Prayers for Peace: Fighting for both
Many of us start with prayer in these gloomy times, when rockets continue to fly and hostages are still held captive. I do too. As a devout Catholic, I pray every day for the safety of Israeli soldiers and civilians, for the innocent Lebanese and Gazans caught in the crossfire, for the Iranian people who suffer under a regime that has destroyed the region, and for peace in the Holy Land. However, prayer is insufficient on its own. True peace is a hard-won reality that requires defenders prepared to stand in the breach; it is neither a catchphrase nor a hashtag.
The uncomfortable truth is this: to have peace, and even to have the right to pray for it and advocate for it openly, you must first be able to defend that very right, often with force. Evil does not negotiate with the unarmed. It does not respect cease-fires signed only by the decent. History teaches us that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and sometimes the price of peace is decisive military action. Those who would deny Jews the right to live in their ancestral homeland, or Christians the right to worship without fear, or anyone the right to speak truth, understand only one language: strength.
Nowhere is this clearer today than in the recent joint military operations conducted by the United States and Israel against targets in Iran. These strikes—targeted, proportionate, and aimed at degrading the regime’s nuclear weapons program and its terror infrastructure—embody the classic principles of Just War theory. They meet the criteria I laid out in my recent blog post, “A Just War Defense of the 2026 U.S.-Israeli Strikes on Iran” legitimate authority exercised by sovereign states acting in self-defense; just cause in confronting an existential threat; right intention to protect innocent life rather than conquer or destroy; last resort after years of diplomacy, sanctions, and proxy attacks failed; reasonable chance of success; and discrimination between combatants and civilians.
The Iranian regime has spent decades building nuclear capability while chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” It arms Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, funds the murder of Jews and the persecution of Christians across the Middle East, and openly calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state. When such a regime acquires the means to carry out its genocidal rhetoric, the moral calculus changes. Inaction is not neutrality; it is complicity. The operations by the U.S. and Israel are not warmongering. They are the regrettable but necessary use of force to prevent a far greater catastrophe, the very definition of a just war.
As a faithful Catholic, I find myself increasingly troubled by recent statements from the Vatican calling for immediate cease-fires and framing the conflict in purely humanitarian terms without sufficient acknowledgment of the evil we face. Popes have historically been voices of moral clarity in dark times. Yet when the West, imperfect as it is, stands against a regime that stones women for “immodesty,” hangs homosexuals, and arms those who rape and murder on October 7, silence on the nature of that evil or premature calls for “peace” that would leave the aggressor intact strike me as deeply misguided. The Church’s own tradition, from Augustine to Aquinas to the modern Catechism, has never taught that Christians must lay down their arms while the innocent are slaughtered. “Blessed are the peacemakers”—yes—but peacemakers who first ensure that evil cannot triumph.
I pray for peace every morning. I pray for the conversion of hearts in Tehran, for the safety of every Israeli conscript, for wisdom among leaders in Washington and Jerusalem, and for the day when swords are beaten into plowshares. But I also pray for the soldiers and pilots who carry out these missions, for their moral courage, and for the grace to know when prayer must be paired with resolve. Peace without the will to defend it is not peace—it is surrender dressed in pious language.
Let us continue to pray. But let us also stand firmly with those who fight so that prayer itself remains possible. The right to life, the right to worship, and the right to exist as a Jewish state in the land of our forefathers, these are not abstract ideals. They are gifts from God that must sometimes be defended with the sword so that future generations may live to beat those swords into plowshares.
May the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, grant us both the wisdom to pray and the courage to fight for the peace that passes all understanding.
