In the wake of President Donald Trump’s military attack on Iran, Pope Leo XIV initially offered a carefully worded plea for peace. He expressed his “heartfelt” wish that “diplomacy” would regain “its proper role,” deliberately avoiding blame for the escalating tensions. He later asked, without naming anyone, whether Christian leaders who go to war “have the humility and courage to seriously examine their conscience and undergo confession?”
A closer look, however, reveals a coordinated strategy where other prominent Catholic leaders are issuing much sharper condemnations. According to the Washington Post, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, immediately warned that America’s rationale for preemptive strikes risked setting “the whole world … ablaze.”
