A Pope Who Bears Witness
Peace Is Not a Political Statement
On January 15, 1991, Pope St. John Paul II wrote a letter to President George H.W. Bush on the eve of the Gulf War. The letter was urgent, pastoral, and direct. The pope warned that war, even against obvious aggression, would create “new and perhaps worse injustices.” Two days later, Operation Desert Storm began. The plea failed.
I’ve been thinking about that letter a lot in recent weeks, watching Pope Leo XIV navigate the same impossible terrain. A pope calling for peace while the machinery of war grinds forward with observers on all sides reading his words as if they were campaign talking points rather than what they actually are: an assertion of Catholic moral teaching.
That’s the argument I make in my new essay for The Dispatch’s Dispatch Faith newsletter, published today: “Pope Leo’s Case Against the Iran War Is Not Political.”
The essay traces a line from John Paul II’s Gulf War correspondence through to Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday homily and his pointed response to President Trump’s threat against the Iranian people, a threat the pope called “truly unacceptable.” Along the way, I set these papal interventions against a striking counterpoint: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s prayer at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Both men claim to follow Jesus Christ. The distance between their visions is striking.
But the heart of the essay is not the contrast. It’s the Catholic tradition. The Catholic understanding of peace is not the world’s understanding. Peace, as the Catechism teaches, is not merely the absence of war. It is “the tranquility of order”, the work of justice and the effect of charity. When Pope Leo speaks, he speaks from within that tradition, not from within any party or faction. To read him otherwise is to misread him.
Whether the Iran war meets the criteria of the Church’s just war doctrine is a genuinely difficult question. Answering it requires expertise in economics, military science, and diplomacy, not just philosophy and theology. I don’t pretend to settle it. But I do argue that every one of us, as stewards of the common good, has a duty to engage in that discernment rather than collapse the question into partisan reflex.
The essay closes with a line I mean sincerely: I hope and pray the president didn’t really mean what he said, and I thank God we have a pope who is unafraid to bear witness to Jesus, King of Peace.
Read the full essay at The Dispatch: Pope Leo’s Case Against the Iran War Is Not Political
