Cardinal Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, has condemned what he called the “gamification” of war, asking Americans to resist becoming desensitised to the “true costs of war”.
In a statement issued on March 7, partly in response to a White House video posted on Social Media featuring footage from the war in Iran spliced with scenes from action movies, Cupich said, “A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening”. “We now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced”, he said.
He particularly focussed on the human cost of the war, including US casualties who he said were “dishonoured” by the post, as well as the Iranian school children killed on day 1 of US strikes. “The moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game,” his statement read.
Despite the administration’s appeal to excitement, Cupich warned that “we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the ‘spectacle’ of explosions.”
Read the story on the National Catholic Reporter, here.
Picture above of Archbishop Blase Cardinal Cupich preaching at Saint John Vianney College Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, 14 March 2021 by MTF-GR. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.