On that day, Pete Hegseth fired the Army’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Randy George — a headline-generating act that consumed the attention of every major newsroom in the country. The story was rightly treated as extraordinary: the dismissal of the Army’s top uniformed officer in the middle of an active war, communicated to George by phone while he was in a meeting, with no public explanation offered. It was breathtaking.
But on that same day, Hegseth did something else. He fired Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the Army’s chief of chaplains. And that story — one with profound implications for the spiritual integrity of the United States military, and for the future of religion’s proper relationship to state power — was almost entirely swallowed by the larger news.
I want to retrieve it from that shadow. Because what is being done to the military chaplaincy under Pete Hegseth is not a footnote. It is a warning.
A First in American History
Let us begin with a simple, remarkable fact: for the first time in the history of the United States Army, its chief of chaplains has been fired by a Secretary of Defense. Not retired. Not rotated out at the end of his term. Fired.
Maj. Gen. William Green Jr. had served as chief of chaplains since 2023. He is a man of remarkable formation: a former enlisted soldier who left the Army to pursue theological education, earned a Master of Divinity from Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, and returned to serve as a chaplain for decades — deploying in support of operations in Iraq, rising through the ranks to lead the entire chaplain corps. He received the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star. Just one month before Hegseth fired him, he gave the benediction at a White House Medal of Honor ceremony.
No reason was given. None is required, apparently. We have arrived at a moment when the firing of the Army’s spiritual leader in the middle of a war demands no public accounting whatsoever.
This silence is itself diagnostic.
The Machinery of Transformation
To understand why Green was fired, one must understand what Hegseth has been doing to the chaplaincy systematically in the months preceding April 2nd.
Last December, Hegseth announced that the chaplain corps had been “infected by political correctness and secular humanism.” He declared that chaplains had been “minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers,” and that “faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care.” He eliminated the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide — a document of more than one hundred pages — because, he said, it mentioned God only once, while mentioning “feelings” eleven times. He signed a directive abolishing it on the spot.
In late March, he went further. He reduced the number of recognized faith codes for service members from over 200 to 31 — eliminating categories that had previously accommodated Wiccans, atheists, and a wide range of minority religious and indigenous traditions. He ordered that rank insignia be stripped from chaplains’ uniforms and replaced with religious insignia, insisting that a chaplain should be “a chaplain first and an officer second.” In a video posted to social media, he announced: “We are (still) making the Chaplain Corps Great Again.”
One week later, he fired the man who led it.
The sequence is not coincidental. It is programmatic.
What a Chaplain Is For
I have been a Catholic priest for more than fifty years. I have a close friend who serves as a military chaplain — a man of deep faith and profound pastoral wisdom who has accompanied soldiers through the worst that war can do to a human being. I want to speak with some pastoral authority here, because what Hegseth is describing as a restoration of the chaplaincy is, in fact, a fundamental deformation of it.
The military chaplain exists to serve every service member in his or her care — regardless of faith tradition, or lack of one. This is not a concession to “secular humanism.” It is the bedrock of what the chaplaincy has always been. A chaplain accompanying a young soldier through suicidal ideation, through the moral injury of combat, through grief and fear — that chaplain is doing exactly what a minister of God is supposed to do. The pastoral and the therapeutic are not opposites. They never were. The great tradition of pastoral theology — from Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis forward — has always understood that attending to the whole person, body, mind, and soul, is the work of the shepherd.
To dismiss this as “self-help and self-care” is not a theological position. It is a pose. It is the language of a man who has confused spiritual toughness with spiritual indifference — who believes that a warrior’s soul is forged in contempt for vulnerability, rather than in the compassionate presence of someone who will not flinch from it.
The military has become increasingly dependent on chaplains to help address the growing crisis of mental health among troops. Service members take their own lives at rates that dwarf combat deaths. To tell chaplains, in this environment, that therapeutic care is a degradation of their vocation is not bold pastoral reform. It is reckless.
Faith Codes and the Narrowing of the Tent
The reduction of faith codes from 221 to 31 deserves a separate word, because it has received almost none.
A brief explanation for those outside the military world: faith codes are the official designations the armed forces use to record a service member’s religious affiliation. They are not merely administrative labels. They are the primary tool by which chaplains understand who is in their care — and how to accompany that person with integrity. A chaplain who knows that a service member is Jewish, or Buddhist, or a practitioner of a Native American tradition, can minister to that person in a way that respects the actual contours of their faith. Without that information, the chaplain is, spiritually speaking, flying blind.
From 2017, the Pentagon recognized more than 200 such codes, accommodating the genuine religious diversity of the American fighting force — including Wiccans, atheists, practitioners of indigenous traditions, and a wide range of minority and syncretic communities. Hegseth has now reduced that list to 31, framing the change as a practical streamlining. Most service members, he noted, used only a handful of codes anyway.
Perhaps. But one must ask: efficient for whom? The men and women whose traditions were eliminated did not choose their faith codes arbitrarily. They chose them because those codes described their actual lives and their actual need for appropriate pastoral accompaniment. Eliminating a code does not make the chaplain freer to minister. It makes the chaplain blinder.
There is not a scintilla of doubt in my mind about what this narrowing means. It is not administrative tidying. It is the imposition of a preferred religious framework on an institution that belongs to every American, of every faith or none.
The Shadow of Armageddon
Here we arrive at the most frightening dimension of all.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported in March that it had received complaints from U.S. service members that they had been told by senior commanders that the war with Iran is meant to “cause Armageddon” — the biblical end times. The fulfillment of prophecy. The beginning of the final conflict.
Let that sentence rest for a moment.
Service members — young men and women in uniform, under the authority of a chain of command — were reportedly being told that the conflict they are fighting is not merely a military operation. It is an eschatological event.
I have written before about Hegseth’s Pentagon prayer and the crusader iconography that has animated his public theology. I have raised the alarm about the conflation of American military power with divine mandate. But this is no longer creeping. The reports from service members suggest it may be galloping. And now we have a chief of chaplains who has been fired — silently, without explanation — and a chaplaincy systematically remade to serve a narrower, more ideologically uniform, more explicitly Christian nationalist vision of its mission.
One further detail, easily overlooked: the Pentagon hosted a Good Friday service this year for Protestants — but not for Catholics. One wonders whether Hegseth’s version of Christian America has room in it for us.
The Catholic Chaplain’s Unique Position
This is where I must say something that I believe has been almost entirely absent from press coverage of this crisis: Catholic chaplains occupy a canonical position that gives them — and their Archbishop — a form of institutional independence that Pete Hegseth cannot touch.
The Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA is a personal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, headed by Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio. It has no territory, no cathedral, and — this is the crucial point — no government funding whatsoever. It is an institution of the Holy See, not of the Pentagon. Archbishop Broglio himself is a civilian bishop appointed by the Pope, not a military officer, and holds no military rank of any kind. He cannot be fired by the Secretary of Defense. He cannot be ordered to change his theology. His authority derives entirely from canon law and apostolic appointment.
Here is the canonical structure that matters: Catholic chaplains are not incardinated in the Archdiocese for the Military Services. They remain incardinated in their home diocese or religious order and are released to the AMS “on loan” for the period of their service. Once endorsed by the Archdiocese, they become commissioned military officers for purposes of pay, rank, and assignment — but their canonical superior throughout their service remains Archbishop Broglio, whose authority derives from Rome, not from the chain of command. Hegseth can tell a Catholic chaplain where to go. He cannot tell him what to believe, what to preach, or how to accompany a soldier’s conscience.
This is not a theoretical distinction. It became strikingly concrete this Easter.
“It’s Hard to Cast This War as Something Sponsored by the Lord”
On Easter Sunday, Archbishop Broglio appeared on Face the Nation with CBS News anchor Ed O’Keefe. What he said was remarkable — and, given his reputation as one of the more conservative Catholic prelates in the United States, all the more significant for the quarter from which it came.
Asked directly whether the war with Iran is justified, Broglio was unambiguous: “I would think, under the just war theory, it is not, because while there was a threat with nuclear arms, it’s compensating for a threat before the threat is actually realized.” He aligned himself explicitly with Pope Leo XIV, who has repeatedly urged negotiation, saying: “I would line myself up with Pope Leo.”
On Hegseth’s repeated public invocations of Jesus Christ to frame the conflict as righteous — his prayers from the Pentagon press room, his crusader imagery, his suggestion of divine sanction for Operation Epic Fury — Broglio was measured but clear: “It’s a little bit problematic in the sense that the Lord Jesus certainly brought a message of peace, and also, I think war is always a last resort.” And then, with quiet precision: “I do think that it’s hard to cast this war as something that would be sponsored by the Lord.”
Broglio spoke also of the pastoral reality his chaplains are navigating. He and his brother chaplains, he said, are spending more time working on questions of “moral injury” — the wounds left in soldiers who must kill even under legitimate command. “Even if you obey a legitimate command, but you have to kill someone, that’s going to leave some traces in your heart or on your soul,” he said. “We’ve tried to provide structures and help to people in that situation, to try and help them heal.”
This is precisely what Hegseth has declared illegitimate — the therapeutic dimension of pastoral care. And it is precisely what Catholic tradition insists upon.
For Catholic service members caught between obedience and conscience, Broglio offered clear counsel: because conscientious objection in the U.S. military applies only to war as such, not to a specific conflict, lower-ranking personnel are generally bound to follow orders unless those orders are “clearly immoral.” But he did not leave it there. His counsel for Catholic troops in moral distress was this: “Do as little harm as you can, and try to preserve innocent lives.”
The Archbishop who oversees every Catholic chaplain in the U.S. military told American troops, on national television on Easter Sunday, that the war in Iran does not meet the moral criteria of the Church — and that their faith demands they act accordingly within the limits of their authority and conscience. No Secretary of Defense, however aggressive his purges of the officer corps, has any instrument for silencing that voice. Archbishop Broglio answers to Rome.
On the Proper Relationship of Faith and Arms
The Catholic tradition has thought carefully and at length about war, about the soldier’s conscience, and about the relationship of religion to military power. The just war tradition, from Augustine through Aquinas to the modern Catechism, insists that war can only be morally justified under strict conditions — and that no military operation can claim divine sanction simply because its leaders invoke God’s name or perceive their enemies as godless.
The Catechism is precise: the damage inflicted by an aggressor must be “lasting, grave, and certain”; all other means of resolving the conflict must have been exhausted; there must be a serious prospect of success; and the use of arms must not produce evils graver than the evil to be eliminated. Preventive war — acting against a threat not yet realized — has long been viewed with deep caution in Catholic moral theology. Archbishop Broglio’s assessment on Easter Sunday was an application of that tradition, not a departure from it.
To tell soldiers that they are fighting to bring about Armageddon is not merely theologically illiterate. It is morally catastrophic. It removes the very conditions that make conscience possible. If God has ordained this war, then no question of justice, proportionality, or protection of innocents can arise. The divine mandate overrides the moral calculus. The soldier who doubts is faithless. The chaplain who raises a question of conscience becomes an obstacle.
This is not Christianity. It is a political religion wearing Christianity’s clothing. And it is precisely what a properly functioning military chaplaincy exists to resist — because a good chaplain is the soldier’s advocate before God, not the state’s instrument for religious mobilization.
Pete Hegseth fired Maj. Gen. William Green. He did not say why.
The why is visible in everything he has done before and since: the crusader imagery, the eschatological framing of the war, the narrowed faith codes, the purge of the therapeutic, the stripping of rank insignia in favor of religious display. He is building a chaplaincy in his own image.
And Archbishop Broglio — appointed by the Pope, funded by the faithful, answerable to no Secretary of Defense — has now told the nation, on Easter morning, exactly what that image is not.
A Word to the Church
I am a Catholic priest. The Catholic Church has a long and complicated relationship with military power, not always to our credit. We have blessed swords, prayed for victories, and — to our shame — sometimes confused the interests of Christendom with the interests of Christ. The reforms of Gaudium et Spes and the subsequent development of Catholic social teaching have moved us, however imperfectly, toward a more honest accounting of what the Gospel demands of those who hold power over life and death.
That tradition calls us now to speak. Not because we are partisans of any political faction, but because what is being done to the military chaplaincy is a genuine theological disorder — a confusion of the sacred and the imperial that the Church has seen before, and that has never ended well.
The shepherd’s crook and the sword are not the same instrument. When a government begins treating them as interchangeable — when it fires the shepherd because he will not become a weapon, and reshapes the flock in the image of its preferred ideology — the Church has an obligation to say so.
Archbishop Broglio said so on Easter Sunday. He said it from outside the chain of command, from the independence that canon law and apostolic appointment guarantee him. That independence is not incidental. It is, precisely in this moment, providential.
I am grateful for it. And I am saying so too.
Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L., is a retired Catholic priest of the Diocese of Orange, California, and retired rector of Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano. He publishes Liturgy and Truth on Substack.
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