I can’t stand the RCC’s posture of extreme passivism. Jesus wasn’t unswervingly passivist unless that served His purpose. He was sometimes violent, or suggested a violent consequence for people’s behavior. How do readers of the Gospels miss this?
My impression, looking from the outside, is that this is a fairly recent phenomenon. From Constantine until at least the conquistadors, the Catholic church was not averse to organizing Christian-based military for its purposes, usually laudatory.
As late as the early 20th century, Chesterton argued against both pacifism and militarism (see here), and his argument sounds to me like a modern version of Aquinas. I also remember Lewis somewhere arguing that Christianity is a precarious paradox of extremes, one of which was the simultaneous necessity for both militarism and pacifism--but I can't remember whether he wrote that before or after becoming Catholic.
Puzzlement here. Is this related to the post?