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Pope Leo vs. President Trump
“After the tragic experiences of the 20th century, aerial bombardment should have been banished forever!” declared Pope Leo XIV this week. “Instead, as we know, it still exists, and technological development, which is positive in itself, is being put at the service of war. This is not progress, it is regression!” The pontiff remonstrated: “Aircraft should always be vehicles of peace, never of war! No one should fear that threats of death and destruction will come from the sky.”
The pope’s remarks were interpreted as a direct attack on President Donald Trump’s prosecution of war with Iran. That’s an understandable conclusion, especially if you don’t know the full context. Leo wasn’t speaking to reporters or diplomats. Rather, he was talking to airline executives and employees of Italy’s national airline, ITA Airways, as well as representatives from the Lufthansa Group. He urged these staff of the airline industry: “In this context, it becomes even more important to chart courses of peace in the skies.”
In that sense, Leo’s statement about not using the blessings of modern technology for the destruction of modern warfare is akin to Pope Benedict XV’s protest during World War I. It was a war that Pope Benedict XV (1914–22) did not view as just. He decried how innovations of peacetime were being channeled into instruments of death. “The combatants are the greatest and wealthiest nations of the earth,” he lamented. “What wonder, then, if, well provided with the most awful weapons modern military science has devised, they strive to destroy one another with refinements of horror. There is no limit to the measure of ruin and of slaughter.” The pontiff denounced the “useless slaughter” that was leading to “the suicide of civilized Europe.”
The current pope is a man of science as well as theology. He’s actually a mathematician. He doesn’t like seeing technological innovations harnessed for destruction rather than for peace. He’s becoming increasingly vocal. Just yesterday, speaking in his weekly General Audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo decried this “time marked by the madness of war.”
The world is certainly hearing this message from Rome.
A rather provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal last weekend pitted the American pope against the American president. Titled “The Quiet American: How Pope Leo is Pushing Back Against Donald Trump,” by reporters Marcus Walker and Elizabeth Benstein, it opened with five notable words from the quiet American pontiff: “War is back in vogue.”
Leo XIV had actually said that to a group of ambassadors inside St. Peter’s Basilica back in January. As Walker and Bernstein noted, the pope didn’t name names, but “he didn’t have to.” Given what was happening with “President Trump flexing America’s military might in Venezuela and the Caribbean, threatening to take over the Danish territory of Greenland, and assembling an armada for a looming war with Iran” (plus Russia’s war on Ukraine), it did seem like war was back in vogue. And that was January. America is now in full-scale combat with Iran, and President Trump is also threatening Cuba.
I thought that the Journal piece was a bit hyperbolic and incendiary, itching to create controversy where perhaps it didn’t quite exist just yet. But in the course of the last several days, I’m not so sure. As speculation rises that the United States might deploy ground troops in the Middle East, and with the Strait of Hormuz ready to blow, the American pope — like many Americans — seems increasingly troubled by what could degenerate.
To be sure, this pope understands that nations, including his own, go to war. The Holy Father’s own father went to war. In 1942, Louis Marius Prevost, who grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park area, applied to the U.S. Navy’s V-7 accelerated training program. He was accepted and received his commission. The 5-foot-5, 140-pound son of Italian and French immigrants saluted the flag and did his duty. He served on an infantry landing craft at Normandy on June 6, 1944. Yes, D-Day. The 23-year-old Prevost served aboard the LST-286, which was tasked to the hellacious Omaha Beach invasion. From there, Prevost went on to command a Landing Craft Infantry vessel operating in the Mediterranean. After the war, he remained an officer in the Naval Reserve until 1956.
So, the current Holy Father’s father knew that boats and planes alike can be instruments of war as well as peace. In fact, they can be tasked at wartime to generate peace. Donald Trump no doubt feels that his wartime actions right now against Iran will lead to peace in the long term.
Of course, Leo XIV, growing up as Robert Francis Prevost, surely saw the U.S. effort in World War II as a just cause. Through his decades of schooling and training in the Catholic faith, the self-described “son of Augustine” and head of the international Augustinian order learned the conditions of St. Augustine’s Just War Doctrine. (READ: “Pope Leo on Peace, War, and Conscience”)
One suspects that Leo XIV isn’t viewing the current U.S. action in Iran as necessarily meeting those conditions. This very diplomatic, thoughtful, and measured man hasn’t yet said so, but one wonders if a statement like that from this pope might be forthcoming if things go bad quickly.
That would be quite a statement, no doubt pitting the American pope against the president. We shall see.
READ MORE by Paul Kengor:
Pope Leo on Peace, War, and Conscience
Pope Leo: Rely on Your Brain Rather Than AI
Image of Pope Leo licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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