“Augustine was no escapist”[/caption]
….Augustine understood peace not as passive surrender to circumstances, but as rightly ordered love. Peace is not pretending evil does not exist. Peace is not withdrawal from responsibility.
Peace is not indifference disguised as sophistication. Peace requires vigilance because the human heart is never morally neutral.
He also understood something far more demanding: Peace requires moral clarity. Evil does not prevail merely because of violent people. It prevails when good people become distracted, indifferent, or lack courage.
A society loses peace when people stop defending truth, stop protecting the vulnerable, or stop believing that evil and injustice must be restrained. For Augustine, peace was never simply a feeling. It was the work of rightly ordered love — and love, if it is real, always moves outward. It is fruitful. It sacrifices. It builds. It acts.
Augustine believed that every human being loves something. The central moral question is not whether we love, but whether we love the right things, in the right order, and in the right measure. When love is rightly ordered, the restless heart finds rest. Augustine knew this from personal experience. In his Confessions, he chronicles a young man’s search for peace in ambition, sensual pleasure, intellectual pride, and even in a seemingly noble career. “Our hearts are restless,” he wrote “until they rest in You.”
Yet Augustine was no escapist. As Bishop of Hippo, he engaged in politics, defended the vulnerable, debated heretics, and contributed much-needed wisdom in reconciling how political authorities must act to defend the common good, even where force can be compatible with charity in a violent, unstable world.
He wrote that Christians live as pilgrims in the earthly city while belonging ultimately to the City of God. In that tension, we labor for proximate peace — tranquility among nations and citizens, manifested in just laws, virtuous families, and rightly formed souls — while never confusing it with what Augustine called “the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God….”
This Augustinian vision has profoundly shaped both Catholic thought and our own experience as Americans. A well-ordered society requires well-formed citizens, shaped by moral and religious faith. It includes the vocation of marriage and family, dignified work, and public service. In the 20th century, amid two world wars, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, brave men and women offered the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of peace.
A country where, in 1943, in my hometown of Chicago, a young college graduate would be commissioned into the United States Navy. By June of 1944, he would serve in the allied armada assembled for Operation Overlord. On D-Day, June 6, he took part in the Normandy invasion, helping deliver troops to the heavily defended French coast. Later, this young man of faith also participated in Operation Dragoon, the allied invasion of southern France. Later in life, he described the significance of May 8, 1945, when he found himself in Rome on VE Day — marking the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.
Exactly 80 years later — to the day — on May 8, 2025, this young Navy lieutenant’s son, Robert, an Augustinian, would be elected the first American pope. Appearing for the first time on the loggia of St. Peter’s Square and taking the name Leo XIV, his first words to the world were: “Peace be with you….”
From U.S, Ambassador to Vatican’s commencement address at Thomas Aquinas College on May 16. Watch address here.
Augustine would be appalled by the conduct of the US government fighting wars of choice on behalf of the Zionists and ruthlessly killing innocent people
While I don’t think the requirements for a just war have been met in the case of our war with Iran, your statement “fighting wars of choice on behalf of the Zionists and ruthlessly killing innocent people” seems wrong. I know of no cases of US troops targeting civilians, which would be wrong/immoral. Do you?
Had our president carried out his threat to destroy Iranian civilization, that, indeed, would have been gravely immoral and genocidal.
That said, did you find anything wrong in Ambassador Burch’s address to those young people?
Pray for him. He is not a Zionist (definitions of which vary).
On the other hand, Ambassador Mike Huckabee seems to be and is misled by the Protestant heresy of dispensationalism. The modern political state of Israel is not the Israel of the Bible and the one written about in the Book of Revelation.
Bishop Barron put the Catholic position succinctly:”all forms of antisemitism are to be unequivocally condemned; the state of Israel has a right to exist; but the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism.”
Another deranged TDS sufferer who’d rather that Iran have a nuclear weapon. 🤣🤡
I very much enjoyed Ambassador Brian Burch’s TAC Commencement address! The entire speech is well worth reading and viewing, on the links provided.
There were several good commencement speakers at Catholic colleges this year. And, others, not so much.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan spoke at the University of Dallas commencement and Governor Ron DeSantis spoke at Ave Maria University. Chris Stefanick spoke at Walsh University and Msgr. James Shea, the president of the University of Mary, spoke at The Catholic University of America. Tim Busch, founder of the Napa Institute, spoke at U. Mary and Franciscan University of Steubenville. Kelsey Reinhardt, President and CEO of CatholicVote, spoke at Wyoming Catholic College. Jersey Mike’s founder, Peter Cancro, spoke at Benedictine.
Dee Dee Myers, an alumna and Bill Clinton’s presidential press secretary, spoke at Santa Clara University.
Abortion promoter and private jet-setter environmentalist John Kerry and ex-Catholic Tom Brady spoke at Georgetown, America’s first Catholic college. Venus Williams spoke at Loyola Marymount University and pro-abortion politician Ken Salazar spoke at Regis.
Carl Anderson, former Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, served as the commencement speaker for Divine Mercy University this year.
Did Jersey Mike’s founder, Peter Cancro, bring lunch?