The archbishop of Chicago condemned the White House for glorifying the war in Iran in a scathing letter.
Cardinal Blase J. Cupich said in a statement titled “A Call to Conscience,” released on Saturday by the Archdiocese of Chicago, that the deaths of American service members and Iranian civilians are “being treated like it’s a video game.”
Cupich slammed the White House’s X post on March 5, captioned, “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” The post was accompanied by a video montage of unclassified footage of military strikes in Iran, various popular films, and war games.
“Hundreds of people are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day,” the archbishop said in a statement, referencing the U.S. bombing of a girls’ school that killed over 150 people.
“Six U.S. soldiers have been killed,” he continued. “They are also dishonored by that social media post. Hundreds of thousands displaced, and many millions more are terrified across the Middle East.”
As of Sunday, the confirmed number of U.S. service members killed in Iran has risen to seven.
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House for comment.
The archbishop also criticized the gamification of war through prediction markets. Following the initial strikes in Iran on Feb. 28, Polymarket received backlash for allowing its users to bet on bombings. While the company justified this move by calling its prediction insights “invaluable,” several accounts raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from these attacks.
“What a profound moral failure, for gamifying strips away the humanity of real people,” the cardinal continued. “Let’s not forget, a ‘hit’ isn’t putting points on the board; it’s a grieving family whose suffering we ignore when we prioritize entertainment, and profit, over empathy.”
Cupich concluded that the U.S. government was treating the suffering of Iranian people as entertainment. In doing so, he argued that people become “addicted to the ‘spectacle’ of explosions” and “desensitized to the true costs of war.”
“The longer we remain blind to the terrible consequences of war, the more we are risking the most precious gift God gave us: our humanity,” he said. “I know that the American people are better than this. We have the good sense to know that what is happening is not entertainment but war, and that Iran is a nation of people, not a video game others play to entertain us.”
The Trump administration has been at odds with the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIV, who hails from Chicago, has criticized the president’s war in Iran at least three times since the U.S. assault began. The pontiff delivered pointed criticism in an X post last Tuesday.
“Stability and peace are not built with mutual threats, nor with weapons, which sow destruction, pain, and death, but only through a reasonable, authentic, and responsible dialogue,” the pope wrote.
Cardinal Cupich previously slammed Trump’s immigration crackdown, which he said led to racial profiling. He said this was “not America.”
“I’ve had some priests who are of a different color being targeted and arrested—stopped—because of their color and asking them to prove that they’re citizens,” he said.
