“Elites That Care Nothing for the Common Good” — Pope Leo XIV Rebukes Trump’s European Arms Race
From Rome’s Sapienza University, the pope told students the $864 billion rearmament Washington has pressed on NATO is a betrayal of diplomacy itself. The schools and hospitals it starves, he said, are the price of the elites’ profit.
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Two students approached Pope Leo XIV on Thursday morning as he stepped into the Divina Sapienza chapel at Rome’s largest university. They handed him a book of poems from Gaza, told him the project has raised two hundred thousand euros for Emergency’s medical work inside the strip, and asked him to read it. “Lo legga, quel libro, Santità,” one of them said.
Read it, Holy Father.
An hour later, in the Aula Magna of Sapienza — the largest institution of higher learning in Europe, home to more than 125,000 students — the pope named the arms race that Donald Trump has spent the past year forcing on the European continent.
“Let us not call ‘defense’ a rearmament that increases tensions and insecurity, impoverishes investment in education and health, denies trust in diplomacy, and enriches elites that care nothing for the common good,” Leo said.
Read that last clause again: “enriches elites that care nothing for the common good.” Papal addresses do not usually name the arms industry, even by indirection. This one did — a direct charge against the contractors and shareholders whose stock prices have climbed throughout 2025.
European military spending rose 14 percent in 2025 to $864 billion, the largest single-year jump since the Cold War ended, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The surge has been driven by the Russia-Ukraine war and by Trump’s relentless pressure on NATO members to spend more on weapons.
At his urging, NATO endorsed a defense spending target of 5 percent of GDP last year — more than double the level the alliance had asked of its members a decade ago. In February, the president signed an executive order re-prioritizing the U.S. weapons customer list to favor countries with higher defense budgets.
The pope’s sentence at Sapienza was a verdict on that entire architecture. Leo used the language of Catholic social teaching — the common good, the dignity of investment in schools and hospitals, the priority of diplomacy — to indict a transatlantic political class that has surrendered to militarization as the organizing principle of statecraft.
The rebuke was pointed and clear. Here’s the background.
