Tonight, the President of the United States said he wanted to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.

I am a priest. I have spent more than fifty years proclaiming the sanctity of human life. And I am telling you plainly: those words are a moral obscenity.

Behind the abstraction of “Iran” are mothers, fathers, children — human beings made in the image and likeness of God. The Iranian people have suffered for generations: first under the brutal thuggery of the Shah and his secret police, then under the iron grip of a radical theocracy they did not unanimously choose. To speak of erasing them — of hurling them back into the Stone Age — is not the language of a statesman. It is the language of a man who has never looked into the face of a civilian casualty.

We are the nation that stormed the beaches of Normandy to liberate a continent. We are the nation that rebuilt devastated Europe through the Marshall Plan because we understood that dignity does not end at borders. What have we become when our highest office produces not a word of moral seriousness, but a boast fit for a schoolyard bully?

Just war doctrine — which has governed the moral reasoning of civilized nations for centuries — demands discrimination between combatants and civilians, proportionality in the use of force, and a genuine intention of peace. “Bombing them back to the Stone Age” meets none of those criteria. It is not strategy. It is savagery dressed in a suit.

I did not recognize my country tonight. And I refuse to be silent about it.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.