From the desk of the pastor for Jan. 18, 2026

The Lord be with you. When we think about world wars today, we think immediately of World War I and II. Considered catastrophic to all participants, those two wars shattered Europe’s confidence in itself and its hold upon the world. Perhaps even more destructive in its loss of life by relative proportion, the Thirty Years War ended the Wars of Religion.

From 1618 through 1648 the Holy Roman Empire fought for its survival and won at a cost that is hard even today to calculate let alone understand.* Historians estimate that this war killed ten to twenty million people in Germany, the Low Countries, and France. To put those numbers into perspective, we must account for the great change in population. For example, today Germany has a population of 80 million people, but its territories in 1618 had a population of only 20 million. We must likewise acknowledge that all of these deaths occurred over decades. The best estimate is that it took Europe almost a hundred years to recover this lost population. So grave were the losses that by the end of the war most of its participants could not raise new armies because they could not find any men fit to fight.

What was so important that nearly half of Germany had to die? The war started over the Kingdom of Bohemia’s bid for independence from the Habsburghs. Within a few years, however, the war had metastasized into a struggle over the religious rights of Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. By 1630 enough blood had been spilled that most of the princes of the Empire - Catholic and Protestant - were willing to negotiate. Then Sweden invaded northern Germany, which led to France also invading what was then imperial territory. Eventually, the Dutch War of Independence also became entangled in the mess although the Franco-Spanish War did not nor did the Italian Wars of Spain. The English civil wars also stayed separate although the demand for Scottish troops did deprive Sweden of much needed men. Although not all were in the same war, basically every country of Europe was at war in the 1630s: it was a mess.

To clean up this mess took twelve years of negotiations from 1636 to 1648. Becoming known in history as the Peace of Westphalia, the two treaties ended the Thirty and Eighty Years Wars. More importantly than the exchange of territories for our purposes was the manner of these peace proceedings. Westphalia established that all countries - and thus all countries’ sovereigns - had equal dignity and rights going forward. Moreover, both commoner and king could see that a conflict that had Catholic and Protestant countries on both sides was not a war about religion. Although religious toleration as we understand it was a century or two away, European countries would not go to war over God again. May the Lord help us to remember that wars rarely end the way we think they should

In His Sacred Heart,
Fr. John

*All numbers cited can be found in The Thirty Year’s War - Europe’s Tragedy.