The preaching of St. Peter Julian Eymard on the Institution of the Eucharist has deeply left its mark on me. I have returned to one particular homily many, many times through the years, even copying it out in my own handwriting more than once, the better to engage with the text.

St. Peter Julian explains the love, solemnity and deliberateness with which our Lord arranged the details of that Last Supper:

Jesus selected the city: Jerusalem, the city of the sacrifices of the Old Law. He selected the house: the Cenacle. He chose his attendants in this undertaking: Peter and John, Peter, the disciple of faith, and John, the disciple of love.

And then, ultimately, what was, in some ways, the most important consideration: “He appointed the time: the last hour of his life he could freely dispose of.” Leaving aside the profound devotional impact, reading these words changed my understanding of time. We see that not all moments are of equal weight; time is made precious, not by its coincidence with an exterior event, but by how it is situated in the life of the person. A premium is accorded to what is done in summary and consummation. To offer another angle on the idea, time’s urgent scarcity clarifies what is truly a priority, as nothing else can.

Our Holy Father, conscious though near death, issued an Angelus address to be read on his behalf, in full knowledge that this may well be the final proclamation over which he has disposal. Perhaps we should listen in awareness on these precise terms, especially given the historical moment in which all this is taking place.

There is a sense in which the testimony of the dying Pontiff is one of total accompaniment with the Ukrainian people. Wars of aggression, whatever name they are given, are fully, unambiguously unjustifiable. When asked about the moral legitimacy of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Cardinal Ratzinger responded: “The concept of ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” He did not mean by this to leave a loophole of ambiguity. There is an implied “even” before the word “appear” – as in, “the concept does not even appear in the Catechism”; it is so unthinkable that it is not even considered.

Ratzinger’s predecessor and namesake, Benedict XV, cited St. Paul in admonishing the faithful regarding “the obligation of obeying the commands of those in authority, not in any kind of way, but religiously, that is conscientiously – unless their commands are against the laws of God.” As Christians, we must be prepared to match humility and docility as regards our personal will or preference with an ironclad intractability in matters of conscience. Remembering Caiaphas, we should take caution when the “truth” is invoked by those in high office bearing utilitarian motives.

Nations, like the Church on earth, are hardly sinless. To draw on inherent complexities in deflecting blame for an injustice is spiteful and manipulative, but its power derives from its reference to factual truth. A blatant and open lie is something else again. In the face of documented historical hard data on the world stage, we’re not merely being gaslit. We – the world – are being collectively bullied, by means of this new and mendacious narrative, into complicity in our own moral injury.

Vaclav Havel described the old, bygone Warsaw Pact, where the acceptance and proliferation of lies became a way of life. As Havel sees it, lies need not be accepted as truth to have a toxic effect:

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system.

The Church on Earth is not invulnerable to such internal machinations; the scandals speak to that. But it is also through the Church that, in the Sacrament, God who is Truth extends his presence among us. In another apex of eucharistic preaching, Fr. Rainero Cantalamessa’s 2005 Good Friday homily reads as follows:

The Eucharist is the sacrament of non-violence! Thanks to the Eucharist, God’s absolute “no” to violence, spoken on the cross, echoes alive down the centuries. And, at the same time, it is God’s “yes” to the innocent victims, and it is the place where all the blood spilled on earth joins with the blood of Christ and cries out to God and “pleads more insistently than Abel’s” (Heb. 12: 24).

Now, in 2025, Christ’s vicar on Earth is employing his final hour standing with the victims of unjust aggression – simply by naming the truth with integrity, over and against a hazing ritual, a litmus test of obedience issued to all peoples. There is something almost apocalyptic (however commonsensically and allegorically that is to be taken) in being asked to bow down to an alternative reality, recast in accord with the vision, will and preference of globally dominant state power.

This is not to imply that there have been no atrocities committed in the name of legitimate self-defense – even in this given case. The use of cluster munitions stands out in my mind as one such extremely grievous choice. Yet justice cannot be achieved apart from prudence, to which it is subordinate – and there can be no prudence apart from truth. Here, it is the literal, factual truth that must be sought and defended, so as to be set free.

Truth, and its sacramental perpetuation, is the only real guarantee for all parties affected or involved in this unstable and highly charged world where there are no guarantees. Again Fr. Cantalamessa:

This presence [the Real Presence in the Eucharist] is a guarantee, not only for the Church, but for the entire world. Yet we feel afraid to use the words “God is with us,” because they have been used before in an exclusive sense: God is “with us,” on our side, meaning not with others, and even “against” those others who are our enemies. But since Christ has come, there is no longer any exclusiveness, everything has become universal.

As Christians, it is our duty to remain steadfast to truth, as our only path to reconciliation is truth, and not some cynical arrangement born of convenience and doomed to bear rotten fruit for years and decades to come down the line, as it were cleaning the house for seven other spirits more evil than itself. Lying voices saying, “peace, peace,” when there is no peace, motivated by greed and self-interest, testify only to the fact that violence can be carried out with words as surely as it can with weaponry.

Contrast this with the prophetic witness of Pope St. Paul VI at the United Nations in 1965:

It is enough to recall that the blood of millions, countless unheard-of sufferings, useless massacres and frightening ruins have sanctioned the agreement that unites you with an oath that ought to change the future history of the world: never again war, never again war! It is peace, peace, that has to guide the destiny of the nations of all mankind!

Consider the double iteration of peace in both cases: in the one case, it is both petitionary and eschatological, presented as the lodestar of humanity, fully Christological in its implications; in the other, it is declarative and seductive, attributing its establishment to its own efficacy.

The cry for true peace has often been defamed as naivete or appeasement. Indeed, as noted in Ariane Sroubek’s earlier article on Where Peter Is, Pope Francis has been accused of being overly conciliatory in his call for peace negotiations. Yet in doing so, he has never compromised the truth nor pursued base interests for the Vatican or the Church as a whole; rather, this his last petition for peace extended not only to Ukraine, but also over “Palestine, Israel and throughout the Middle East, Myanmar, Kivu and Sudan.”

I have not studied geopolitics, and do not presume to speak to what I do not understand. What troubles me and what I wish therefore to consider in bracketed isolation is the attribution of blame in the interests of political expediency, a move utterly central to the narrative of the Passion. We are not free, and certainly not obliged, to do violence – and this includes violence to the truth:

The Eucharist makes present in the world the one who, by his teaching and by his life, has unmasked and broken forever the system that makes something sacral of violence.

The foregoing quotation comes from Fr. Cantalamessa’s already cited Good Friday homily from 2005. That Pope Francis would use his dwindling resources to speak of “suffering” Ukraine is cause for great hope, not least because, as Fr. Cantalamessa was to go on to preach on Good Friday in 2010: It is “suffering [which] draws us into the power of the Cross.”

That power, as St. Peter Julian writes, comes from the sacrifice of the one who reigns from the Cross and in the Eucharist. “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.”

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Image: Vatican News, 25.02.2023