No game

This Sunday’s Gospel passage, the healing of the man born blind, offers a striking lens through which to consider moral blindness.

In the narrative, Jesus Christ restores the sight of a man who has never seen the world. Yet the real blindness in the story belongs not to the man who lacked physical sight, but to those who refuse to recognise truth when it stands before them. That same spiritual blindness is evident in the way modern warfare is increasingly perceived and presented.

US Cardinal Blase J Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, recently condemned a social media video celebrating US missile strikes on Iran.

More than 1,000 people were killed in those attacks—men, women and children. Families were shattered, communities destroyed in the blink of an eye. Yet the violence was edited and shared online in the style of an action movie, accompanied by the caption: ‘Justice the American Way’.

War, once understood primarily through its terrible human consequences, is increasingly consumed as spectacle. Missile strikes become clips. The devastation of real communities becomes background content on a screen.

Cardinal Cupich describes this trend as a dangerous form of “gamifying” war. The language itself reveals the distortion. In a game, a “hit” means points scored. In real life, a “hit” means lives lost and families left to mourn.

This is precisely the kind of blindness that the Gospel challenges. In John’s account, those who witness the miracle cannot accept what has happened because it disrupts their assumptions. They question the healed man, interrogate his parents and ultimately cast him aside rather than acknowledge the truth before them. Their refusal to see is not due to lack of evidence but to hardened hearts.

True sight

The same dynamic can take hold in societies at war. The suffering of distant people becomes easy to ignore. The victims are reduced to abstractions: enemy combatants, collateral damage, strategic targets.

When images of explosions are presented like scenes from a film, it becomes even easier to forget that each blast marks the end of a human story, a person created in the image of God.

The Christian tradition has long insisted that war must never be treated lightly. Even the Church’s ‘just war’ teaching, often misunderstood as permission for violence, places strict moral limits on the use of force and insists that war is always a tragic failure of peace. Pope after pope has warned that modern warfare—with its devastating weapons and civilian casualties—pushes humanity ever closer to moral catastrophe.

The Gospel reminds us that true sight is not merely physical. It is moral and spiritual. To see rightly is to recognise the dignity of every human life, including those who live far from us and speak different languages.

It is to understand that behind every casualty figure is a mother, a father, a child, a friend.

In the closing lines of John’s story, Jesus warns that those who claim they can see may in fact remain blind. That warning deserves careful reflection today. If war becomes entertainment, if destruction becomes spectacle, and if the suffering of others becomes content to scroll past, then something essential in our humanity is being lost.