Recently the Vatican declined to participate in President Donald J. Trump’s newly minted “Board of Peace.” Instead, the Vatican has deferred crisis situations, such as resolving international conflict, to the United Nations. Pope Leo XIV, like his predecessors, continues to use his office to call all of humanity to peace. Last month, he addressed ambassadors. You should read it in its entirety before consuming what I write here.
I want to present, thinking in the framework of another great classic, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, in light of the one Pope Leo presented to us, St. Augustine’s City of God. In Canto 3 of Inferno after we encounter the vast multitudes who Dante says that he “couldn’t have known that death unmade so many,”1 we encounter the souls waiting to be brought into the bowls of hell. “They blasphemed God, their parents, the human race, the place, the time, the seed of their begetting. And their births. And then they came together, every one, and wept with bitterness upon the cursed shore, which waits for every man who doesn’t fear the Lord.”2
The peace we seek for our world is not simply the absence of conflict, we seek the harmony of creation. That is not a whimsical hippie idea. It is the ancient ideal. It is, as Pope Leo reiterated quoting Pope St. Paul VI, “the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.”3
It is, to reference the late Stratford Caldecott’s magnificent work, the way of creative justice, justice that is not as this world gives. This way is captured well in a quote that Caldecott begins his book with from Pope Francis:
I believe that the one who worships God has, through that experience, a mandate of justice towards his brothers. It is an extremely creative justice because it invents things; education, social progress, care and attention, relief, etc. Therefore, the integral religious man is called to be a just man, to bring justice to others. In this aspect the justice of religion, or religious justice, creates culture. The culture made by a woman or man that worships the living God is not the same culture made by the idolater. John Paul II had a very bold phrase: a faith that does not produce culture is not a true faith. He emphasized this: creating culture. Today, for example, we have idolatrous cultures in our society: consumerism, relativism, and hedonism are examples of this.4
Pope Leo notes in his address what is known as the dissolution of the post-war consensus. This is more obvious to Europeans (I am told) than Americans, but R.R. Reno captures it, in a vein very similar to the Pope Francis quote above, when he says, “The violence that traumatized the West between 1914 and 1945 evoked a powerful American-led response that was anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist. These anti imperatives defined the postwar era. Their aim is to dissolve the strong beliefs and powerful loyalties thought to have fueled the conflicts that convulsed the twentieth century.”5
Since then this sentiment has only intensified. In the evacuation of strong gods and their Indiana Jones-type replacement with the weak gods due to the massive effectiveness of that brilliant wartime technology known as advertising and public relations coupled with mass media (read propaganda), people began to realise that the anti-imperative dogmas were just that, dogmas. In varying shades we can largely examine political fault lines from those who primarily order their lives in accordance with weak gods or strong gods. The post-war consensus is built on the weakening gods, intended to prevent another world war. This arises from a belief that such atrocities at that scale only happen through strong beliefs. These dogmas had the strange ring of being allegedly anti dogmatic, imposed with an iron fist in the name of tolerance. These are the constant desire for openness across borders, weakening of boundaries, and disenchantment with all things that used to uniquely bind people together.
It is the great irony of such a desire that we have unheard of degrees of murder happening in exactly these countries due to abortion. After World War II and the Cold War many have acknowledged the atrocities to human dignity committed by governments with the Holocaust and gulags. But, who, besides the Church, courageously points out the over a billion murdered since the 80s in these “tolerant” countries? Even the current administration touted as pro-life has waffled on this obvious point of human dignity (cf. abortion pill).
I turn the reader toward Reno’s own work to grasp the weight of his insight. I don’t claim to capture his sense exactly here. The point is that, in our rejection of these gods of the post-war consensus, people in general, and even many American Catholics, are not returning to the high call of embracing the City of God amidst the City of Man: inner purification of sins and enlightenment in the mind of Christ. Instead, they are returning to the strong gods.
They walk right up to something intended to be subordinate to Christ and His Church and let it guide the entirety of their life: choosing creatures over the Creator. We don’t need to follow the gods’ language too exclusively. There are pros and cons of each of the gods, it is more so a manner of hierarchical ordering, of a just relationship with these things. We don’t have to have an idolatrous relationship with openness or nationalism. When these are properly defined and ordered they are great aids to humane life. One should love their country and one should love assisting other countries in need, but one shouldn’t love either of these above Christ or starve one’s own citizens to feed another ruler’s polity. We must practice prudence, but prudence formed by love.
Instead of scrutinizing all the gods, weak and strong, we are simply throwing ourselves back over to them as our temporal salvation. We are like the Israelites, given the opportunity for repentance and conversion in the desert and yet we melt down the gold God gave us from the spoils of Egypt, not to worship Him, but to corrupt His priests and worship the very gods we were liberated from enslavement to. This land has been given to us to be stewarded in line with God’s law and His Church’s charity. We ought not to bite the hand that feeds us. We are seeking the peace that the world promises to give. That is the peace of the devil who tempted our Lord in the desert. It is a lie that will eat away your soul.
Ultimately such a desire is one for domination. We want to unify the nations, under our interests. One way or another we will get our desires. If we continue down the path of secular messianism, of compromising our faith for temporal “victories,” we will find ourselves united with many of our enemies. Only this union will be one of utter contempt and scorn, we will be united in our hatred of all things. As Virgil tells Dante, “My son, those souls who die within God’s wrath, they all convene here, from every nation.”6
The only just union of all nations, the only just peace of all nations will not arise from liberal compromises or from strong imperialism led by our guys. There is already a perfect mode of union, a generative mode, which was given to us by the rightful King of All Nations: the Church. We see right now amidst a change of era that the postwar consensus is failing. As Tolkien noted, history is vain, one long defeat. That is not foolish talk. It is looking reality in the face. Times are a-changing as they say. Who does not change? God alone. If we think we can construct a system that can expand across every nation and culture for all time that is not guided, rooted, and led by the Holy Spirit we are utter fools. Rome fell so that the Church might give the world true unity, not so that Churchmen might reconstruct the vainglory of Alexander the Great, Caesar, or Napoleon.
It is Lent. Let us be united in our desperate need for Christ, united in His call to make disciples of all nations. Note that phrase disciples of all nations. Each nation must become a follower of Christ to have the peace it seeks, we must, as individuals and peoples, surrender ourselves to the God who loves us, enter into the spiritual journey of purgation, illumination, and union, and be re-formed as new creations in Jesus Christ. We must be a people that generates culture from our holy cultus. We must let our activism flow out of our right and just worship. We cannot, obviously, be political quietists. We also do not need to be foolish religious zealots. But we also need to be a prophetic voice, calling the world to repentance and demonstrating a different way of union than all seek in their worldly imaginations. The world imposes union through coercive power, compelling allegiance to principles that are subordinate to God. We know true union can only come from true justice that begins within us. We must become integrally religious people. United in Christ, and seeking to bring the entire world into Him.
1 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno translated by Jason M. Baxter (Brooklyn: Angelico Press,
2024), 15.
2 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno translated by Jason M. Baxter (Brooklyn: Angelico Press,
2024), 17.
3 Pope Leo XIV, Address to Members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See (9 January
2026).
4 Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka, On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Image, 2013), 22-3.
5 R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (), xix.
6 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno translated by Jason M. Baxter (Brooklyn: Angelico Press,
2024), 17.
