Military service consists in killing our neighbor, and preparing for that. God has forbidden us to kill, in His Law as in the Gospel. And His commandment, illuminated and confirmed by the Gospel, has infinitely more weight and authority than all the arguments generally used in favour of killing a neighbor. The Christian must cease to be an accomplice in the State’s murders.
Whether we like it or not, to accept being integrated into the armed forces is to adhere to the paganism of Mars, and therefore to deny Jesus Christ. It is indeed accepting and serving the pagan god Mars, because the army demands a total and thoroughgoing surrender of my will and my judgment to the ways and means of Mars which are essentially different from a total and thoroughgoing surrender to the ways and means of Jesus Christ. This total surrender to a false God is riveted to the ‘falsificifications of all moral standards found in the Gospel.’ It is founded on the anti-Christian principle that the end justifies the means. It demands a fidelity to a false faith, and a juvenile and gullible confidence in the justice of men, as if good could come out of the evil they accomplish. If totalitarian paganism is incompatible with Christian fidelity, so is military paganism: the two are almost identical.
-Jean Lassarre
“John said that the Christian cannot prove his love of God except by his love of neighbor. Matthew makes it very clear that it is not really proved unless the neighbor we love is an enemy. Love of neighbor is extended by Jesus to include the enemy.”
-Rev. John L. McKenzie,
