Labor as Good Soldiers

By Thomas Creen, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

Look up 2 Timothy 2:3. It says (in the Vulgate): “Labora sicut bonus miles Christi Jesu.” As part of a book of the New Testament, this verse’s validity transcends and permeates both time and space. We in Miles Jesu seek to follow the Apostle’s exhortation, as all Christians should, to labor as good soldiers of Christ Jesus and remind ourselves and others constantly of this exhortation by making it our very name – Miles Jesu (soldier of Jesus).

With a firm basis in Sacred Scripture for using military terminology, Venerable Pope Pius XII exhorted the seminarians at Rome’s North American College in 1953 in the following way:

We belong to the Church militant; and she is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass her destruction. Not only in the far-off centuries of the early Church, but down through the ages and in this our day, the enemies of God and Christian civilization make bold to attack the Creator’s supreme dominion and sacrosanct human rights. No rank of the clergy is spared; and the faithful—their number is legion—inspired by the valiant endurance of their shepherds and fathers in Christ, stand firm, ready to suffer and die, as the martyrs of old, for the one true Faith taught by Jesus Christ.

There is no doubt that charity is the supreme law of Christ and the Church. Our Lord Himself clarified that by summarizing the law as, “Love God and love your neighbor” (cf. Mk 12:29-31). Christ did not say that the most important thing is to fight for Him. However, charity often demands that we do difficult things, not necessarily fighting physically as armies do, but morally and spiritually against our own sinfulness and against evil and injustice.

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