It is good that Veterans’ day falls in the month of November, when the Church asks us to pray for the dead. For while this day honors all veterans, living and dead, its origins lie in Armistice day, commemorating the end of the first World War, one hundred and one years ago today.
It’s ironic, in a way, that as we honor all who have served our country, it is the moment of armistice, the moment that they ceased fighting wars that we commemorate. But then again, the whole purpose of the armed services is to end all wars and to make the ultimate sacrifice to bring peace to our shores.
For peace is something that every veteran, more than anyone else, desires with their whole heart and soul. Few and far between are the military men who glory in battle as something more than a means to an end. They fight that there might be no more fighting and sacrifice that future generations will not have to.
Our greatest war time presidents have understood that. Abraham Lincoln, who led the nation through our bloody Civil war gave a speech in Philadelphia and cautioned against those who see war as grand or glorious. “War at its best,” he warned, “is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.”1
Franklin Roosevelt used to refer to war as a contagion, a disease and famously spoke of his hatred of it. “I have seen war,” he proclaimed at Chatauqua. “I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping exhausted men come out of line-the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”2
And President Eisenhower, who picked up where Roosevelt stopped, likened war to hanging humanity on a cross of iron, reminding us that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”3
All of whose views are reflected in the words of Pope Pius XII, who warned that "the calamity of a world war, with the economic and social ruin and the moral excesses and dissolution that accompany it, must not on any account be permitted to engulf the human race for a third time."4
I can see Pope Paul VI, the first Pope to address the United Nations, proclaiming loudly from its podium “No more war. war never again!”
So let us pray for those who have sacrificed so much for us. Let us pray for those who died in Iraq, who were maimed or disfigured fighting ISIS in Syria, or who stand guard at lonely outposts in South Korea tonight. May God reward them for their vigilance and their sacrifice.
But let us pray that the need for their service might be brought to an end. That the covetous desires of evil hearts to dominate or control, to take what belongs to others or to violate the rights of peoples might cease and that all might “turn from evil and do good…seek peace and pursue it.”5
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1 - Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1864.
2 - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at Chautauqua, August 14, 1936.
3 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953.
4 - Pope Pius XII's broadcast message, Christmas 1941.
5 - 1 Peter 3:11.
