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Pope Leo XIV entered Gemelli Hospital on Tuesday for surgery on his lung, and more than 2,000 of you have now written to him. If you haven’t yet, please sign the letter today. Letters from Leo will deliver every one to the Vatican on behalf of our community.
Hours after a private audience with Pope Leo XIV on Monday, the archbishop for the U.S. military told Catholic troops assigned to Hegseth’s firing squad for Nidal Hasan that they must ask to be excused.
The archbishop, Timothy Broglio, is a conservative and a former president of the U.S. bishops’ conference.
He has opposed the Trump administration more than once, including on Easter Sunday, when he said on national television that the war in Iran was not just.
“As I would in the case of a procured abortion, I oblige any Catholics assigned to the firing squad to request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church,” Broglio wrote in an Oct. 12 statement against the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
The audience was one of the last Leo held before he entered Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on Tuesday for surgery on a small lung nodule.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will face a firing squad on the base on Dec. 3.
He promised an audience, too. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told Real America’s Voice, and the U.S. bishops’ president condemned the plan within a day.
Broglio knows this crime from the inside. He presided at the funeral of Michael Grant Cahill, the only civilian killed at Fort Hood, and his statement opens by renewing his sympathy to the families who lost someone that November afternoon. Then he turned to the Pentagon with a series of questions.
“Do we really want to imitate the terrorists of this world and make a public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries? … The US military generally enjoys a good reputation in the world. Is there really a value to throwing them in the same boat with terrorists by broadcasting the image of the execution of a man in a wheel chair to the whole world?”
His questions reminded me of Pope Francis’s address to Congress on Sept. 24, 2015, the first ever delivered by a pope. “To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place,” Francis told lawmakers.
He also asked whether anyone in the chain of command had weighed the “moral injury” the members of the firing squad might carry home.
Fort Hood sits inside his archdiocese (the Archdiocese for the Military Services holds pastoral care of Catholics in the armed forces wherever they are stationed), so the young soldiers who could be handed rifles on Dec. 3 are his own flock.
His comparison was chosen with care. Abortion is the issue on which conservative Catholics most often demand that bishops bind consciences, and Broglio placed a state-staged killing in the same moral category.
He joins a growing chorus. Archbishop Paul Coakley of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the livestream “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” last week, and on Monday Cardinal Blase Cupich labeled it “performative barbarism.”
Pope Leo had already written, on the World Day Against the Death Penalty, that capital punishment “is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” — a message I covered on Saturday.
A conservative who tells the truth
The Catholic right cannot wave Broglio away. He spent eleven years as chief of staff to Cardinal Angelo Sodano, John Paul II’s secretary of state. He backed service members who sought religious exemptions from the COVID vaccine mandate, and he led the U.S. bishops as their president from 2022 to 2025. By any measure, he sits on the conservative wing of the American hierarchy.
He has also become the steadiest Catholic check on this administration’s use of the armed forces. Last December, he said that deliberately killing survivors of the administration’s drug-boat strikes was “illegal and immoral,” which was his second rebuke of Trump in two months.
In January he told the BBC that Catholic troops could in conscience refuse an order to seize Greenland by force.
On Easter Sunday he took the argument to national television. Asked by CBS’s Ed O’Keefe on Face the Nation whether the war in Iran was justified, Broglio answered, “Under the just war theory, it is not.”
As I reported before the broadcast, he also called Hegseth’s invocations of Jesus from the Pentagon briefing room “problematic” and said it is hard to see the war as something “sponsored by the Lord.”
His counsel to Catholics in uniform fit in one line: “Do as little harm as you can, and preserve innocent lives.”
A shepherd for Catholics in uniform
Broglio has fought just as hard for the faith of the Catholics who serve. When the Army canceled the chapel contracts for the religious educators and musicians who support its priests last fall, he wrote to every member of Congress that the cuts impede “the constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of religion especially for Catholics.”
Catholics are about one in five soldiers, yet only 137 of the Army’s more than 2,500 chaplains are Catholic. After his letter, the Army agreed to reexamine the cancellations.
That fight carries more weight now. Doug Wilson, the Idaho pastor Hegseth calls a mentor and a man whose vision of a Christian nation would outlaw Catholic processions, has preached at the Pentagon. On Good Friday this year, the Pentagon held Protestant services and no Catholic one.
Broglio has praised Hegseth when he thought the secretary got the chaplaincy right, including the decision to scrap a “spiritual fitness” guide that he said reduced chaplains to social workers. Because he has given credit where it was earned, nobody can dismiss Monday’s statement as partisan reflex.
He is a conservative, and an honest one. On Monday, hours after sitting with the pope, he looked at a firing squad staged for phones during the nation’s 250th year and told the young Catholics who might be ordered into that line that the Church will not ask them to stand there.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Broglio and with every Catholic soldier who refuses to let the state turn the taking of a life into entertainment.
Nidal Hasan committed an evil act, and his victims’ families deserve justice. The Gospel still insists that his life, and the consciences of the young men and women told to end it on camera, belong first to God, and no secretary of defense can claim them.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for shepherds who speak plainly when power demands silence — and Broglio just showed what that looks like.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a culture of public killing, I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
They are all leading by example. I love it. I was entering high school when Vatican II was introduced to the community, same as Pope Leo. It makes my heart smile to see things promised come to fruition. I am grateful.
I am very proud of and grateful to Archbishop Broglio for his clear stance - the Church's clear stance- on murder. Afterall . . . Trump holding his Bible (up-side-down!) only goes so far!