on this great solemnity of Corpus Christi — Body and Word are fused so indistinguishably as to render an offense against the one commensurate with an offense against the other. To call upon the name of the Lord vainly at this liturgical moment, as we bear our gentle King of Peace in processions, is particularly misplaced; to do so is indeed to misspend the truly holy.

St. Peter Julian Eymard preaches with a timeless relevance:

Christus regnat. Christ reigns. Jesus does not rule over earthly territories but over souls, and He does so through the Eucharist.

A king must rule through his laws and through the love of his subjects for him.

The Eucharist is the law of the Chrisian: a law of charity and of love, which was promulgated in the Cenacle in the admirable discourse after the Last Supper: This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. If you love Me keep My commandments.

… He engraves it on our hearts through His love; the Legislator Himself promulgates His Divine law to each of our souls.

It is a law of love. How many kings rule by love? Jesus is about the only one Whose yoke is not imposed by force; His rule is gentleness itself. His true subjects are devoted to Him in life and death; they would rather die than be disloyal to Him.

His true subjects desire to perpetuate his disarmingly meek presence in the world, a presence which is the delight, glory and supreme will of the Father.

Whomever may herald his confidence in the efficacy of bombs toward the reign of peace, Fr. Zabelka learned through regret that the giver and author of peace is “Christ, not Mars.” In the words of Cardinal Cantalamessa, “The Eucharist is the sacrament of non-violence.” The Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world and does not propagate them, is our peace. It is Him whom I love, and my poverty and powerlessness, and the utter failure and destitution of the reach of my voice, afford an altogether different legitimacy to my saying so, sinner though I am. As I cry to the barren wilds, so I pray: May Jesus increase; may I decrease.

Image: Donald J. Trump, official Presidential portrait 2025-2029, whitehouse.gov.

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V. J. Tarantino

V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport.  She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/