Thoughts About War In a Lenten Season, by Robert Royal

By Robert Royal, The Catholic Thing, March 23, 2026

Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West , and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.

Let’s begin with a pointed question: Are we, almost all, today, Sadducees? If your knowledge of the groups who appear in the New Testament is hazy, we might put it thus: Do almost all of us now, even Christians who claim otherwise, like the Sadducees in Jesus’ day, basically discount eternal life and think physical death the absolute end, and worst of evils? If so, a war may do us a service because it reveals, in its dreadful and severe way, the state of our souls.

War is hell. But does Hell – a place of eternal war – or Heaven – the place of the only true and lasting peace – play any real role in our minds and hearts during a time like this? It may seem heartless to ask the question in the face of so much immediate suffering, but it’s precisely because of those human ills that the deeper questions come to the fore. …

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