UPDATE: A previous version of this story reported that Archbishop Broglio served as a military chaplain based upon a Grok citation which appears to have been an AI hallucination. The Archdiocese of Military Services has notified us that Archbishop Broglio NEVER served in the military. We have therefore modified the original column to reflect this fact.
Six Democrat lawmakers, who are also veterans of military services, have come under fire for issuing a video encouraging members of the U.S. military services to disobey so-called “illegal” orders issued by President Trump. The Pentagon is now considering recalling some of these lawmakers to have them formally court-martialed.
Religious News Services is reporting that that Archbishop Timothy Broglio, head of the Archdiocese for Military Services (who, unlike his predecessors, never actually served in the military), has issued a statement which appears to echo the Democrats’ call for military members to disobey their orders:
Archbishop Timothy Broglio said that an order to kill survivors of an attack by U.S. forces on a boat in the Caribbean would be wrong if they posed no immediate danger to those forces.
To deliberately kill “survivors on a vessel who pose no immediate lethal threat to our armed forces,” Broglio said, is “illegal and immoral.” He explained that “the moral principle forbidding the intentional killing of noncombatants is inviolable.”
Last week, The Washington Post reported that on Sept. 2, in the first of a wave of attacks on alleged drug traffickers, who the Trump administration says were headed towards the United States, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered that all people on the boat be killed, resulting in a second strike that killed two survivors of the first strike.
Since then, the Trump administration has said that Adm. Frank Bradley, who oversaw the operation, ordered the second strike to sink the boat. Bradley is expected to appear before Congress on Thursday. Some legal experts, including a group of former military judge advocate generals, have said that if The Washington Post’s reports are true, then the act was a war crime.
“No one can ever be ordered to commit an immoral act, and even those suspected of committing a crime are entitled to due process under the law,” wrote Broglio.
President Trump has been very clear that he’s going to use the full power of America and the full might of the United States to take on and eradicate these drug cartels, no matter where they’re operating from and no matter how long they’ve been able to act with impunity,” Said Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State. Trump said many drug boats are coming out of Venezuela, claiming terrorists are acting under the control of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
TAKE ACTION: Contact Archbishop Timothy Broglio at tpbroglio@milarch.org or 202-719-3600 and let him know what you think.