Switzerland Tells Its Priests They Are Not Essential. The Pastoral Record Says Otherwise.

Since June 1, 2026, Switzerland no longer automatically exempts priests, monks, and members of religious orders from compulsory military service. Nine members of the clergy have already received call-up notices under the reform, according to reporting by ZENIT News.[^1] Swiss men deemed fit for service generally complete around eight months of active duty between the ages of 18 and 30. For generations, clergy were excluded because they were judged essential to civilian populations, particularly in wartime. The Swiss Federal Council has now abandoned that judgment, arguing that rising religious disaffiliation means priestly ministry can no longer claim the same necessity it once did.

Bishop Alain de Raemy, Auxiliary Bishop of Lugano and head of the Swiss military chaplaincy, described the legislation to public broadcaster RTS as showing "a lack of respect toward the population." The Swiss Association of Free Churches has added that affected religious communities were not properly consulted before the change took effect. Both objections point to the same problem: the law's operative premise — that spiritual care has become dispensable — is the claim that deserves scrutiny.

Two separate questions the Swiss debate conflates

Mandatory national service has a genuine argument behind it. Shared civic obligation and the discipline of placing oneself at the disposal of a community rather than only a vocation are real goods. A priest who has served alongside farmers, engineers, and teachers carries something back to the parish that no seminary delivers. Catholic social thought does not place clergy categorically beyond the reach of civic duty. Vatican II's Christus Dominus recognized that military chaplaincy requires particular attention precisely because it is difficult work, and asked diocesan bishops to release qualified priests for it.[^2] The Council's framing assumes priests bring something irreplaceable to soldiers, which is the same assumption the old Swiss exemption made about civilians.

The Swiss reform collapses two distinct questions into one administrative change. The first question is whether shared civic obligation is good; it is. The second is whether the government's stated reason for removing the exemption — that priests are no longer essential — accurately describes what priests do. These are separable, and the Federal Council answered only the first while treating it as an answer to both.

What the pandemic actually showed

De Raemy appeals to the Covid pandemic. When hospitals closed to visitors, when the dying could not have family present, the demand for spiritual accompaniment did not fall with Mass attendance statistics. He pressed the RTS: "How will we manage in times of war and future crises if priests have to serve in the army? What is the Federal Council's plan?" The Federal Council's implicit answer rests on the government's own figures of 32 percent Catholic and 20 percent Evangelical affiliation in Switzerland — treating that as a population for whom priests are optional infrastructure.[^1] That arithmetic only holds if spiritual need tracks formal religious registration, which pandemics, wars, and ordinary deaths consistently refuse to confirm. The demand for last rites, for confession before surgery, for someone who will pray with a dying stranger does not disappear when a population's self-reported denominational identity declines. It surfaces precisely when institutional life fails.

The bureaucratic logic of dispensability

What the Swiss law actually encodes is a specific anthropological claim: that the human person, in conditions of modern prosperity, can manage without the ministry of sacred order. That claim is increasingly the implicit premise of Western social policy toward religious institutions, which confidently categorizes religion as privately meaningful rather than publicly functional, with little sense of open hostility. Hans Urs von Balthasar, writing on the clerical state in The Christian State of Life, draws on Gregory of Nazianzen's insistence that the priest who offers sacrifice must first offer himself wholly, that the objective and subjective sacrifice cannot be separated.[^3] The argument is theological, but its pastoral consequence is concrete: what a priest brings to a crisis is not a service a grief counselor or a chaplain with different formation can substitute. He carries sacramental authority, the capacity to act in persona Christi at the moments when the person most needs exactly that.

Categorizing this as non-essential is a claim about the person: specifically, that the person does not need what the priest uniquely provides. Benedict Groeschel, in The Reform of Renewal, observed that Western culture's broad movement toward relaxing demands on persons, clerical and otherwise, tends to follow the path of least resistance rather than the path of greatest good.[^4] The Swiss reform follows that path. Removing an exemption because fewer people identify as religious is the easy answer. It doesn't require asking what spiritual care actually does for human beings under stress.

Solidarity and the one thing necessary

The strongest version of the pro-service argument isn't about the clergy at all — it's about a republic's need for citizens who are committed to the welfare of the community. A priest who has stood in a barracks and trained alongside men from every canton has a knowledge of ordinary Swiss life that shapes his ministry. Shared obligation is formation of a different kind. But shared obligation is a reason for service, not a reason to declare priestly ministry dispensable.

Priests will be needed, both at home and abroad. Civilizations thrive when communities are committed to serving one another in love. If pursued in this light, compulsive military service could be the opportunity of encounter, accompinament, and conversion that is needed to revitalize the faith in Switzerland. "ALL THINGS work together for the good for those who love God", even a conscription.[^5]

References

[^1]: ZENIT News, "A New Swiss Law Requires Priests and Monks to Perform Military Service Based on the Premise That, in Modern Society, the Clergy Is No Longer Essential," July 17, 2026, https://zenit.org/2026/07/17/a-new-swiss-law-requires-priests-and-monks-to-perform-military-service-based-on-the-premise-that-in-modern-society-the-clergy-is-no-longer-essential/.

[^2]: Second Vatican Council, Christus Dominus: Decree Concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church (1965), nos. 43–44.

[^3]: Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life (Ignatius Press, 1983), chapter on the priestly state. (Original draft cited p. 220, which falls within the book's earlier chapter on marriage; specific page removed pending verification against a copy of the text.)

[^4]: Benedict J. Groeschel, The Reform of Renewal (Ignatius Press).

[^5]: Romans 8:28