Pope Leo slammed the president and other war-hungry world leaders in a veiled but firmly delivered message.
Pope Leo, the first American to lead the Vatican, did not mention Trump by name on Friday, but it appeared he was alluding to the president and his Iran war during a meeting with top priests.
“Do those Christians who bear grave responsibility in armed conflicts have the humility and courage to make a serious examination of conscience and to go to confession?” he asked.
Leo, 70, has voiced opposition to the United States and Israel’s strikes on Iran in the last month, Reuters reports, asking in a prayer that “the roar of bombs may cease, that weapons may fall silent, and that space may be opened for dialogue in which the voices of peoples can be heard.”
Trump, 79, was raised in the Presbyterian Christian faith. Two of his top deputies, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, are Catholic.
Representatives for Vance and Rubio did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Catholic Church has been opposed to most wars in its history, as Jesus taught his followers to be non-violent. However, the church has made exceptions to support conflicts that it views as a “just war.”
The just war theory was developed by Christian thinkers like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, balancing the presumption against violence with necessities such as self-defense against an unjust invasion.
More than 175 people, most of them small children, were killed by a strike on an elementary school in Iran on Feb. 28, a portion of the reported 1,300 civilians who have died in the country since the strikes began, according to Iranian officials. Thirteen American soldiers have died in the Middle East in the same period.
Leo is not the only Catholic leader opposed to yet another war in the Middle East.
In Trump’s own backyard, Washington, D.C., Cardinal Robert McElroy said this week that strikes against Iran were “not morally legitimate,” failing the three requirements to be one.
McElroy said, “the criterion of just cause is not met because our country was not responding to an existing or imminent and objectively verifiable attack by Iran... The criterion of right intention is not met in our country’s decision to attack Iran.”
McElroy also slammed Trump for having no endgame in Iran.
“One of the most worrying elements of these first days of the war in Iran is that our goals and intentions are absolutely unclear, ranging from the destruction of Iran’s conventional and nuclear weapons potential to the overthrow of its regime to the establishment of a democratic government to unconditional surrender,” he said. “You cannot satisfy the just war tradition’s criterion of right intention if you do not have a clear intention.”
Lastly, McElroy said he is not convinced that Trump’s war will do more good than harm.
“Finally, our current war effort does not meet Catholic just war teaching because it is far from clear that the benefits of this war will outweigh the harm which will be done,” he said.
