Pope Leo XIV has said God ignores the prayers of those who wage war and have “hands full of blood”. In what appears to be a clear rebuke of Donald Trump’s administration, the US-born pontiff, celebrating Palm Sunday mass in St Peter’s Square, called for an immediate ceasefire to the “atrocious” conflict between Israel, the US and Iran, and said Jesus cannot be used to justify war.
Leo is “known for choosing his words carefully”; he “did not specifically name any world leaders” but he has “been ramping up criticism of the Iran war in recent weeks”, said Joshua McElwee in The Independent.
“The papacy has always been political,” said Pete Reynolds in The Wall Street Journal. And now “some of the biggest challenges to its vision of society are coming from the US”. As the first American leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Leo “brings a deeper understanding” of US society and politics than any previous pope, so “his critiques” can’t be as easily dismissed by US politicians. But he will also be well aware that “millions of American Catholics voted for Trump”.
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In marked contrast to other senior Vatican figures – such as secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who said American strikes on Iran risked setting “the whole world ablaze” – the pope’s initial response to the war had been “a tempered call for peace”, said Anthony Faiola and Michelle Boorstein in The Washington Post. Until now, Leo was delicately “navigating a minefield” with the Trump administration. Pitched by the Vatican “as a unifier and bridge builder”, he was striving to remain “above the fray”, while his allies in the Holy See, and cardinals and bishops in the US, “more directly challenge the administration”.
The problem is, said George W. Bush’s former speechwriter, William McGurn, in The Wall Street Journal, that “the moral witness of the papacy” has been diminished by successive popes’ “blinkered position on war”. “The kind of rightly ordered world” Leo “desires can’t be built by armies alone – but can almost never be built without armies and without the threat of force.” Traditional Catholic teachings, “grounded in the reality of man’s fallen human nature”, have been traded for “functional pacificism” that “risks being dismissed even by sympathisers”.
What next?
The Vatican potentially has great sway over US policy: Catholics, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, hold senior positions in the US administration, and are well represented on the Supreme Court and among leading House Republicans.
But a “major rift” has opened up in the Christian coalition that elected Trump, said John Grosso in the National Catholic Reporter. “Traditionalist Catholics and evangelicals” are split over the Iran war and, more broadly, “over the role Israel plays in US foreign policy”. Leo’s most recent comments could be “a moment of reckoning for Catholics caught up in Maga”, Austen Ivereigh, a biographer of Pope Francis, told the paper. How do they “reconcile obedience to church authority with support for Trump”?
