The two people in the world who should feel most obliged to be thoughtful and restrained in their public statements are the president of the United States and the pope. But neither of the current incumbents seems willing or able to rise above his immediate political impulses as is necessary to protect the institution he leads.
It says much about modern culture that President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV have been “trolling” each other, a slang term that describes the low practice of goading and baiting someone in public with whom one disagrees. Watching the exchange between the leader of the world’s most powerful nation and the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics in recent days, one is left agape with near disbelief.
One wonders almost despairingly, “Does nobody anymore know who they are and what they represent? Isn’t anyone capable these days of calibrating their political impulses and opinions against the norms of history, policy, and intellectual honesty?”
On Sunday, Trump accused Leo of being “weak on crime and terrible on foreign policy,” and he posted a ridiculous picture of himself as a glowing Jesus healing the sick. Some Catholics found the picture amusing and suggested that it was silly to be outraged. But to many of us, it was not just tasteless in a giggling adolescent way but also constituted an objectionable failure to recognize that presidents are entrusted with the stewardship of their office and that should weigh far more heavily than the scatological urge to fling besmirching rhetoric at adversaries.
Trump’s comments came amid a demeaning public spat he did not start, in which the pope was the greater offender. In X posts from his official account, Leo clearly criticized Trump’s and America’s role in the war against Iran, even though he did not name them.
“Anyone who is a disciple of Christ … is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs,” Leo wrote. “Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.”
Historically, this is bunk, and it is also pure pacificism, cynical, fatuous, and wrong on doctrine.
To say Christ is never on the side of those who drop bombs ignores the concept of just war, which Catholic doctrine accepts, and it attempts to marshal God against the U.S. and Israel and place Him, therefore, on the side of Iran. It is untrue to say the U.S. and Israel refuse to coexist with Iran. They have tried to do so for 47 years. It is Iran’s fanatical leaders who refuse to coexist with America and Jews, and who have deliberately killed and maimed thousands of them. Genocide against Jews and the West is their raison d’etre.
Leo did not stop there. He said the Christian East was being “profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives … But no gain can be worth the life of the weakest, children, or families. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood.”
To say no war can justify the shedding of innocent blood is axiomatic pacifism, and Christians are not required to subscribe to that view either by theology or by doctrine. Certainly, it is evil and against all Church teaching deliberately to make targets of the innocent — that is what Iran does with its terrorism and proxies — but just war acknowledges that some innocent people will be killed.
To say that no gain can be worth the life of the weakest is drivel that trivializes the most terrible judgments that political leaders have to make. To accept what Leo says would mean that toppling the murderous Islamists in Tehran and freeing 92 million tyrannized Iranians would be unjustifiable if some non-combatants were incidentally killed. But ordinary Iranians themselves are begging the U.S. and Israel to keep going. Leo is meddling in international politics like a medieval pontiff and, like his forebears, glossing over political calculation with a varnish of piety.
It is surely no coincidence, as has been pointed out, that the pope met for talks with David Axelrod, former President Barack Obama’s campaign guru, on April 9 and immediately thereafter attacked Trump in only marginally veiled terms.
Catholics are justified in objecting to Trump’s trolling of the pope, but they should be far angrier about Obama’s henchman steering the Vatican into confrontation with Washington for political purposes. They should be just as angry and also dismayed that the pope went along with it, allowing himself to be a partisan tool.
When asked by reporters to respond to Trump, Leo said he was merely spreading the gospel and added, “I am not a politician, and I have no intention to debate with [Trump].”
TRUMP HATERS CLUTCH AT THEIR PEARLS
This is disingenuous. Leo had just gone out of his way to cast aspersions at Washington’s current leadership and bent the gospel to political purposes. Then he deflected questions about the firestorm he’d caused, much like a Hollywood entertainer who, when called out for incendiary political commentary, answers, “Hey, back off, I’m just an actor/comedian/fill-in-the-blank, not a politician.”
The pope was wearing his immaculate white soutane as he spoke. But his conduct in this latest confrontation has not been pristine.