by James F Keating, First Things
When it comes to papal matters in Rhode Island, I am often interviewed on the local news. Thus, I get my “fifteen minutes of fame” whenever a pope dies or is about to be elected. I am called upon to make predictions about the next pope. My record is not great. I predicted Bergoglio to succeed St. John Paul II, but said he was too old to follow Benedict XVI. With respect to our present pope, I confidently ruled out an American being elected. My reasoning was that it would give the United States too much power in the world, throne as well as altar. In my defense, Robert Prevost is an unusual American prelate, having been a bishop in Peru. Once elected, I predicted that he would stay out of American politics or at least avoid fighting with Donald Trump. I was wrong on this as well and spectacularly so.
Over the past months, Pope Leo has become a harsh critic of the policies of the Trump administration. The first salvo concerned immigration. Leo’s statements were finely balanced, acknowledging, on the one hand, that every nation has a right to regulate its borders and, on the other, insisting that immigrants, regardless of their legal status, must be treated with dignity and fairness. Not much to see here. Things took a drastic turn, however, when the pope objected to the attacks on Iran by the militaries of Israel and the United States. The problem was not, of course, that the pope opposed the war and, once it started, urged an immediate cessation of violence in favor of dialogue. Wars are always accompanied by great evils and are never permissible when a peaceful alternative is available. Papal statements against this or that war go back, at least, to Benedict XV’s impassioned but ultimately fruitless efforts to stop World War I, a conflict he described as “useless slaughter” and the “suicide of civilized Europe.” St. John Paul II, at the end of his life, spoke out forcefully against the Iraq War.
What is new, at least to my ears, is the harshness of Leo’s rhetoric. He seems to have determined that Trump’s actions stem from a lust for domination and nothing more. The president’s stated reason to ensure that the radical government of Iran never procures a nuclear weapon is wholly ignored. Moreover, some of the pope’s statements veer toward pacifism. For example, the pope stated the following in his homily for Palm Sunday:“Brothers and sisters, 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. 1:15).”
Read also: What’s really behind Trump’s clash with the Pope? by Damian Thompson, Spectator
Pope Leo doubles down on intense anti-war, anti-Trump rhetoric at interfaith gathering by Doug Mainwaring, LifeSite
Is the Pope Right About War? by David Virtue on substack