Canada’s Armed Forces have not abolished military chaplaincy or forbidden private religious ministry. They have done something more conceptually difficult: when a chaplain addresses certain official ceremonies, he is required to act not as the representative of his faith tradition but as a representative of the Canadian state. That raises a question more fundamental than whether he may use the word “God”. What, in such circumstances, is a chaplain for?
There are occasions when military ceremony reaches the limit of what ceremony alone can say. Names are read. Families stand among those who served beside the dead. Gratitude is mixed with grief, and the language of duty begins to sound inadequate before death itself. An officer can speak of service. A politician can speak of the nation. A chaplain has traditionally been present because he can speak beyond both: of God, judgement, mercy, sacrifice, prayer and the hope of eternal life. Canada’s new Armed Forces instruction leaves the chaplain in the ceremonial space but draws a firm boundary around what he may say when he speaks there on behalf of the institution.
Canadian Armed Forces Military Personnel Instruction 03/26, issued on 29 July, defines a “spiritual reflection” as an inclusive public address intended to foster meaning, purpose and spiritual well-being. It then states explicitly that such reflections are not to use religiously specific language, “including references to God”. Where CAF members are expected or required to attend an official government event and prayers or religious observances have been requested, chaplains must instead offer a spiritual reflection. The rule applies to graduation parades, change-of-command ceremonies, ship commissionings, honours ceremonies, seasonal functions and military commemorations including Remembrance Day. Military and state funerals are treated differently, and private counselling, worship, sacramental ministry and faith-specific gatherings remain protected.¹
The most revealing part of the instruction comes slightly later. CAFMPI 03/26 says its purpose is to define the boundaries of expression when a CAF member acts publicly as a representative of the Canadian Armed Forces and Government of Canada rather than as the representative of his own spiritual or faith tradition. It repeats the distinction specifically for chaplains. At public military ceremonies, the chaplain is acting as a representative of the Armed Forces rather than of his own religious tradition. The policy does not regard this as a diminution of chaplaincy. On the contrary, it presents religious neutrality as part of the chaplain’s broader mission of serving a diverse military community.¹
That makes the central question considerably clearer. The Canadian Government does not understand its chaplains simply as denominational ministers attached to the military in order to provide Catholics with priests, Jews with rabbis, Muslims with imams and members of other traditions with their corresponding religious ministers. The Royal Canadian Chaplain Service describes a much wider function. Chaplains are responsible for the spiritual, religious and pastoral care of all CAF members and their families, whether they belong to a particular faith, profess no religious belief or are merely “spiritually curious”. They advise commanders on ethical, religious, spiritual and moral questions, offer pastoral support across the military community and officiate at official events and ceremonies. At the same time, the CAF expressly recognises that they possess “dual accountability” to their Faith Tradition and to military authority.²
That distinction matters. A Catholic priest in military service is not appointed merely to say Mass for Catholics. He may counsel the bereaved regardless of religion, advise a commander upon an ethical problem, sit with an atheist facing death, help a Muslim serviceman obtain the ministry of an imam, or offer pastoral support to somebody who cannot identify what he believes at all. Nothing about Catholic priesthood prevents such service. One does not have to pretend that every pastoral encounter is an occasion for explicit catechesis in order to recognise that the priest who undertakes it remains a priest throughout.
The Queen’s Regulations and Orders make the relationship still more interesting. “Chaplain services” are formally defined as the provision of pastoral and spiritual care, or the conduct or facilitation of religious services and “ceremonies of a religious or spiritual nature”. A military chaplain must be authorised to practise professional ministry by the faith group to which he belongs and remain accountable to that faith group. His duties include providing chaplain services to personnel and families who desire them, regardless of their own beliefs, and offering advice upon religious, spiritual, moral and ethical questions. He cannot be ordered to bear arms and, significantly, cannot be required to undertake military duties other than those related or ancillary to chaplain services.³
The policy therefore raises a more basic question. If what an institution wants at a compulsory ceremony is an address which is deliberately non-confessional, why is the chaplain necessarily the person from whom it should be requested?
If the purpose is to speak of courage, comradeship, national gratitude, memory, transition or public service without reference to any religion, a commanding officer or other appointed speaker can plainly do so. No ecclesiastical mandate is required to offer a civic reflection upon sacrifice. If, on the other hand, the reason for summoning the chaplain is that the occasion possesses a genuinely spiritual dimension which ordinary civic speech cannot supply, the demand that he remove the particular religious language which gives substance to his spiritual office becomes harder to explain. The institution appears simultaneously to require something distinctively chaplain-like and to require that the chaplain cease, for the duration of that contribution, to speak as the representative of the tradition that makes him a chaplain.
The new instruction is unusually candid about the answer. In these circumstances, the CAF does not intend the chaplain to speak as the Church’s representative. It intends him to speak as its own. The chaplain possesses, in effect, two public capacities. In one, he exercises the ministry for which his faith community authorises him. In the other, he is a commissioned officer entrusted by the State with fostering spiritual well-being in a diverse institution. CAFMPI 03/26 applies the requirement of neutrality to that second capacity.
Martin Frith, President of Humanist Canada, makes substantially this argument in his response to Bishop ✠Scott McCaig. A military chaplain, he argues, is simultaneously a representative of a spiritual or faith tradition and an officer serving a public institution. When acting officially for the latter, the constitutional duty of the State to remain neutral becomes decisive. On this reading, asking the chaplain not to invoke God during an institutional spiritual reflection no more converts him into an atheist than requiring a Catholic judge to apply secular law converts him into a secularist. The distinction is between personal or confessional belief and speech attributable to the State.⁴
Bishop ✠McCaig’s objection goes to the viability of the distinction itself. For many believers, he argues, meaning, purpose and spiritual well-being cannot intelligibly be detached from God. Requiring a religious minister to speak about those matters while excluding the religious source by which he understands them is therefore not simply a restriction upon vocabulary. It may require him to perform an official act under an understanding of spirituality that is not his own. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops subsequently publicised his concerns and his challenge to the policy.⁵
This is where the question of what a chaplain is becomes more important than the immediate controversy over the word “God”. Military chaplaincy exists precisely because the State does not manufacture priests, ministers, rabbis or imams for itself. The CAF’s own regulations recognise this. A chaplain must be authorised by an external faith community to practise ministry and remains accountable to it. His military mandate presupposes an ecclesial or religious mandate which the military did not create.³
A Catholic priest therefore does not acquire priesthood from his commission as an officer, nor can he divest himself of it when acting before a compulsory audience. His pastoral solicitude can encompass everyone without distinction; his sacramental and ecclesial identity cannot become religiously neutral. There is a difference between adapting the manner in which ministry is exercised for the good of the person before him and being institutionally instructed that, on a particular occasion precisely involving “spiritual” speech, he is not to speak as the representative of the tradition from which his spiritual authority derives.
The pre-existing regulations contain a distinction which makes the issue sharper still. CAF personnel cannot ordinarily be compelled to attend a parade primarily devoted to religious or spiritual observance. Military ceremonies, however, can contain religious or spiritual elements.³ The older framework therefore already recognised that attendance at a military event containing religion need not be identical with personal participation in religion.
CAFMPI 03/26 goes further. At compulsory official ceremonies, it does not merely protect personnel from being required to make religious responses or adopt devotional gestures. Where a prayer has been requested, it requires that prayer to be replaced by a neutral spiritual reflection.¹ The policy’s rationale is that the speaker is then acting for the Government itself, and the principles derived from the Supreme Court’s Saguenay decision require the State to refrain from manifesting religious belief. Supporters of the policy therefore regard a distinction between attendance and personal participation as insufficient when religious words form part of the State’s own official ceremony.⁴
The alternative conception can be seen in familiar British Remembrance practice. At London City Hall’s 2023 Remembrance service, the Bishop of Barking opened the ceremony and delivered the address, while Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish representatives offered identifiable interfaith prayers and the bishop concluded with a blessing. In Bradford, diocesan material records Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Sikh leaders contributing prayers at Remembrance commemorations. Nobody listening is thereby transformed into a Christian, Muslim, Jew or Sikh. The religious identity of the speaker is declared rather than concealed.⁶
This does not determine Canadian constitutional law. It demonstrates a different model of pluralism. One model seeks neutrality by removing confessional language from the common institutional act. Another maintains a common civic ceremony while permitting explicitly identified religious voices to contribute from their respective traditions, without treating attendance as assent. The Canadian dispute is partly a dispute about which conception better expresses the constitutional neutrality of the State.
That distinction matters because Nuntiatoria has considered its cultural equivalent before. The Instrumentalisation of Faith and the Illusion of Cultural Christianity examined what happens when Christianity remains welcome for the atmosphere, reassurance and inherited solemnity it contributes while the truth claims giving rise to those things become increasingly awkward.⁷ There is at least a danger of something analogous occurring with chaplaincy. A priest may remain useful because institutions recognise that bereavement, sacrifice, fear, death and moral injury require something that ordinary administrative language struggles to provide. Yet the more his contribution is reconstructed as generic “spirituality”, the more reasonable it becomes to ask what remains specifically chaplaincy about it.
That question should not obscure the legitimate rights of the listener. A serviceman ordered to attend a ceremony should not be required to profess Christianity, make the Sign of the Cross, recite a creed, participate in a prayer or fear professional consequences because he refuses to do so. Canadian state neutrality exists in part to protect precisely that freedom of conscience. Humanist Canada therefore argues that a succession of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or other prayers may display diversity while still leaving unresolved the constitutional problem of the State appearing to speak religiously through an official ceremony.⁴
Canadian constitutional law requires caution before either position is turned into a confident legal conclusion. Section 2(a) of the Charter protects freedom of conscience and religion. The Department of Justice’s own guidance notes that cases involving discretionary administrative decisions engaging religious freedom are assessed through the Doré/Loyola framework, which examines whether Charter protections have been proportionately balanced with the relevant statutory mandate. The seriousness of an interference also depends upon its actual impact and whether meaningful religious choice remains.⁸ It therefore cannot simply be asserted that the new instruction either plainly violates the Charter or is necessarily required by it.
The Canadian Human Rights Act adds another possible dimension where employment consequences arise. Religion is a prohibited ground of discrimination, while the statutory accommodation framework recognises limits where accommodation would cause undue hardship. If a chaplain sought a conscientious accommodation and suffered an adverse professional consequence, the facts would be important: what precisely was required, what alternative had been proposed, what institutional objective was relied upon and what accommodation had actually been considered.⁹
International human-rights principles likewise protect more than worship conducted in private. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the right to manifest religion individually or with others, publicly or privately, in teaching, practice, worship and observance. Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights similarly protects religious manifestation while permitting limitations prescribed by law and necessary to protect specified public interests or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.¹⁰ The international framework therefore does not eliminate the tension; it describes both sides of it. Religious manifestation is protected, and so is freedom from coercive religious interference.
The CAF instruction contains another revealing comparison. Indigenous practices containing spiritual elements may be incorporated into military ceremonies when framed in a cultural, historical and educational context connected with reconciliation. Personnel are not required to participate in their spiritual components. The policy explains that Indigenous rights and Canada’s history of suppressing Indigenous traditions justify their particular treatment.¹ No exact legal equivalence with Christian or other religious practice follows. What the provision nevertheless demonstrates is that the CAF itself accepts, in at least one context, that compulsory presence alongside spiritually significant material need not amount to compelled spiritual participation.
Nuntiatoria’s Prayer, Patriotism, and the Politics of Amnesia considered a related question in the British civic sphere: whether institutional public character must necessarily require inherited Christian expression to retreat.¹¹ Canada’s circumstances are different, but the conceptual problem is recognisable. The State wishes simultaneously to preserve a category called “spiritual reflection” and to define that category so that no particular religion may provide its language.
From the standpoint of Catholic theology, that is not a religiously insignificant act. Quas Primas rejects the confinement of Christ to private devotion and explicitly denies that civil society lies wholly outside His sovereignty. Pius XI condemns the exclusion of Christ and His law from public affairs and insists that the authority of Christ extends to society as well as the individual.¹² Nuntiatoria has developed the same distinction more recently in Christianity Is Right ~ Not Right Wing: Catholic claims concerning political and moral order precede modern partisan categories because their asserted source is not the political state at all.¹³
Canadian constitutional law is not Catholic social doctrine, and no Canadian court is obliged to accept Quas Primas. The theological point is different. A Catholic bishop assessing what may legitimately be required of a priest must begin with Catholic teaching about priesthood, religious truth and the relation of Church and civil authority. The State may describe a particular ceremonial function as non-confessional. That does not of itself establish that an ordained minister can perform it without ecclesiological difficulty merely because the State continues to call the function “spiritual”.
Military chaplaincy makes that problem particularly acute. A chaplain ministers among people who may be required to kill, face death, obey orders, endure moral injury and exercise terrible power over others. He exists not merely to improve morale. His tradition enables him to speak about moral limits which neither military command nor political expediency creates. An order cannot make evil good. An enemy does not cease to possess human dignity because he is an enemy. Victory does not sanctify every means. Death cannot be adequately described merely as the termination of useful service.
The CAF would answer that none of this ministry has been forbidden. Its policy explicitly preserves religious counselling, worship, rites, faith-specific gatherings and religious pastoral care, and it insists that the neutral spiritual reflection belongs only to the chaplain’s separate role as a representative of the institution.¹ That is the strongest form of the Government’s case and deserves to be stated accurately.
But it also reveals exactly where the unresolved question lies. Why must that second function belong to the chaplain at all?
If the speaker is acting solely as the representative of the Government of Canada, offering language deliberately stripped of any particular religious confession, it is not self-evident why the task requires somebody whose distinctive office exists because a faith community has authorised him to exercise religious ministry. If what is wanted is the voice of the State, the State already possesses officers who can speak for it. If what is wanted is the voice of religion, it is difficult to ask for that voice and simultaneously stipulate that it must cease to speak religiously.
That is more than a semantic puzzle. It reaches the architecture of modern military chaplaincy. The Canadian model increasingly understands the chaplain as both religious minister and specialist officer in institutional spiritual well-being. CAFMPI 03/26 depends upon those identities being separable according to context. Bishop ✠McCaig’s challenge, in substance, is that there are circumstances in which the separation may ask too much of the minister precisely because his understanding of spiritual well-being cannot be abstracted from the religious truth he is ordained to proclaim. Humanist Canada answers that the separation is indispensable whenever he speaks for the State rather than for his Church.⁴ ⁵
That is the debate Canada now needs to have with clarity. It is not adequately described by saying that God has been “banned” from the Canadian military. He has not. Nor is it answered merely by observing that private worship remains untouched. The question is what happens to the nature of chaplaincy when the institution asks a religious minister to address the spiritual meaning of a public occasion while declaring that, for that purpose, he is no longer speaking as the representative of his religion.
Canada has defined the distinction with unusual explicitness. The chaplain may pray as a chaplain in one setting. In another, the same man is required to speak as the Government.
The question that remains is whether the second role still requires a chaplain.
¹ Department of National Defence, Canadian Armed Forces Military Personnel Instructions 03/26 — Spiritual Reflections in Military Settings, 29 July 2026.
² Department of National Defence, The Royal Canadian Chaplain Service.
³ Department of National Defence, Queen’s Regulations and Orders, Volume I, Chapter 33 — Chaplain Services, especially arts 33.01, 33.04, 33.07, 33.11 and 33.12.
⁴ Martin Frith, Humanist Canada, Response to the 10 Aug 2026 Statement of the Military Ordinary on the 2026 CAF Reflection Policy, 23 August 2026.
⁵ Bishop ✠Scott McCaig, Statement of the Military Ordinary on the 2026 CAF Reflection Policy, 10 August 2026; Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Statement issued by the Military Ordinary of Canada on Spiritual Reflections in Military Settings, 18 August 2026.
⁶ Greater London Authority, Remembrance Day Service 2023; Diocese of Leeds, Interfaith.
⁷ Nuntiatoria, The Instrumentalisation of Faith and the Illusion of Cultural Christianity, 21 April 2026.
⁸ Department of Justice Canada, Charterpedia: Section 2(a) — Freedom of Religion.
⁹ Government of Canada, Canadian Human Rights Act.
¹⁰ United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 18.
¹¹ Nuntiatoria, Prayer, Patriotism, and the Politics of Amnesia, 10 May 2026.
¹² Pius XI, Quas Primas, 11 December 1925, especially §§17–19, 31–32.
¹³ Nuntiatoria, Christianity Is Right ~ Not Right Wing, 8 September 2026.
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