In the Atlantic city of Angra do Heroísmo, where volcanic stone meets the slow rhythm of the sea, the language of Good Friday is rarely abstract. It is spoken in procession, in silence, in the measured toll of bells. And this year, it was spoken in a sentence that traveled far beyond the walls of the Sé de Angra: There is no God of war.

The declaration came from Armando Esteves Domingues, bishop of Angra, during the Celebration of the Passion of the Lord—a liturgy that marks, in Christian time, the hour of death and the threshold of meaning. But his words did not remain confined to ritual. They entered the moral vocabulary of a world where war is often justified in the language of necessity, and sometimes—more dangerously—in the language of God.

To invoke God in the service of violence, the bishop said, is not merely an error. It is an “outrage,” a “blasphemous betrayal.” In this, he echoed a recurring insistence of Pope Francis: that any violence carried out in God’s name is, at its core, a distortion of the divine itself. God, he reminded the faithful, does not stand with power as domination, but with the innocent—in their solitude, in their suffering, in their unrecorded grief.

It was not a political speech. It did not name conflicts or governments. And yet it was unmistakably political in the deepest sense: it spoke to power, to responsibility, to the ethics of decision-making in a fractured world. True authority, the bishop suggested, is not measured by the capacity to command or destroy, but by the willingness to serve and protect life.

On the cross, he said, Christ enters “the solitude of the innocent” and transforms despair into prayer. It is a theological statement, but also an ethical one. It proposes a standard—a criterion—for those entrusted with authority: to recognize suffering not as collateral, but as central.

The timing was not incidental. Good Friday has always been a day when the Christian imagination confronts violence not as abstraction but as event: the execution of a man by the machinery of empire, witnessed by the powerless. But in a world where images of war circulate endlessly—cities reduced to rubble, families displaced, children buried beneath the language of geopolitics—the Passion risks becoming metaphor. The bishop’s words resisted that drift.

“Let us pray for peace and for those who decide,” he urged. Not only for leaders, but for the wounded, for the young sent to kill and die, for parents who bury their children. It was a litany that collapsed distance, bringing the global into the local, the distant war into the quiet nave of a cathedral in the mid-Atlantic.

And yet, the homily did not end in despair. Even amid “ruins and tears,” he said, there are signs of resurrection: humanitarian corridors, volunteers, doctors, families who take in the displaced, communities that share what little they have. These are not grand gestures. They are, in scale, small. But they are, in consequence, enduring.

In invoking the cross, the bishop did not offer an answer to suffering so much as a question. Not Where is God?—a question often asked in the face of violence—but Where are we? What do we do in the presence of suffering? Do we add to it, justify it, look away from it? Or do we, in however modest a way, interrupt its expansion?

The question lingers because it refuses resolution. It places responsibility not in abstraction but in action.

The homily also unfolded within a broader commemorative frame: the jubilee marking 800 years since the death of Francis of Assisi, whose prayer for peace—to bring love where there is hatred, pardon where there is injury—was recalled not as ornament, but as imperative. In a time when religious language is often mobilized to divide, the bishop returned it to its original work: to heal, to reconcile, to resist violence.

Beyond the liturgy, the day carried its own material gesture. The Good Friday collection, directed toward the Holy Land, supports communities in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt—places where faith persists under the pressure of conflict. Food, medicine, schools, housing: the infrastructure of dignity in fragile terrain.

In Angra, the day would continue with the Via Crucis through the streets, the procession of the Dead Lord moving slowly through the city’s stone arteries. It is an old ritual, repeated year after year. And yet, in a world that often forgets its own lessons, repetition is not redundancy. It is resistance.

“There is no God of war,” the bishop said.

In another time, it might have sounded self-evident. Today, it sounds like a necessary correction—a line drawn not on a map, but in the conscience.

Adapted from a Press Release (Igreja Açores)

Translated into English as a community outreach program by the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL), in collaboration with Bruma Publication and ADMA (Azores-Diaspora Media Alliance) at California State University, Fresno. PBBI thanks Luso Financial for sponsoring NOVIDADES.