“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.
Trump has spent weeks attacking Leo for the pope’s criticism of the American and Israeli strikes on Iran. In January, Pentagon officials reportedly lectured the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States on the Church’s proper role in global affairs.
On the eve of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s audience at the Vatican, Trump smeared the pope as a danger to American Catholics. Through all of it, Leo has refused to retreat.
What unfolded at Sapienza was a diagnosis, delivered in the cadence of Catholic social teaching.
The pope told the students they live in a world “disfigured by wars and by words of war,” which he called “a pollution of reason.” He meant something larger than a policy failure. The phrase describes what happens to a civilization when its political language is reorganized around enemies. Twentieth-century Europe knew that pollution intimately, and he warned the young not to forget it.
He cited Ukraine, Gaza, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Iran as examples of what he called “the inhuman evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies in a spiral of annihilation.” He warned against artificial intelligence stripping human choices of moral responsibility on the battlefield. This is the world that the most powerful countries are now building.
The American mirror is impossible to miss. The Trump-Vance administration has fused Christian nationalism to a permanent war footing.
At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth runs a department that casts its Iran campaign as a crusade. Trump himself invoked God to justify the destruction of Iran.
MAGA pastors recently blessed a 22-foot golden Trump statue in Doral. And every alliance in Europe is now being told to mortgage its welfare state to American arms manufacturers.
This is the order JD Vance once promised to resist. The vice president told the country in 2024 he would oppose a war with Iran. When the bombs fell, Vance’s Catholic conscience disappeared into MAGA talking points.
The pope, of course, refused that bargain.
Leo offered the students a different vision. “We are not an algorithm,” he told them — a sentence that should be carved into every humanities building in the West.
He called them to a “spiritual alliance with the sense of justice dwelling in the hearts of the young.” The cry of his predecessors — “never again war” — he invoked as a live political demand for a generation that has never known the wars of the twentieth century.
And finally, he asked them to “be artisans of true peace: an unarmed and disarming peace, humble and persevering, working for harmony among peoples and for the care of the Earth.” The two who handed him the Gaza poems are already doing it.
Among the students Leo encountered during the visit were Nada Jouda and Salem Abumustafa — two of the seventy-two Palestinians who arrived in Rome this week through the humanitarian corridor that Sapienza, the Diocese of Rome, and the Community of Sant’Egidio signed in February.
Nada Jouda is nineteen, from Rafah. Her father died during the war in 2023; through two years of displacement she carried her schoolbooks across tents in Rafah and Khan Younis until she could finish her senior year.
Salem Abumustafa, twenty, left a family living in a tent without electricity after the war destroyed his four-story home in Khan Younis. The pope greeted both of them by name. Their presence in that hall is what Leo called “a radical yes to life” — the inverse of every weapons contract Brussels just authorized.
The first U.S.-born pontiff delivered that rebuke in the city where Saint Augustine — Leo’s spiritual father, and the founder of his order — taught rhetoric for a year before leaving for Milan.
After Rome was sacked, Augustine wrote City of God to refuse the lie that the empire was the final horizon of human meaning. Leo, his heir, asks a new generation of European students to do the same.
The pope has named the weapons buildup the American president is forcing on his European allies. In its place he offers the slower, harder work of justice, diplomacy, and human dignity.
Every European capital that signed onto the new NATO spending target was listening today. So were the American Catholics who have watched their own bishops fall silent.
The question now is whether the West can still hear what Leo is saying — or whether the spiral he described from a lecture hall in Rome has already moved past the point of reversal.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who believe that the common good is not a slogan to be sacrificed to arms dealers, that diplomacy remains the harder and holier path, and that the dignity of a child in Kyiv or Gaza or Detroit is worth more than every weapons contract being signed in Brussels and Washington this week.
In an era when the most powerful man in the world casts war as policy and Christian nationalism as faith, we remain rooted in a Gospel that refuses both.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that will not bow to power and a country that will not mistake cruelty for strength.
They are looking for a movement of conscience — for the kind of moral clarity Pope Leo XIV offered today from a university chair in Rome — and right now, as Europe rearms and Washington cheers it on, that hunger has rarely been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against an arms race that is hollowing out the West — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
I had never imagined this convergence of philosophies that stand united in opposition to the MAGA movement: if the Holy See, and Catholicism, represented by this wonderful man, the Enlightenment Protestants, and we secular humanists can align, and remain aligned, we could and can move mountains.
Thank you.