Pope Leo XIV told a delegation of Portuguese service personnel on Monday that it is noble to defend the sovereignty of one’s homeland and to uphold the rule of law, at a private audience in the Apostolic Palace marking sixty years since the establishment of Portugal’s Military Ordinariate in 1966.
The delegation included members of the Army, Air Force and Navy, together with the National Republican Guard and the Public Security Police. The pope opened by remembering two Portuguese soldiers killed in a road accident on 21 August while helping a lorry driver with a flat tyre.
The centurion at Capernaum
Leo built his remarks around the Roman centurion who asks Jesus to heal his servant — a figure the Church has cited on this subject for centuries, because he is a soldier praised in the Gospels without being told to stop being one.
The pope drew a double lesson from him. The centurion was conscious of his own authority, and at the same time showed what Leo called the courage of humility before Christ. Military personnel, he told the delegation, should hold those two things together: remain steadfast in the duty to protect citizens, and remain humble in exercising the power that duty confers.
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Two messages in the same week
The audience came two days after the pope’s visit to San Marino, where he told an audience that the Catholic vision of love and mercy must overcome the narratives that create enemies and persuade nations to re-arm in what he described as a culture of power. Earlier this year, in a Palm Sunday homily, he condemned war in strong terms, and the Holy See has criticised particular military actions as unjust — among them United States actions in its war with Iran.
Read side by side, the two sets of remarks can look contradictory. Within Catholic teaching they are not meant to be, and it is worth setting out how the Church itself reconciles them rather than leaving the impression of a pope who changes position depending on the audience.
What the tradition actually says
The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the legitimate defence of a community as a duty of those responsible for the common good, and describes armed forces as serving the common good when they act rightly. It then imposes conditions that are deliberately hard to satisfy: the damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave and certain; other means of ending it must be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; and the use of arms must not produce evils greater than the evil being eliminated.
That framework produces exactly the pattern seen this week. The vocation of a soldier can be honoured while a specific war is condemned, because the conditions apply to the war and not to the profession. Popes since John XXIII have leaned progressively harder on the conditions, and Pope Francis went further than his predecessors in questioning whether the criteria can be met by modern weapons at all.
Critics of that development, including some Catholic theologians, argue that a doctrine which condemns nearly every war in practice offers little guidance to the people who have to make decisions in one. Critics on the other side argue the conditions have historically been used to bless wars after the fact. Both criticisms are live inside the Church, and neither was resolved by Monday’s audience.
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What a military ordinariate is
A military ordinariate is, in effect, a diocese without territory. It exists to provide chaplains and pastoral care to armed forces and their families, wherever they are posted, and is headed by a bishop who answers to Rome rather than to the local diocese where a barracks happens to sit. Portugal’s was created in 1966; there are more than thirty worldwide.
The arrangement is one reason popes meet soldiers regularly. Leo received the Italian Military Ordinariate in March, when he told them that military personnel must work to promote peace — the same balance, stated in the opposite order.
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