“War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity. International law, honest dialogue, solidarity between states, the noble exercise of diplomacy: These are methods worthy of individuals and nations in resolving their differences. … War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations.”
With those words, a pope sought to deter a war initiated by the United States in the Middle East. The pope was St. John Paul II, and the quagmire he sought to prevent was the second Gulf War begun by President George W. Bush in 2003. John Paul went to great lengths in a futile effort to prevent that war, even sending his personal emissary to the White House to argue his case.
Fast forward to 2026, and another pope again warned a U.S. president that war is a defeat for humanity.
“I would simply say, once again, what I said in the ‘Urbi et Orbi’ message on Sunday: asking all people of goodwill to search, always, for peace and not violence; to reject war, especially a war which many people have said is an unjust war, which is continuing to escalate and which is not resolving anything,” Leo XIV said April 7.
Pope Leo was responding to the rapidly escalating attack on Iran by U.S. and Israeli forces. The war was accompanied by increasingly bellicose rhetoric and soon expanded into Lebanon.
When President Donald Trump made profane threats to destroy Iranian civilization by wiping out such civilian infrastructure as power plants, water treatment plants and bridges, Pope Leo XIV rebuked those comments as “a threat against the entire people of Iran” and “truly unacceptable.”
The world’s news media, for understandable reasons, has focused on the world’s two most prominent Americans in such direct conflict. Subsequent statements by President Trump attacking Pope Leo in very personal terms only fed the controversy.
But for Catholics, it is important to remember that this is not the first time that a pope has challenged a president. Not as a politician but as a spiritual leader, the pope speaks from the perspective of the Church’s centuries of thought regarding war and its consequences.
In the case of the Iraq war, early claims of victory by President Bush (“Mission Accomplished”) proved premature. The reasons used to justify the war (weapons of mass destruction) turned out to be erroneous, and the cost in terms of U.S. and Iraqi lives was huge. We continue to live with the damage to our own soldiers and their families. The social upheaval in Iraq gave rise to ISIS and further regional conflict. Meanwhile, the country’s Christian minority has shrunk almost to the vanishing point.
It was, in short, a defeat for humanity in multiple ways.
It is too soon to tell all the evils that will be unleashed by the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. The excuses for launching the war are many but, from a moral point of view, unsatisfying. As Pope Leo’s comments implied, the attack does not conform to the standards of Catholic teaching about just wars, including just and clear cause, a last resort, reasonable outcome of success and proportionality.
American Catholics have been politically divided for some time. Often one’s support for, or opposition to, the war is likely to have more to do with one’s political stance than with a careful consideration of the pope’s words and Church teaching. However, the president’s policies and his verbal attacks on the pope have had one unintended consequence: U.S. Catholic leadership is more unified and less polarized than it has been in many years as it rallies around Pope Leo.
Let us hope that it has a similarly unifying effect on Catholics in the pews.
