Pope and President Tangle

In April, the Holy Father and the president of the United States traded barbs. The proximate cause was Leo’s criticism of the Israeli and American attacks on Iran. The temperature rose as Trump issued annihilationist threats, stating that America would use its vast military power to ­obliterate Persian civilization: “A whole civilization will die ­tonight.” This and other wild statements followed in the train of Pete Hegseth’s regular recourse to ­Rambo-style braggadocio.

Leo deemed Trump’s threat “unacceptable.” (The ­Holy Father was surely correct. I wrote as much at the time in “Ethics of Rhetoric in Times of War.”) He went on to say, “I would like to invite everyone to pray, but also to seek ways to communicate—perhaps with congressmen, with authorities, saying that we don’t want war; we want peace.” Leo also posted sharp lines on social media: “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’ (Is. 1:25).”

The White House seemed to have taken these statements by Leo as a declaration of political war. Trump went into campaign mode, posting derogatory statements about Leo on Truth Social (“WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy”). Trump also posted a bizarre AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure healing the sick. An uproar ensued. Leo announced that he was “not afraid of the Trump administration.”

What are we to make of this spectacle?

I regard some of Trump’s statements as cheap and degrading, others as contemptible. But hyperbole and slander have always been part of his rhetorical arsenal, which has fueled his political successes. So, mark me down as dismayed by his nasty remarks about the Holy Father, but unsurprised. (Notice that I say “dismayed,” not “outraged”—the latter is an element of the WWE atmosphere that Trump enjoys creating.)

That said, Trump and his advisers are correct to identify the Catholic Church as a political opponent. As I have written on several occasions, as an international institution, the Church has been closely allied with many of the forces driving globalization and seeking the triumph of the postwar, open-society consensus, while Trump and the populism he represents press in the opposite direction.

I want my spiritual leader to be a strong and steady advocate for peace. Moreover, there are good reasons to deem Trump’s decision to go to war unwise and perhaps unjust. I outlined my misgivings in an earlier column (“Just War Theory and Epic Fury”). But rather than sweeping claims about Jesus as the prince of peace and bald statements about whose prayers he answers, our age needs reflection on the kind of peace we can hope for—and work toward—in the present circumstances, circumstances that increasingly make the Vatican’s default posture implausible.

After World War II, those championing international institutions held the moral high ground. The Catholic Church became a strong advocate of a supranational vision of global governance, which promised to put an end to war as a tool of foreign policy. John XXIII endorsed the development of a global “public authority.” Benedict XVI reiterated this aspiration, calling for a “true world political authority.” Francis did the same.

The problem with this vision of peace is that the most sustained effort to actualize it failed. After the end of the Cold War, American leaders attempted to construct a “rules-based international order” that would provide a reliable, supranational framework for global cooperation. But it did not prevent Vladimir Putin from taking Crimea and invading Ukraine, nor did it restrain Iran’s network of proxy militias, which destabilized the Middle East and triggered the present conflict.

Moreover, Pope Francis recognized that the rules-based international order has a dark side: It supercharged capitalism and created a growing divide between winners and losers. His 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti criticized the globalized economy. Nevertheless, the encyclical called for a renewed internationalism, this time organized to promote solidarity and the rights of the marginalized.

Again, high ideals can seem noble, but when they are unrealistic, they easily become irresponsible. Without seeming to recognize the irony, during the Francis pontificate the Vatican invited billionaires to Rome to discuss the hoped-for reforms. Meanwhile, actual resistance to the economic disenfranchisement caused by globalization, as well as pushback against the inequitable distribution of costs of sustaining the international system, arose in populist movements, exemplified by but by no means limited to Trump’s electoral victories.

Leaders of the Catholic Church should have anticipated the failure of post–Cold War internationalism and the rise of nation-based populism. In his famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII saw that the new economic forces reshaping the West during the industrial revolution could be restrained only by the counterbalancing power of the great engines of solidarity: family, nation, and church.

The peoples of Western nations are groping their way toward something like Leo XIII’s insight. Populism seeks to renew the solidarity of the nation, which offers a counterforce to the excesses of global capitalism that Pope Francis criticized. Today’s populism is a messy business, fraught with its own excesses. It is also ­reanimating geopolitical tensions, and thereby posing grave dangers, as the Iranian conflict illustrates.

Pope Leo’s trip to African countries was fascinating to observe. Whether it was criticism of corruption, calls for economic justice, or exhortations for the young to remain in their homelands, his message was one of encouraging solidarity and building state capacity so that the nations of the continent might enjoy prosperity and stem internal conflict. Yet, when attention falls on Western nations, the Vatican seems unable to recognize similar problems and needs.

Pope Leo has given every indication that he wants the Catholic Church to participate in the political debates of our time. He is right to do so. After the end of the Cold War, the world was reshaped in profound ways, which are now precipitating challenges, which in turn bid fair to trigger new and disruptive ­changes. Mass migration, great-power conflict, nationalism, economic justice: These and other issues beg for moral analysis at the most fundamental levels. 

So yes, Leo should speak about the Iran conflict. But he should also address the dangers of nuclear proliferation. What are the just means by which it can be prevented? And he should also contemplate difficult questions about the justice of warmaking to defend an empire. The term “empire” is in bad odor. But the term can be used loosely to describe a powerful nation’s sphere of influence, wherein its hegemony preserves the conditions for peace. Is it plausible to think that just war theory, the aim of which is to promote peace, makes it immoral for a hegemon to use military force to protect the conditions for peace, which stem precisely from its dominance? It’s a thorny question, one relevant not just to the Iran conflict but to American warmaking since 1945. 

I do not dismiss international institutions. They may play positive roles in the future. But the Catholic Church needs to recognize what time it is. We need her moral wisdom to discern the kind of peace that can obtain in a world of great-power competition, and how we might hope to attain and preserve it.