Pope Leo’s pointed message to Catholics the day after the U.S. bombed Iran

The day after the United States bombed Iran in a military effort to forcibly change the nation’s regime, the most famous American global leader — outside of President Donald Trump — is speaking out about it.

“Faced with the possibility of a tragedy of enormous proportions, I am making a heartfelt appeal to the parties involved to assume their moral responsibility to stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable abyss,” Pope Leo XIV said in his weekly Angelus address on Sunday morning.

The American-born pope wasn’t speaking only to the thousands gathered in St. Peter’s Square, but to the more than 1.4 billion Roman Catholics in the world, including those in the Trump administration who self-identify as Catholics, including Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“Stability and peace are not built with reciprocal threats or with weapons that sow destruction, pain and death,” the pontiff said, “but only through reasonable, authentic and responsible dialogue.”

The joint U.S.-Israeli strikes have already claimed the lives of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and numerous civilians, including, reportedly, more than 100 girls at an elementary school.

While the pope doesn’t wield the sort of temporal power that presidents and prime ministers do, his words carry moral weight for those within his religious tradition, and cannot be easily dismissed by politicians, nor the 52% of Catholics who still have a favorable view of Trump, according to a recent poll by the conservative EWTN News and RealClearPolitics.

It is not the first time Pope Leo has called out the Trump administration’s efforts to force regime change in sovereign nations with leaders who have been accused of human rights abuses.

“The good of the beloved Venezuelan people must prevail over every other consideration and lead us to overcome violence and to undertake paths of justice and peace, safeguarding the country’s sovereignty, ensuring the rule of law enshrined in the Constitution, respecting the human and civil rights of each person,” the pope said during the Angelus address Jan. 4.

I often write about how religion impacts the lives of Latinas like me, who are trying to navigate a world that often seems to have eschewed moral clarity for political dissolution. As a Roman Catholic, I pay particular attention to the guidance offered not only by Pope Leo, but also the bishops who are tasked with providing moral counsel to their flock.

Stability and peace are not built with reciprocal threats or with weapons that sow destruction, pain and death.

No one who has remained a Catholic as the church has been wracked by an ongoing, self-made crisis of clerical abuse can ignore the fact that some bishops are as opportunistic and power-hungry as our politicians. But under the leadership of Pope Leo, more U.S. bishops than ever have chosen to speak out from a place of genuine moral authority, untainted by the gross partisan and ideological bias that had previously infected the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In January, three U.S. cardinals — whom some consider progressives — called on the administration to adopt a “genuinely moral” foreign policy with respect to Venezuela, Ukraine, and Greenland. Meanwhile the archbishop for the U.S. military — widely considered a staunch conservative — reminded Catholic military personnel that it is “morally acceptable” for them to disobey an order that violates their conscience.

At the same time, 18 bishops asked for the government to cut U.S. military spending to invest in eradicating poverty instead, and across the world bishops have disavowed the appetite for war and domination by military force the Trump administration has modeled.

For example, the pope has declined to participate in a Trump-led “Board of Peace” that seems to be about anything other than peace. “A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by diplomacy based on force by either individuals or groups of allies,” Pope Leo said on Feb. 17.

“War is back in vogue and the zeal for war is spreading.”

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, was more direct in his criticism of the board: “What do I think of the Board of Peace? I think it is a colonialist operation: others deciding for the Palestinians,” he told the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

While the Vatican releases Pope Leo’s Angelus addresses without much fanfare, it is important for Catholics seeking moral guidance on world events like the U.S. war on Iran to listen to the address directly rather than rely on the interpretation of those who might alter the pope’s words for political convenience.

In the instance of the pope’s Angelus address on Venezuela, for example, the Trump administration’s U.S. ambassador to the Holy See reportedly omitted the pope’s reference to safeguarding that nation’s sovereignty because it could not be aligned to the administration’s actions.

And Vance last year offered a justification of Trump’s mass deportation policies based on his misunderstanding of a Catholic theological concept. The vice president’s error was corrected and addressed by Pope Francis shortly before his death in April 2025.

During Lent, we as Catholics are called to examine our habitual excuses, our profane tendencies and our susceptibility to the spin of those with a stake in worldly power, to instead focus deeply on our spiritual life and its obligations.

For Catholics, in particular, Pope Leo’s words today cannot be explained away. We must demand that our nation’s leaders stop the spiral of violence and acknowledge that peace cannot be built with weapons.

Swords into plowshares, mi gente, swords into plowshares. And we shall study war no more.