The Prince of Peace and the Sword of History: Pope Leo XIV, Just War, and the Christian Tradition

by Tim Rosenberger

I.

The confrontation between Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump over the American-Israeli war with Iran has generated considerable heat and rather less light. Trump called the first American pope weak and terrible for foreign policy. Leo responded that he had no fear of the Trump administration and would continue to preach the Gospel. The cycle looks like a political spat. In truth, it surfaces an ancient disagreement in Christian thought about faith and the use of force, a question the tradition has never fully resolved and that Leo has now restated at volume without reckoning with its implications.

Both figures deserve more charity than the exchange has produced. Trump’s instinct that a civilization under existential threat from a nuclear-armed adversary has the right and duty to defend itself is not theologically illiterate. It is the settled position of the Catholic Church whose leader is criticizing him, and in this exchange the president finds himself, improbably, its defender. Leo’s instinct that invoking divine blessing on the destruction of an entire people is politically reckless and spiritually dangerous is also not wrong. The positions become incompatible only when Leo reaches for language more absolute than the tradition warrants and Trump for divine endorsement more confident than any statesman should claim.

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