Editorial - From the Bible to the Church Fathers, ancient texts are being taken out of context to attack the current teaching of the Church: an interpretation that ignores the evolution of doctrine leading to the rejection of conflict as a solution
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on April 24, 2026
“There is no God,” we read in the Bible (Psalm 14:1). It would be bizarre, to say the least, if an atheist, past or present, were to take the first part of this biblical verse to base his doctrine on; because, simply by completing the verse, we discover the trick: “‘There is no God,’ says the fool.” Operations similar to that of the hypothetical atheist are instead appearing in recent weeks in certain articles (Giuliano Ferrara in Il Foglio and Antonio Socci in Libero), which use the Gospel, the history of the Church, or the writings of St. Augustine to base their criticisms of the Church’s “pacifism” in this time of war, resorting to the “friendly fire” most often used by the Church’s critics. The Bible, as we know very well, is full of words that justify violence, war, and vengeance: “Blessed is he who seizes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks!” (Ps 137:9). For this reason, it is not surprising that there have always been—and still are—people who take these and other texts to religiously justify violence and war. Some political and military leaders have even sought to use certain verses from chapter 9 of the Book of Esther to stamp a holy seal on the war in Gaza.
Ferrara invokes the Gospel phrase “Render unto Caesar…” (which we find in the Gospels in a polemical context far removed from war and peace) to assert with enviable, Fantozzian ethical certainty that “this story that the Catholic Church is pacifist is utter nonsense.” And to prove his point, Ferrara cites a long list of episodes in which the Church has been “nationalist and even warmongering right up to the present day”: the Constantinian alliance, the barbarians, the Investiture Controversy, “the formidable era of warfare in the sixteenth century,” the conflict between Luther and the Counter-Reformation, Lepanto, etc. The founder of Il Foglio could have filled an entire issue of his newspaper with a list of the Church’s non-pacifist deeds and words throughout its history, and we could have filled other issues of our newspaper. But the crucial question is clearly another and quite different one: what do these historical facts prove? What use are yesterday’s religious wars? Can we use them to assert that today’s Church cannot be against war? The issue, then, directly concerns the most common and dangerous of the errors made by journalists who use history: anachronism; an error into which the two excellent polemicists have fallen headlong. And as historians know, the error of anachronism nullifies the entire value of an article presented as historical, because it is a fatal error that closely resembles that first verse of Psalm 14 read out of context, distorting its meaning (both content and direction).
Socci writes: “A respectful and in-depth reflection on certain passages by St. Augustine regarding war could lead to an agreement or at least a rapprochement” between Pope Leo and Trump on the current war in Iran. It takes a great deal of recklessness to advise an Augustinian pope to engage in a “respectful and in-depth reflection” on St. Augustine, and then to claim that that same Augustinian pope should change his stance on war by studying St. Augustine more closely. Only ideological hubris can generate such absurdities. But if we then go on to read that text by Augustine that is supposed to bring about reconciliation between the Pope and Trump (Letter 189, written in 417 to General Boniface), we realize that it contains theses found in the vast majority of medieval theologians: therefore, nothing exclusively Augustinian. Even in this article, therefore, the focus of the discussion is elsewhere: the claim that a thesis by a theologian—even one of the greatest—from the fifth century can serve as an ethical basis for criticizing the legitimacy of a Pope’s position today. A bizarre idea, to say the least, if we consider that we are in the realm of morality (Augustine is not speaking of the “Trinity”), where Church doctrine has continually changed and continues to evolve—Paul, in his letter to Timothy, does not question the legal institution of slavery: do we want to use that other letter to reintroduce it? The Church’s moral (and theological) doctrine grows and changes with the Church and with humanity, and if it did not, it would betray itself, its nature, and its historical mission. And so, with this anachronistic exercise, Socci concludes his article by invoking the medieval doctrine of the “just war,” because, “as Augustine teaches, one may wage war to build peace.” Forgetting or ignoring that in the history of the Church, after Augustine and Thomas, came the Second Vatican Council, then Pope John—war is something “alienum est a ratione” (Pacem in Terris)—and then Pope Francis’s Fratelli Tutti, which, in line with the Catechism, declares the era of just war over: “We can no longer think of war as a solution. Faced with this reality, it is very difficult today to uphold the rational criteria developed in past centuries to speak of a possible “just war.” Never again war!” (241).
Anyone wishing to refute a moral and social thesis of the Church today may obviously use ancient texts and theses, provided they serve only as the starting point, not the end point; they are the opening, not the body of the argument. Because those distant authors thought and lived in an ethical and social context too different from ours for their interpretations of peace and war to be used to refute or confirm those of the Church today. “The following year, at the time when kings usually go to war,” so reads the Second Book of Samuel (11:1). In that world, in fact, “kings used to go to war,” and so they did for many centuries to come. In our world, however, many kings have stopped going to war, thanks in part to the maturation of biblical and evangelical humanism. The Bible and the Church grow and change alongside history; they learn from it. They have sown their seeds in the furrows of history, have mingled with other seeds, and over time have given rise to cultures, words, rights, democracy, and freedom that today make us feel ethically uncomfortable when, in the Bible, the Gospels, and the Doctors and Fathers of the Church, we find words we would no longer use today: an ethical and spiritual embarrassment regarding biblical words generated by the Bible itself. When we forget or ignore this golden and wonderful law of history’s moral and spiritual movement, we turn the Bible, the saints, and the theologians into mummies, incapable of speaking living and good words. We prevent them from growing, we condemn them to irrelevance, or we expose them to the worst abuses. Every generation of Christians enters the world with one Bible and one set of ethics, and leaves it with another Bible, another set of ethics. Between the Bible, Augustine, and us lie millennia of love and pain experienced by billions of men and women; there are Hildegard and Francis, Dante and Humanism, Pico and Giordano Bruno, Kant and Nietzsche, the concentration camps and the Gulags, Hiroshima, September 11, the children of Gaza. The Bible did not know all this; the Gospels did not know it; Augustine did not know it; not even Jesus. But we know it; we know it very well; we have learned it, and we can never forget it.
Credit Foto: © Diego Sarà