The Catholic Church is not a pacifist institution. It never has been. Augustine said so in 430 AD. Aquinas codified it in the 13th century. The Catechism states it explicitly today. And John Paul II — who watched the Nazis occupy his country — understood it more personally than almost any theologian in history.
We have been asked, by readers and prospective investors, whether there is a contradiction between our identity as a Catholic-founded fund and our investment in Poland's defence industry. We write about Piorun missiles, Apache attack helicopters, and ammunition factories. We do so with enthusiasm and rigour. And some people, shaped by a particular assumption about what Catholic ethics requires, find that puzzling.
The assumption — usually unstated — is that Christianity teaches pacifism: that a faithful Catholic investor should avoid weapons as surely as pornography or tobacco. This assumption is widespread. It is also wrong. It confuses a preference for peace — which the Church genuinely and emphatically holds — with a prohibition on legitimate defence, which the Church has never taught and does not now teach.
The Catholic Church has had a fully developed, explicitly articulated doctrine on the morality of war and defence for 1,600 years. It is called the just war tradition. It is not obscure. It is in the Catechism. It is cited by every Pope. It was built by the greatest theologians in the history of Christian thought. And it leads — clearly, directly, and without ambiguity — to the conclusion that investing in the legitimate defence of a sovereign nation facing a documented military threat is not only morally permissible but can be morally required.
This article sets out the argument in full. It is aimed at anyone who has ever wondered how a Catholic fund squares its faith with its portfolio — and at anyone interested in how 1,600 years of theological reasoning applies to a defence industry in NATO's most threatened geography.
St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was the first to build a systematic Christian case for legitimate warfare. Writing in the generation after Rome fell to the Visigoths, in a world where the question of whether Christians could serve in armies was intensely practical, Augustine argued that the use of force to defend the innocent and restore justice was not only compatible with Christian love — it was sometimes an expression of it. A father who fails to protect his child from an attacker is not demonstrating Christian charity. He is failing in his duty.
"The purpose of war, even when waged by just men, is peace. For war is waged by those who strive for peace; it cannot be waged by those who strive for war in the sense that they love war."
St. Augustine · Epistle 189St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) systematised Augustine's insights in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q.40, De bello), identifying three conditions for a just war: legitimate authority must declare it; there must be a just cause; and the intention must be the advancement of good rather than vengeance or conquest. These became the foundational categories of international law — not just Catholic theology. Hugo Grotius, the father of international law, built directly on Aquinas. The Geneva Conventions reflect this tradition. When military lawyers speak of ius ad bellum and ius in bello today, they are using categories that trace directly to a Dominican friar in 13th-century Italy.
The tradition continued through the Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes (1965), which explicitly recognised the legitimacy of national defence while condemning weapons of mass destruction and calling for disarmament. Vatican II did not abolish just war teaching. It reaffirmed it in a nuclear context and added urgency to the call for peace — while maintaining, unambiguously, that "governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed." Those words are from Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 79. They are Vatican II. They are not conservative apologetics. They are the Council.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church — issued by the Vatican in 1992, confirmed by John Paul II, the authoritative and binding compendium of Catholic teaching — addresses war and defence in paragraphs 2307 through 2317. Four paragraphs are directly relevant to our position. We cite them without editorial addition.
All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, "as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed."
The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. At one and the same time: (1) the damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave, and certain; (2) all other means must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; (3) there must be serious prospects of success; (4) the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.
Public authorities have the right and duty to impose on citizens the obligations necessary for national defense. Those who are sworn to serve their country in the armed forces are servants of the security and freedom of nations. If they carry out their duty honorably, they truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of peace.
Read CCC 2310 carefully. This is not grudging tolerance of military service as a necessary evil. The Catechism calls soldiers servants of security and freedom who truly contribute to the common good. This is the language of moral affirmation. If those who carry weapons in legitimate defence contribute to the common good, then those who manufacture those weapons — and those who invest in companies that manufacture them — participate in the same moral activity, subject to the same just war conditions.
No discussion of Catholic teaching on defence in the context of Poland can omit Karol Wojtyła — Pope John Paul II, born in Wadowice in 1920, ordained in Kraków, elected to the papacy in 1978 as the first Polish pope in history. He was not an abstraction. He was a man who, as a young seminarian in occupied Poland, worked in a limestone quarry and a chemical factory under German rule while running a clandestine theatre company at night. He watched Poland occupied by one totalitarian power, then another. He buried friends killed by both. He understood, with a directness that armchair theologians cannot approach, what happens to a people who cannot defend themselves.
When John Paul II visited Poland in June 1979 — his first return as pope, eleven months into his pontificate — he stood in Victory Square in Warsaw before a crowd of hundreds of thousands and delivered a homily that the communist government could not prevent and could not answer. He spoke of Poland's identity, of its Catholic heritage, of the rights of a nation to its own culture and its own freedom. He was not preaching passivity. He was preaching the inviolable dignity of a people — and the implication of that preaching, understood by every Pole in that square and by the KGB officers reporting on it to Moscow, was that a people with such dignity cannot be permanently subjugated. Lech Wałęsa signed the Solidarity accords the following year with a pen bearing the pope's picture.
John Paul II explicitly articulated the objective rights of nations: the right to existence, to freedom, to sociopolitical subjectivity. These are not sentimental aspirations. They are moral claims with implications. A nation that has the right to exist has the right to defend that existence. The soldier defending Poland's eastern border is carrying out a duty that the Catechism — the document John Paul II himself confirmed — describes as a contribution to the common good. The factory in Skarżysko-Kamienna making Piorun missiles is producing the instruments of that defence. Stalin's famous question — "How many divisions does the Pope have?" — was answered by the Polish Pope not with a list of divisions but with a moral framework that ultimately proved more durable than any army. But the framework explicitly includes the legitimacy of armies.
The contemporary investment world has developed ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance — frameworks that frequently list weapons manufacturing as a negative screen, alongside tobacco, gambling, and pornography. Many investors assume these frameworks reflect Catholic ethics. They do not. They reflect a specific secular political consensus about what constitutes responsible investment — a consensus that includes assumptions about defence that the Catholic moral tradition does not share.
The moral distinction the Catechism makes is not between weapons and non-weapons. It is between just use of force and unjust use of force — between the Piorun missile defending Ukrainian airspace from Russian aggression and a chemical weapon designed to kill civilians indiscriminately. The Church explicitly condemns weapons of mass destruction (CCC 2314). It explicitly condemns the deliberate targeting of civilian populations (CCC 2313). It does not condemn conventional weapons in the hands of legitimate military forces defending sovereign territory from aggression. Those are different moral categories, and collapsing them into a single ESG screen is not an act of Catholic discernment. It is an act of secular ideology dressed in ethical language.
The just war doctrine is not abstract. Its four conditions (CCC 2309) are criteria to be applied to specific situations. Applied to Poland's defence investment in 2026, they yield clear conclusions.
The aggressor's damage is lasting, grave, and certain. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 24 February 2022. It has killed civilians, destroyed cities, and produced the largest displacement of people in Europe since 1945. Poland shares borders with Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and with Belarus. The threat is not hypothetical — it is the most documented case of state aggression in Europe since 1945, and it is ongoing.
All other means have been shown to be impractical. Eight years of diplomacy since 2014. Sanctions regimes. UN resolutions. International law. None prevented the invasion. The Catechism's condition is precisely met: once all peace efforts have failed, the right of lawful self-defence is established.
There are serious prospects of success. Ukraine's armed defence — with Western weapons — has demonstrated that a well-equipped nation can successfully resist Russian military aggression. Poland's rearmament creates exactly the deterrent effect the Catechism contemplates: a war that is not fought because the adversary calculates it cannot be won is the most successful application of this principle possible.
The weapons are proportionate. The systems we research and document — conventional precision munitions, attack helicopters, shoulder-launched air defence missiles, artillery — are not weapons of mass destruction. They are precision tools of legitimate conventional military force. They satisfy the Catechism's proportionality requirement in every dimension.
We are a Catholic fund. We invest in Polish defence. These are not contradictory statements. The Catholic Church teaches that governments have the right and duty of lawful self-defence (CCC 2308). It teaches that those who serve in national defence contribute to the common good of the nation (CCC 2310). It teaches through 1,600 years of consistent theological reasoning that the use of proportionate force to defend the innocent against a grave, certain, ongoing aggression is not only morally permitted — it can be morally required.
Poland has been invaded and occupied twice in living memory. It lost six million citizens to two occupying powers within a single generation. The Polish Pope — John Paul II, Karol Wojtyła of Kraków — understood what that history meant. He did not teach passivity. He taught that human dignity demands the freedom to exist, and that freedom sometimes must be defended. The weapons made in the factories of Skarżysko-Kamienna and Stalowa Wola and Mielec are instruments of that defence. We invest in them with clear conscience and clear theological grounding. We welcome any question about our reasoning. We invite anyone who disagrees to engage with the Catechism before engaging with us.
All Catechism quotations from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), confirmed by Pope John Paul II, as cited by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Vatican.va. Augustine references from Epistle 189 and The City of God Book XIX. Aquinas references from Summa Theologiae II-II, q.40. Vatican II references from Gaudium et Spes, 1965. Commentary from National Catholic Register, EWTN, Catholic Education Resource Center, and The Fatima Center. This article represents the investment philosophy of Fides Polonia Capital Management and does not constitute authoritative Catholic theological instruction. Readers with questions about Catholic moral theology should consult their pastor or a qualified theologian.