The Conversation

    The war comic books in the waiting room of the barber shop had cover prices of 20 or 25 cents. The covers were practically interchangeable. Mostly scenes from WWII. American troops fighting Nazis. The closing page always ended the same way: “War is Hell.” 

   The elderly man who asked me to visit him in the hospital said the same thing to me: “War is Hell.” He did not ask me there to hear his confession—he had already done that with another priest. He just wanted a conversation. 

   He was an intelligent, well-read man. Unlike I, his knowledge of the battlefield was more than just comic books and movies. He had been in combat situations more than once; in what he called the unenviable, no-win situation of kill or risk being killed. 

   This man knew his Catechism. He knew about just war theory and also the right to self-defense, or defense of others. Nevertheless, it weighed heavy upon him. The burden he carried was still great even after a lifetime of Confession and Absolution. It bothered him that he had taken human life—and not just one life but many lives. Knowing full-well that whatever his sins or culpability had been, he had been forgiven by God, this man was terribly regretful about the circumstances that required him to fire his weapon into the chest of other men. Young men, like himself at the time, tasked by their respective rulers with defending this or that national interest. 

   These had been no-win, kill-or-be-killed situations. As the Catechism states, “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one's own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not.”

   War is Hell.

   


 

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