This is the edited text of the homily for the Vigil mass of Anzac Day, Friday the 3rd week of Easter at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney 24 April 2026.
It was perversely codenamed Unternehmen Mondscheinsonate (Operation Moonlight Sonata) as more than 500 Luftwaffe bombers razed the industrial City of Coventry through the night of 14 November 1940.
Marker flares were dropped around the city, followed by high-explosive bombs which knocked out the water, power, transport and communications. Later waves of bombers dropped magnesium and petroleum incendiary bombs and the roads were so cratered that fire engines could not reach the hundreds of fires that burnt across the city.
More than 500 people died, a thousand more were injured, and three-quarters of the city’s buildings were lost, including the medieval cathedral. When King George VI stood in the ruins he wept. So great was the devastation, the Germans coined a new term coventrieren, for obliterating a city.
Amidst the rubble a cathedral stonemason found two charred medieval roof timbers lying in the shape of a cross. He bound them securely and set them upright on an altar of broken stone. Behind them on the sanctuary wall the Provost (Richard Howard) wrote in chalk: “Father Forgive.”
Medieval nails were subsequently recovered from the ruins and fashioned into crosses that were sent around the world as symbols of reconciliation. One made its way to a small Anglican Church in Hay, New South Wales, likely through Rev. James Hardingham, who had himself landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, was shot, crippled, deafened and invalided back to Australia, trained and was ordained an Anglican priest, and was to lose his son in the next war as a prisoner on the Thai–Burma railway. That nail cross is now in the National Collection of the Australian War Memorial.
When Coventry Cathedral was rebuilt alongside the ruins, Benjamin Britten composed his War Requiem for its consecration, weaving the poetry of Wilfred Owen through the Latin Mass for the Dead, and giving the solo parts to an Englishman, a German and a Russian. That image, of former enemies brought together in music and prayer in a sacred space rebuilt from the ashes, powerfully told the story of destruction in war and reconciliation in peace.
Recently the media made much of the supposed spat between Pope Leo and President Trump over the war in the Middle East. It was largely a media beat up and possibly a convenient distraction for Mr Trump. But in the background were a Presidential Easter message full of expletives, papal pleas for peace that some thought missed the mark, and a blasphemous meme of Mr Trump as Jesus, later removed from his Truth Social site. The media delighted in the apparent arm wrestle for high moral ground on war and peace. But what do Christians really say about such matters?
Well, from the beginning, Christians have been very reluctant about war. They have been all too aware of the destruction it causes and the darkness it stirs in human hearts. Christ taught His men not to kill or be violent but rather forgive and “turn the other cheek”. He beatified the peacemakers and his g’day was “Shalom, Peace.” Even as he was trying to save Him from torture, execution, deicide, He told Peter to put away the sword. Rather than join the fray, Jesus long evaded capture; when it could no longer be avoided, He went (as foretold) “like a lamb to the slaughterhouse: harshly dealt with, He never opened His mouth.”
The first disciples tried to enact Jesus’ kind of peace. When Stephen, Paul and the other apostles were attacked, they forgave their assailants rather them resist them. Many early Church Fathers followed this path. Tertullian declared that “the Lord, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.” Origen observed that the more Christians endured persecution rather than perpetrated it, the more their numbers and strength increased. St Clement of Alexandria taught that “peace and love require no arms; it is not in war but in peace that we are trained.” The Roman soldier St Martin of Tours renounced violence when he converted. A strain of Christian pacifism survives to this day. But even those of us who believe warfare is sometimes justified must be deeply uneasy about it, seeking to avoid, limit or resolve it. If fight we must, we will only ever do so for just cause and in just ways. “Gung-ho” is never our cry.
That attitude is underscored in tonight’s readings. Isaiah prophesies the coming the “Prince of Peace,” whose reign will mean endless peace (Isa 9:1–6). St Paul identifies Christ as that peace-bringer, breaking down barriers between people and offering “the gospel of peace to those far off or close by” (Eph 2:13-18). And Jesus Himself declares: “Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.” (Jn 14:27)
From Peter onwards the popes have never tired of preaching a peace Pope Leo XIV calls “both unarmed and disarming”. It is, he says, a real peace, not just a pipe-dream; an internal peace dwelling within, before it is a peace between people; a peace that converts with its “gentle power” to expand understanding and overcome violence. Of course, Christians have no monopoly on prudence regarding use of force or the laws of war. People of sound principles and prudence will still sometimes disagree. And as Pope Leo acknowledged, when Christians offer their wisdom on these matters, they risk being misunderstood or scorned. Still, we must not hesitate to promote “a culture of peace” and justice whether in war or peace, rejecting the logic or mindset of hatred, coventrieren, obliteration of enemies.
We all know that in our broken world violence can come our way unbidden. Jesus told His men to resist evil and warned that living by His principles would occasion conflict as often as peace. He sometimes provoked discord Himself and famously overturned the bankers’ tables in the Temple, chasing them out with a whip.
There can be a role for force, especially on the part of civil authorities, in defence of justice; the ‘sword’ is permissible, even required, for individual or collective self-defence. Once means of peaceful settlement have been exhausted, our service men and women must sometimes be deployed. But even then, it’s not “all’s fair in love and war”, it’s not ‘total war’ or blind bloodletting.
The Christian goal, even amidst war, is reconciliation, not subjugation; the restoration of friendship, not humiliation; civilisation, not rubble. The principles of justice in war challenge us to examine our objective reasons, our subjective motives, our present means, the likely effects.
To ask ourselves whether it’s worth it, whether there is no other way, whether the dangers to non-combatants are being sufficiently considered. To only ever use proportionate force to disarm the threat, never excessive force for vengeance sake.
Pope Leo the Augustinian knows well that the best Christian thinking on justice in war goes back to St Thomas Aquinas and ultimately St Augustine. For both, war could only ever be a reluctant, heavy burden, undertaken in vindication of the right or defence of the weak, and ordered towards the restoration of amity and justice between the parties.
Which makes the courage of conscientious servicemen and women all the more admirable. Their service and sacrifice, for love of country, of comrades, of strangers whose freedom they defend, is truly heroic.
Tonight we honour them: the fallen, the wounded, those carrying scars we cannot see, those who serve still in harm’s way. We hold them up to the Risen Lord, who knows what it is to suffer for others. And with those earliest Christians, we pray for that day prophesied by Isaiah, “when men will hammer their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles, when nation will no longer lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war anymore.”
