In his recent letter from Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa spoke of what St Paul called “the mystery of lawlessness”. It is a phrase that stands out. One that, to us, captures the moral void revealed by modern warfare. Pizzaballa’s words, written as Gaza reels from years of bombardment, displacement and starvation, are not political but spiritual: they leverage St Paul’s lament and position them in a world that has normalised cruelty and elevated force as the only logic of power.
“For two years,” Pizzaballa writes, “we have witnessed massacres of civilians, starvation, displacement, and lack of medical care.”
Even as talk of ceasefire and hostage release offers a glimmer of hope, he warns that violence has become the guiding principle of politics, economics and even religion. “Only by force,” he notes, “it is said, can peace be imposed.” Yet history, he reminds us, shows that violence breeds only more violence.
This descent into what St Paul calls lawlessness is one of entropy. It is the slow erosion of empathy and moral clarity and it is not confined to the Holy Land.
At the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Pope Leo recently condemned the use of hunger as a weapon of war and described global starvation as “a collective failure, an ethical derailment, an historic offence.” Some 673 million people, he noted, still go without enough food, a mark of what he called “a soulless economy and an unjust system of distribution.”
The great mystery, of course, is how – in a world of plenty – starvation and air strikes can ever be allowed. As billionaires proliferate, any child that dies from want or violence deserves to be seared into their collective consciences. Of course, it never is. Which is, perhaps, why they are billionaires.
Together, the Patriarch and the Pope offer a moral indictment of the age: a time when human suffering is visible to all yet stirs little outrage. The horror of Gaza, broadcast daily, has become background noise. “We risk becoming accustomed to suffering,” Pizzaballa warns, “but it need not be so. Every life lost, every hunger endured remains a scandal in God’s eyes.”
AOAV’s own research bears this out. Since the war’s escalation, civilians have made up the overwhelming majority of those killed or injured by explosive weapons. Urban warfare has erased the boundary between battlefield and home. To bomb cities is not merely a military act. It is an assault on the very idea of civilian protection. Every life lost is, indeed, a scandal.
The Patriarch’s letter insists on a countervailing truth: that faith, endurance, and compassion remain acts of resistance. “Our decision to remain, when everything urges us to leave, is not a challenge but an act of love,” he writes. The Church’s refusal to speak in the language of reckoning is also a quiet rejection of revenge. This needs to be stressed.
There will be no end of violence if revenge takes the form of violence.
If the mystery of lawlessness, then, lies in how easily societies justify cruelty, the mystery of goodness lies in the persistence of mercy despite despair.
To care, to record, to witness and to insist that every civilian life matters must remain the most radical act.
In a world numbed by atrocity, the Patriarch’s appeal is simple: to look again, to feel again, and to remember that the true measure of peace is not victory, but humanity.
We would do well to heed these words.
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