By Johnny Zokovitch
If we have any doubts about how the war-making of the US and Israel is part and parcel of the death cult that these governments have embraced, we need only open our ears to the proclamation of the gospel this coming Sunday. The story of the raising of Lazarus is the traditional reading for the fifth Sunday of Lent, foreshadowing the central mystery of faith still to come at the Easter vigil, Jesus’ own triumph over death.
Today, the facts aren’t in dispute. Together, the governments of Trump and Netanyahu have repeatedly turned to the power to kill to achieve their ends. The Israeli government has waged a genocidal campaign on the people of Gaza. Netanyahu’s administration has encouraged and protected Israelis in the illegal settlements of the Occupied West Bank who have waged attacks on and killed indigenous Palestinians, devastated their farms, and destroyed their homes. In recent weeks, the Israeli military has conducted air raids and launched a ground offensive in Lebanon; among those killed was Father Pierre al-Rahi, a Maronite Catholic priest who refused to leave his congregation in the southern Lebanon village of Qlayaa and died as a result of wounds inflicted by the Israeli bombing.
President Trump has yet to encounter a problem that he doesn’t think can be solved by killing people. From the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that left between 80-100 people dead, including civilians, to the Christmas Day airstrikes in Nigeria, to the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug runners in the Caribbean, to the deaths of migrants in detention camps and the shootings of protesters, the strategy of the Trump administration has been to kill whoever stands in their way.
Most pronounced at this moment, the US and Israel have unleashed a reign of terror in Iran: the upper end of estimates of those already killed in the Israel/US-instigated war is 3,100, and the war crimes of these two administrations have included targeted assassinations of Iranian leaders and attacks on civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, in which the victims were the sick and children.
As Tom Cordaro wrote in a recent piece for the Pax Christi USA blog, “For the US, war is not a break or a fracture of the normal order; it is our standard operating procedure.” The cult of death demands sacrificial victims.
Such devotion to war-making can only be attributed to the worship of the power of death, the ultimate power being the power to threaten and kill whomever one chooses, whether that be enemies, collateral damage, or even one’s own sons and daughters. The facts are what they are. This war in Iran arises from a death cult that has its grip on the US and Israeli governments, a spirit of violence and bloodlust that possesses both administrations.
What we need is an exorcism – someone to name this demon and call for it to be cast out. Enter Pope Leo.
“On behalf of Christians in the Middle East and of all women and men of good will, I appeal to those responsible for this conflict: Cease fire! Cease fire so that avenues for dialogue may be reopened. Violence can never lead to the justice, stability, and peace that the people are waiting for,” urged Pope Leo to thousands of the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his Angelus address last week.
And this week, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, doubled down on Pope Leo’s message, directly appealing to the US and Israeli administrations to “end the war on Iran.”
Every system of domination believes that their final recourse to power is to kill any who opposes them, that the ultimate power is the power to kill. All those demanding an end to the war in Iran – an end to all war and killing – stand, like Jesus, facing the tomb, demanding that death relinquish its power. In the raising of Lazarus, we know that the cult of death does not have the last word. There is a power here stronger than the power to kill, stronger than the power of death.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.
Both Pax Christi and Johnny Zokovitch deserve thanks and admiration for the above fearless essay. Undeniably, we are witnesses to a moment in history where an unambiguous moral and ethical outcry is as urgent as during the diabolical period of the Holocaust and and atomic attack on Japan. Deo gratias for Pope Leo; now is the hour, not next week, for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to throw timidity and fear to the wind and issue a statement to the New York Times condemning not only the wanton bloodletting by U.S. and Israel in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine, but also a warning to anyone participating militarily in this murder spree that their actions are morally reprehensible. Our eminences have made abundantly clear that even driving a person to an abortion clinic is mortally sinful; are they willing to apply the same criteria to those who make the weapons and employ them to eviscerate and mangle the bodies of other human beings?
David-Ross Gerling, PhD