Backed by Pope Leo, U.S. Cardinals Rebuke Trump’s Greenland Gambit
As Trump pushes to annex Greenland, three top American cardinals — Cupich of Chicago, McElroy of Washington, and Tobin of Newark — have issued a rare joint statement denouncing a “zeal for war.”
Dear friends —
Today’s story spotlights an extraordinary moment: three American cardinals stepping into the global arena to denounce President Trump’s escalating push to annex Greenland.
Backed by Pope Leo XIV’s powerful warning against “the zeal for war,” Cardinals Cupich, McElroy, and Tobin are raising their voices in defense of peace, sovereignty, and the Gospel. Their statement marks the most forceful challenge yet from the U.S. hierarchy to Trump’s foreign agenda — and it lands at a moment when America’s moral leadership is hanging by a thread.
Why now? And why Greenland? As you’ll see, this is about more than Arctic maps. It’s about what kind of nation we are — and whether the Church in this country is finally ready to confront the brutal logic of power that Pope Leo has spent months warning against.
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In an extraordinary move, the United States’s three top cardinals publicly challenged President Donald Trump, imploring his administration to step back from foreign policy strategies that threaten world peace.
Their Jan. 19 statement comes amid a looming crisis over Greenland, where the White House has been sharply ratcheting up rhetoric about acquiring the Arctic territory.
Trump insists the U.S. “needs Greenland” as a strategic asset. Over the weekend, he sent Denmark’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre an extraordinary text message, where he wrote that after being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, he no longer felt the need to think “purely of peace.”
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” he wrote, adding that the US needed “complete and total control” of Greenland.
Trump’s threats to take the island have Greenlanders and American allies in uproar. In Nuuk, the tiny capital, thousands marched through the snow chanting “Greenland is not for sale!” in defiance of Trump’s takeover threats.
European NATO partners have likewise bristled: France, Germany, the U.K. and others rushed troops to Greenland in a dramatic show of support for Denmark, warning that any U.S. seizure would spell the end of NATO.
At issue is the moral principle of national self-determination. Greenland is a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and both Danes and Greenlanders have firmly declared the island isn’t for sale.
Trump, however, has voiced open contempt for their refusal, telling reporters that America will take Greenland “whether they likes it or not.”
He argues U.S. control is necessary to preempt Chinese or Russian ambitions in the Arctic, pointing to the lightning-fast U.S. invasion of Venezuela earlier this month as proof of American resolve.
In a high-stakes meeting on Jan. 14, Trump bluntly told Denmark’s officials, “You found that out last week with Venezuela.” Such rhetoric has sent anxiety soaring across the North Atlantic.
“It’s not the time to gamble with our right to self-determination, when another country is talking about taking us over,” Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said.
The cardinals’ statement pointedly upholds that view. In their statement, they condemned the trend of might-over-right in global affairs, echoing Pope Leo XIV’s concern that “war is back in vogue” and that force is replacing dialogue.
“The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace,” the U.S. prelates wrote. They noted that American policy is at a moral crossroads:
“The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination appear all too fragile in a world of ever greater conflagrations.”
In stark terms, they renounced “war as an instrument for narrow national interests,” insisting military action must be only a last resort in extreme cases. Instead, they call for a foreign policy anchored in “the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity” — priorities far removed from any resource grab or nationalist aggression.
Pope Leo’s Challenge and the Cardinals’ Response
This unified Catholic rebuke did not emerge in a vacuum. Pope Leo XIV — history’s first American pope — has been steadily encouraging the U.S. Church to speak out against what he sees as the moral failures of Trumpism.
Here’s what Leo has in January alone.
