Somewhere on the USS Abraham Lincoln, at some hour this summer, a sailor standing watch noticed a shipmate at the rail doing something that did not look right, and he crossed the deck and pulled him back. Three more sailors ran over to help. That is the whole scene as families have described it, and it is the part of this week’s news I cannot get out of my head. Washington has spent the last two days arguing about whether the Secretary of Defense should keep his job. The Church has something more specific to say, and it starts much further down, at the level of the man on watch and the man at the rail.

The News Story

A mental-health and supply crisis aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln escalated into a full political confrontation in Washington this week, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calling for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s dismissal and the Navy moving a replacement carrier toward the Middle East.

The Lincoln departed San Diego on November 21, 2025, bound for the Pacific, and was rerouted to the Middle East ahead of the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran that began February 28. It has now been deployed more than 250 days and has gone more than 200 consecutive days without a port call, a modern-era record for a U.S. aircraft carrier. Roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines are aboard.^[1][2]

Military Times reported August 11 that multiple sailors had attempted or prepared to go overboard during the deployment. Family members described specific incidents: Annabelle Loma said her husband tried to jump from the carrier and was placed on medical hold; in another account, a sailor on watch physically pulled a shipmate back onto the deck before three others arrived to help. Stars and Stripes reported a separate incident in which watchstanders stopped a crew member from jumping, and the crew was informed by shipwide announcement. The Navy has confirmed that a sailor assigned to the Lincoln’s air wing went overboard earlier this month and was recovered safely. It has not disclosed a total number of attempts.^[3][4]

Families have also reported moldy showers, broken toilets and laundry equipment, intermittent hot water, water contamination, food and hygiene-supply shortages, disrupted mail, and 12- to 16-hour shifts. More than 200 family members raised those concerns directly with acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao at a San Diego meeting last week, and then attended a virtual session with Navy leadership.^[9][11]

The Navy has disputed parts of the accounts while acknowledging strain. A Navy official told CBS News the Lincoln “is operating in a highly contested environment where traditional supply hubs in the Middle East were disrupted by combat actions,” that leadership prioritized “first food, then hygiene items, then mail,” and that the command had “not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts.” Vice Adm. Joseph Cahill acknowledged the strain and pointed to deployment-resilience counselors, chaplains, and Human Factors Councils.^[8]

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote to Hegseth and Cao demanding an accounting, citing “widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns.” Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona called for a bipartisan congressional delegation to conduct an oversight visit. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona called the reports “disturbing.”

Hegseth, speaking Thursday during a visit to Panama, said the reports had been “completely misrepresented,” adding, “We make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment.” Schumer responded that Hegseth “must be fired immediately.”^[5][6][7]

The USS George Washington carrier strike group, which recently left Vietnam and transited the Strait of Malacca, is moving toward the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln. Officials said the rotation was planned before the reports surfaced. No return date for the Lincoln has been announced.^[10]

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

Rest From Work Is A Right

Start where the Church starts, because the Church is unusually direct here and most commentary skips right past it.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church opens its treatment of this subject with four words set off as a heading: “Rest from work is a right.”^[12] Not a benefit. Not a morale program. A right, in the same technical sense the Church uses when she says a worker has a right to a just wage. The reasoning underneath it is theological rather than economic. God “rested on the seventh day from all the work which he had done,” and men and women made in his image “are to enjoy sufficient rest and free time that will allow them to tend to their family, cultural, social and religious life.”^[13] The rhythm of labor and rest is written into the account of creation itself, which means a schedule that erases it is doing violence to something older and deeper than any employment contract.

The Catechism says the same thing in its own register. The institution of the Lord’s Day “helps everyone enjoy adequate rest and leisure to cultivate their familial, cultural, social, and religious lives,” and the faithful are to refrain from work that hinders “the appropriate relaxation of mind and body.”^[14] Relaxation of mind and body. That phrase is doing real work in a story about 12- to 16-hour shifts, broken plumbing, and 200 days in which nobody’s feet touched a dock.

Now, the Church is not naive about emergencies. The Compendium grants plainly that “family needs and service of great importance to society constitute legitimate excuses from the obligation of Sunday rest.” A carrier at war is service of great importance to society if anything is. But read the clause the Compendium attaches immediately after, because it is the hinge: those excuses “must not create habits that are prejudicial to religion, family life or health.”^[12] The exception covers the emergency and stops at the habit. Somewhere between month three and month nine of a deployment, an exception hardens into a habit, and the Church’s own text tells you that is where the permission runs out.

Man’s Powers, Like His General Nature, Are Limited

Regular readers know I often reach for Rerum Novarum, and this is the story it was written for, though not in the way you would expect. Leo XIII was writing about factory hands and miners in 1891, but his principles are stated at a level that reaches a nuclear carrier in 2026 without any strain at all.

Here is the passage. “It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies. Man’s powers, like his general nature, are limited, and beyond these limits he cannot go. His strength is developed and increased by use and exercise, but only on condition of due intermission and proper rest. Daily labor, therefore, should be so regulated as not to be protracted over longer hours than strength admits.”^[15]

Read the mechanism Leo XIII describes, because he gets the physiology right. Strength grows through use, and only on the condition of intermission. Remove the intermission and use stops to build the man and starts to consume him. Every sailor’s spouse quoted in this week’s coverage is describing that exact curve. Leo XIII goes further, insisting that rest be calibrated to the severity of the work: miners get shorter hours “in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health,” with the season and the circumstances figuring in. He is describing a duty to look at the actual conditions of the actual job rather than applying a uniform rule and calling it fair.

Then he closes the door on the argument that consent settles the matter. “In all agreements between masters and work people there is always the condition expressed or understood that there should be allowed proper rest for soul and body. To agree in any other sense would be against what is right and just.”^[15] Every sailor on the Lincoln volunteered. Every one of them signed something. Leo XIII’s answer, given 135 years ago, is that the signature does not reach this far, because the right to rest for soul and body is a condition written into every agreement whether the parties wrote it down or not. It cannot be contracted away, because a few paragraphs earlier he had already explained why: “no man has in this matter power over himself,” and a man “cannot give up his soul to servitude, for it is not man’s own rights which are here in question, but the rights of God.”^[16]

That is the strongest thing in the Catholic tradition on this question, and it almost never gets quoted. The obligation to rest a sailor is not owed primarily to the sailor. It is owed to God, whose image the sailor carries.

Work Is For Man, And Not Man For Work

The Compendium states the governing principle in one line, italicized in the original text: “work is for man and not man for work.”^[17] It develops the point carefully. Human work “is also essentially ordered to and has its final goal in the human person,” and the objective quality of the work, its output and its mission value, “must nonetheless be subordinated to the self-realization of the person.”^[17] The Compendium then quotes John Paul II to make sure nobody carves out an exception for grim jobs: it is always man who is the purpose of work, “even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest ‘service,’ as the most monotonous, even the most alienating work.”^[17]

Apply that to the sentence the Navy official gave CBS News, which I want to treat fairly because it is not a mindless sentence. The Lincoln, he said, “is operating in a highly contested environment where traditional supply hubs in the Middle East were disrupted by combat actions,” so leadership prioritized “first food, then hygiene items, then mail.”^[8] Everything in that statement is probably true. Supply lines through the Gulf really have been wrecked since February, and a commander really does have to triage. Anyone who has run anything understands the logic.

But notice what the ordering does. Food, then hygiene, then mail. Mail goes last because mail is understood as sentiment, and sentiment loses to calories. Under the Compendium’s principle, that ranking is upside down. The letters are the sailor’s connection to the family whose existence is the reason the Church says he has a right to free time in the first place. The Compendium’s whole argument for rest is that a person needs time “to tend to their family, cultural, social and religious life.”^[13] Cut the mail for months and you have severed the thing rest exists to protect, while keeping the man fed enough to stand another watch. That is a supply chain organized around the mission with the person subordinated to it, which is the arrangement the Compendium was written to reject.

What The Uniform Does Not Change

Here somebody will object that a warship is not a workplace and a sailor is not an employee, and that Catholic social teaching on labor simply does not reach inside a hull at general quarters. I have heard versions of that objection my whole life. The Church has already answered it.

The Compendium treats military service with real honor. “The requirements of legitimate defense justify the existence in States of armed forces, the activity of which should be at the service of peace. Those who defend the security and freedom of a country, in such a spirit, make an authentic contribution to peace.” Everyone who serves “is concretely called to defend good, truth and justice in the world,” and many “have sacrificed their lives for these values and in defense of innocent lives.”^[18] That is not grudging. That is the Church saying the uniform means something.

Read the next paragraph and watch what it assumes. “Every member of the armed forces is morally obliged to resist orders that call for perpetrating crimes against the law of nations.” Military personnel “remain fully responsible for the acts they commit,” and such acts “cannot be justified by claiming obedience to the orders of superiors.”^[19] The Church holds every sailor personally accountable, in his own conscience, for what he does under orders. She can only do that because she regards him as a full moral agent, a person with a conscience the chain of command does not absorb.

You cannot have it one way. If the man in uniform keeps his conscience intact, he keeps everything else that belongs to a person too, including a body with limits and a family waiting in San Diego. The Church’s teaching on the dignity of the worker follows him aboard, because it is never attached to his job description. It is attached to him.

Who Owes The Duty

The Compendium names the party responsible, and it is not the ship’s captain. “Public authorities have the duty to ensure that, for reasons of economic productivity, citizens are not denied time for rest and divine worship. Employers have an analogous obligation regarding their employees.”^[20]

Substitute the operative word, and the sentence lands where this week’s argument is actually happening. Public authorities have a duty to ensure that citizens are not denied time for rest for reasons of operational necessity. The strain on the Lincoln did not originate with a supply officer who mismanaged the toothpaste. It originated with a decision to keep a carrier on station past the end of a scheduled deployment, taken far above the ship, by people who will never smell that berthing compartment.

So, Sen. Blumenthal’s letter and Sen. Gallego’s demand for an oversight visit are not partisan theater from the Church’s perspective. They are civil authority doing the specific thing Catholic teaching says civil authority exists to do. Whether Secretary Hegseth keeps his job is a prudential political question, and I will not pretend the Church has an answer to it. Whether somebody with authority owes this crew an honest accounting is settled by the Compendium.

Which brings me to the word that has bothered me since Thursday. Hegseth said the reports were “completely misrepresented” and that the Department ensures “every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment.”^[6] Set aside the politics and look at the shape of the claim. It answers a specific, sourced, recurring set of reports from families and three separate news organizations, with a general assurance about institutional intent. A duty of care is discharged by the condition of the crew, and not by the sincerity of the man describing it. If the accounts are wrong, the bipartisan visit Gallego asked for would settle the matter in a week. Refusing the look while insisting on the assurance is the part that should trouble a Catholic conscience.

It Is Much Easier To Start A War Than To Stop It

Now for the layer underneath, because none of this happens without the war. I want to be careful here, since I have written about this development several times in the last two weeks and I do not want to turn a real teaching into a slogan. The short version: in Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV treats the classical just war theory as outdated, while preserving the right of self-defense in the strictest sense.

What matters for the Lincoln is a different line in that same chapter, one I have not used before. Leo XIV writes that “it is much easier to start a war than to stop it.”^[21] He sets it down almost as a proverb, which is how it reads until you attach a number to it. The number here is 265 days at sea. The Lincoln’s crew is living inside the gap between how easy February 28 was and how hard August has turned out to be. Somebody decided to begin. Nobody has been able to decide to end. Five thousand people are absorbing the difference in their bodies.

Leo XIV also warns in that chapter about the “revival of war as an instrument of international politics,” about a broad turn back toward rearmament, and he insists that war should be a last resort rather than a diplomatic tool.^[22] Look at how the Lincoln got where it is. It sailed for the Pacific in November on a six-month plan and was turned toward the Middle East before the strikes began, then held there month after month because a closed strait and an unfinished negotiation made a carrier worth keeping in place. A ship parked on station as a bargaining chip is a warship functioning as an instrument of politics, exactly the use Leo XIV names. And the cost of holding that chip on the table gets paid in a currency nobody at the negotiating table has to touch: sleep, mail, hot water, and the mental health of enlisted men in their twenties.

Adopting The Perspective Of The Crew

Leo XIV offers several paths forward in that chapter, and the third is the one this story needs: adopting the perspective of victims. He means seeing an event from the standpoint of the people it lands on rather than from the standpoint of the people conducting it, and being a voice for the voiceless.^[23]

Every instinct in our coverage runs the other way. The Lincoln story reached the front pages as a Washington story, filed under whether the Secretary survives, sourced to senators, resolved by whichever side wins the news cycle. Read it from the deck instead, and it is a different story entirely: a 23-year-old on a 16-hour shift, nine months from anyone who loves him, standing watch beside a rail. He has no press secretary. His wife had to go to a town hall in San Diego and then to a reporter to get anyone to listen.

That is the perspective the Holy Father is asking for, and I would extend it in a direction the coverage has not. Catholic teaching treats the man at the rail as a person under strain rather than a broken component. Every one of these sailors is doing something the Church calls an authentic contribution to peace when it is done in the right spirit.^[18] Their exhaustion is the ordinary and predictable result of asking finite men to go past the limits Leo XIII said finite men have. The failure sits with the arrangement.

And notice what the crew has been doing about it. Watchstanders pulling shipmates back from the rail. Three more running over to help. Chaplains and counselors working the compartments. The Church has a word for that, and the word is solidarity, “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good.”^[24] It is genuinely present on that ship, at the deck-plate level, supplied by the sailors themselves. What is missing is the same determination several thousand miles up the chain.

What This Asks Of Us

Three things, and none of them require you to have an opinion about the Secretary of Defense.

Pray for the crew of the Lincoln by name if you know one, and by ship if you do not. Five thousand people, most of them very young, are nine months from home tonight in a war that began in February and has not stopped. Our tradition has kept the sea in her prayers for a very long time, and this is what those prayers were for.

Second, hold the two claims together, because the temptation is to pick one. The Church honors military service as a real contribution to peace and says so without hedging.^[18] The Church also says that rest from work is a right, that the limits of a man’s strength are a fact and not a weakness, and that no agreement can trade away the rest a soul and body are owed.^[12][15] Anyone who tells you honoring the first requires you to swallow the second is selling something. Support for the troops that does not consider their condition is not support.

Third, tell the truth about the arithmetic. A country that keeps 5,000 people at sea for 265 days is spending something, and the spending shows up in a place the budget does not track. When the George Washington relieves the Lincoln, this story will disappear from the front pages within a day and the underlying question will stay exactly where it is, because the war that produced the deployment will still be running. It is much easier to start a war than to stop it. The crew of the Lincoln has spent two hundred days without a port, learning what that sentence costs.

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Footnotes

1. “Democratic Senators Demand Answers About Conditions Aboard USS Abraham Lincoln,” CBS News, August 13, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uss-abraham-lincoln-democratic-senators-inquiry-demand/. ↩
2. Emma Koppelman, “USS Lincoln Sailors Attempt to Jump Overboard Amid Record Deployment,” The National News Desk (KOKH FOX 25), August 13, 2026, https://okcfox.com/news/nation-world/uss-abraham-lincoln-deployment-hits-ninth-month-setting-modern-record-at-sea. ↩
3. “Multiple USS Abraham Lincoln Sailors Have Tried to Go Overboard Amid Extended Deployment, Families Say,” Military Times, August 11, 2026, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/11/multiple-uss-abraham-lincoln-sailors-have-tried-to-go-overboard-amid-extended-deployment-families-say/. ↩
4. “Sailor Went Overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln This Month as Conditions on the Ship Prompt Lawmakers’ Demand for Answers,” CNN, August 13, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/13/politics/uss-abraham-lincoln-conditions-extended-deployment-hnk. ↩
5. “US Senate Minority Leader Calls for Defense Secretary’s Firing over Conditions Aboard USS Abraham Lincoln,” Anadolu Agency, August 13, 2026, https://aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-senate-minority-leader-calls-for-defense-secretary-s-firing-over-conditions-aboard-uss-abraham-lincoln/4027003. ↩
6. “‘Completely Misrepresented’: Hegseth Disputes Reports of Poor Conditions Aboard USS Abraham Lincoln,” The Washington Times, August 13, 2026, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/13/hegseth-disputes-reports-poor-conditions-aboard-uss-abraham-lincoln/. ↩
7. “Pete Hegseth Pushes Back on USS Abraham Lincoln Deployment Amid Reports of Sailors’ Mental Health,” The Hill, August 13, 2026, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6028091-pete-hegseth-uss-abraham-lincoln-conditions-middle-east/. ↩
8. “Democrats Demand Answers About Conditions Aboard USS Lincoln,” ABC News, August 13, 2026, https://abcnews.com/Politics/democrats-demand-answers-conditions-aboard-uss-lincoln/story?id=135616596. ↩
9. “Navy Responds to Reports USS Lincoln Sailors Are Trying to Jump Overboard,” Newsweek, August 13, 2026, https://www.newsweek.com/uss-abraham-lincoln-deployment-sailors-overboard-safety-concerns-12312965. ↩
10. “Headlines for August 13, 2026,” Democracy Now!, August 13, 2026, https://www.democracynow.org/2026/8/13/headlines. ↩
11. “Navy Meets with USS Abraham Lincoln Families over Mental Health Worries,” The Hill, August 12, 2026, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6025704-sailors-suicidal-thoughts-deployment/. ↩
12. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 284. ↩
13. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 284, citing Genesis 2:2. ↩
14. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 2184–2185. ↩
15. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1891), no. 42, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html. ↩
16. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, no. 40. ↩
17. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 272, quoting Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, no. 6. ↩
18. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 502. ↩
19. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 503. ↩
20. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 286. ↩
21. Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 195, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html. ↩
22. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, nos. 189–190. ↩
23. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, nos. 216–217. ↩
24. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 193, citing Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, no. 38. ↩