Writing hope: A conversation with Phil Klay

By Joseph Tulloch

This weekend, as part of its 2025 Jubilee Year, the Catholic Church is marking the ‘Jubilee for the World of Communicators’.

The overall theme for the Jubilee Year is 'Pilgrims in hope', and a major question on the agenda at this weekend's Communications Jubilee is what it means to communicate hope in a global context increasingly marked by violent conflict.

To explore the topic, Vatican News spoke with Phil Klay, a US Marine veteran and novelist.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for reasons of style and brevity.

Vatican News: Could you start us off by introducing yourself and the kind of things that you write?

Phil Klay: Sure. I’m Phil Klay, and I write mostly about the American military. My first book was about the Iraq War, and I've written both fiction and non-fiction about that.

Since then, I've gone on to write about other aspects of American military policy and America's presence around the world. At the same time, I am a Catholic, and that's important to me. I'm not just interested in how military policy plays out at the level of geopolitics, but I think that war is a place of extreme urgency – not just moral urgency, but also spiritual urgency. I've always been interested in looking at the spiritual crises and decisions that people make when confronted with violence.

For the Jubilee of Communicators, one particularly urgent question that we're asking is: What does it mean to try to communicate hope in what is really quite a bleak global context - a context of war?

There are always reasons for hope and always reasons for despair. There is really no time in history where you can't point to mass atrocity and horror, and in many ways we're in a better place in that regard than we were in centuries past.

But, nonetheless, there are always people encountering the extremes of suffering and evil. One of the questions for me is: what do people need at those times of extremity? Keith Nightingale, a Vietnam veteran, argued that it's not true that “there are no atheists in the foxholes”, but rather: the experience of war often forces a moment of choosing for people. People either have to decide they must believe in the God who has taken them through such terrible things, or they cannot believe in a God who would allow such things.

I’ve always found that there is a current within Catholicism that is very attuned to that – to moments of extreme pain, extreme horror, to confrontation with the universe that does not always bend itself to your prayers. I find something very beautiful and powerful about that. The Hail Holy Queen is a wonderful prayer in that regard: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears”. It's a devastatingly bleak prayer, and yet, at the same time, it is a prayer. It's not an act of despair. It's reaching out to the divine when you are incapable of prayers that seem to offer false comfort or false hope.

Another theme of your work is the inhumanity of modern war. I remember a scene in Missionaries where there’s a man watching a drone feed of the person he’s about to kill, in a completely different country. He’s at so many removes from his victim. This is also something that the Pope talks about a lot – the danger of the technological increasingly replacing the human.

I think that there’s always a danger of technology distancing us from our humanity, rather than serving it. That applies far beyond the realm of drone strikes – it’s a perennial problem.

On the one hand, one of the interesting things about drone strikes is that people are terrified of the idea of something without a pilot killing you and doing it from a very long distance. It seems like a very impersonal way of killing. But, at the same time, drone pilots have excellent optics, and are often able to look very closely at the people who they’re killing. The killing is in many ways more intimate than a pilot dropping a bomb, in that regard, even if the pilot is in a trailer somewhere far away.

And it’s not like there weren’t dehumanised ways of killing before the modern era – it’s not like a medieval soldier loading a plague-ridden corpse into a trebuchet to launch behind the walls of a city had a deep sense of the humanity of the person they were going to kill.

So I think that in some ways, the problem is new, in so far as it takes on a new form with the particular types of technology that we have that enable particular types of killing. But the fundamental problem remains the same as it always has been, which is those elements of human nature that enable killing to take place.

My impression is that one of the reasons Pope Francis chose to dedicate this Jubilee Year to the theme of hope is his concern over the rise in conflicts worldwide, and his desire to provide an alternative. Something he mentions quite a lot in this regard is his idea of ‘Third World War fought piecemeal’. It strikes me that this is really quite similar to what you’re talking about when you write about modern warfare.

It's funny that you mention that. I was lucky enough to be part of a literary conference on the Catholic Imagination in Rome, and we got to briefly speak with the Pope. I specifically thanked him for that encyclical and his comments on a new World War fought piecemeal, because I think that’s a very apt way of describing what I see happening around the world.

Is there anything else you want to add?

Sometimes people ask: what makes someone a Catholic writer? I don't always know exactly how to answer that question, but one thing that I do think is important is that, if I’m writing as a novelist who’s Catholic, I cannot luxuriate in the false comfort of despair. I don’t think that we’re allowed to do that. I think you have to write with a sense of hope. It may be a steely hope in the face of a very difficult world, but you have to write with a sense of hope nonetheless.