The Pope and the President

National Review Online

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

 

John Adams, in a letter to Abigail that has worn well over two centuries, wrote that “power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service, when it is violating all his laws.” He could have been writing about this week.

 

The war between the United States and Iran, now in its seventh week, has produced an extraordinary confrontation — not just between two nations, but between two Americans who each believe that God is on his side. One sits in the Oval Office. The other, until recently, was on a plane to Algeria.

 

The fight between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV broke into the open Sunday night, when Trump posted that “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” On Monday, Leo, who spent decades as a missionary in Peru and knows something about speaking truth to distant power, answered that “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.”

 

Before we adjudicate this quarrel, we should take each man’s provocation in turn.

 

Pope Leo XIV has spoken with growing urgency and sharpening moral force since the bombs began falling on February 28. His Palm Sunday homily, delivered less than two weeks ago, was the most theologically charged salvo yet. Invoking the prophet Isaiah, Leo declared that “Jesus is the 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.”

 

That last sentence will trouble not just Trump voters, but every Christian family that has a son or daughter in uniform. The church has long honored those who serve. The catechism calls legitimate defense not only a right but a grave duty. And when Leo addressed the Military Ordinariate of Italy last month, he offered a more careful formulation, describing the mission of a Christian member of the armed forces as “defending the weak, protecting peaceful coexistence, responding to disasters” and “participating in international missions to maintain peace and restore order.”

 

That is a thoughtful account of military vocation, but it is also, if we are being honest, colored in shades of blue that would not look out of place on a U.N. press release. It describes a kind of perpetual peacekeeping operation, not a nation engaged in what its president calls existential combat. One can honor the pope’s pastoral instincts while noting that this framework leaves Catholic soldiers who serve in genuine wars of national interest with very little moral oxygen.

 

When Leo says flatly that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” Christians are permitted to ask: Any war? The war that stopped Hitler? The Crusades may have been the church’s own project. Has the pope considered what his words sound like to veterans of the Pacific theater, or to Polish Catholics who spent 40 years praying that someone would have the will to confront Soviet power?

 

The job of a pope is not simply to issue beautiful moral intuitions. It is to speak with precision.

 

That said, the president has made the pope’s job considerably easier. On April 7, Trump warned on social media that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” The statement was connected to an ultimatum over the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump ultimately pulled back from its most apocalyptic implications when Pakistan brokered a two-week cease-fire. But words have consequences, and these words handed critics a loaded weapon.

 

The Catholic just war tradition requires, among other things, right intention and proportionality. Trump’s threat to target “every” Iranian bridge and power plant is precisely the kind of statement that gives the tradition’s critics grounds to say the criteria are not being met. It doesn’t matter that Trump is a brawler who talks bigger than he acts. In the domain of moral theology, you are judged by what you say as well as what you do. And the secretary of defense and the commander in chief have repeatedly invoked God in justifying this war — Trump himself told reporters that he believed God approved of the actions against Iran because “God is good and God wants to see people taken care of.”

 

This is folk theology. It is also, if we are being charitable, exactly the kind of divine self-endorsement that Adams warned us about — the conviction that one’s own purposes are so manifestly just that they must be God’s purposes too.

 

Leo is the head of a sovereign state and the shepherd of 1.4 billion Catholics. His voice on questions of war and peace carries genuine moral weight. Catholics should take him seriously. They are right to let his statements disturb their comfort and prompt examination of conscience.

 

But Catholics are not required to agree with him. Not on this. Not on any question of prudential political judgment, however grave its moral dimensions. The Second Vatican Council was quite clear on this point: The church claims no special divine competence in reaching political conclusions. The same council document Leo quoted from — Gaudium et Spes — explicitly states that lay Catholics, informed by the Gospel, must exercise their own judgment in temporal affairs. Catholic politicians have always been free to disagree with the hierarchy on questions like immigration enforcement, welfare policy, and, yes, war — provided they are acting in good conscience and not simply rationalizing whatever is politically convenient.

 

Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, has said the Iran strikes do not meet the criteria of just war doctrine. That is a serious formal judgment and should be reckoned with seriously. It is not a binding pronouncement. It is not a matter of salvation. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have defended the war. They are not in schism. The question of whether the war is just is one on which faithful Catholics, applying the same tradition, can reach different conclusions.

 

What neither man has done well is resist the pull of unnecessary personal combat. Leo has been careful not to name Trump directly, and on the papal plane he insisted “the things that I say are certainly not meant as attacks on anyone.” That claim becomes harder to sustain with each passing homily — which is not a criticism so much as an observation. The pope is not wrong to speak. He is wrong, occasionally, to speak with less precision than the tradition requires.

 

But Trump, for his part, has descended to something close to deranged buffoonery. Calling the pope “WEAK on Crime” is not a serious engagement with the moral argument. Neither is claiming, as Trump did Sunday, that “if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like healer within the hour. The irony was apparently lost on him.

 

Adams again: “Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.” Whether this war was necessary is precisely the question. And it is not a question that will be settled by a pope calling for total disarmament, or by a president posting messianic self-portraits. It will be settled by people of goodwill applying serious reasoning to terrible circumstances. The church can help with that. So, improbably, can the president. But only if both of them stop performing for their respective audiences long enough to think.