“Look For An Off Ramp” — Pope Leo XIV Implores Trump to End War by Easter

The pope walked out of Castel Gandolfo on Tuesday and offered the president a path toward ending the Iran war.

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Pope Leo XIV walked out of Castel Gandolfo on Tuesday evening and spoke directly to the CNN cameras. He had a message for Donald Trump.

“I was told that President Trump had recently stated that he would like to end the war,” the pope told CNN’s Christopher Lamb, standing outside the papal residence thirteen miles southeast of Rome.

“Hopefully, he’s looking for an off-ramp. Hopefully, he’s looking for a way to decrease the amount of violence, of bombing, which would be a significant contribution to removing the hatred that’s being created and is increasing constantly in the Middle East and elsewhere.”

The statement landed two days after Palm Sunday, when Leo invoked the prophet Isaiah to warn that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

That homily — delivered before tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square — repeated the phrase “King of Peace” seven times. On the same day, Israeli police barred Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Palm Sunday Mass.

Tuesday’s remarks at Castel Gandolfo carry a different tone than the Palm Sunday rebuke. Rather than condemn, the pope extended an invitation. He took Trump’s reported desire to end the war at face value and offered the president a path toward de-escalation — publicly, carefully, on the eve of Easter.

“I would certainly continue to give this call to all leaders of the world,” Leo continued, answering questions in Italian, English, and Spanish. “Come back to the table to dialogue. Let’s look for solutions to problems. Let’s look for ways to reduce the amount of violence that we’re promoting, and that peace, especially at Easter, might reign in our hearts.”

The full weight of this moment requires context. Since the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Tehran and several other Iranian cities on February 28, Pope Leo XIV has addressed the war publicly at least seven times.

The list of interventions is extraordinary: a call for a permanent global ban on aerial bombings, a denunciation of the conflict as “a scandal for the entire human family,” and a formal determination by his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, that the war does not satisfy the conditions of Catholic just war doctrine.

Parolin called it “foolishness.”

When Trump was asked about the pope’s ceasefire demand on March 21, he answered: “We’re obliterating Iran.”

No other world leader has waged this kind of sustained moral campaign against the war. European leaders have issued a few statements. The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution. But Leo XIV has done something none of them attempted — he has made the case for peace every single week, in language grounded in the Gospel rather than in geopolitics.

The contrast with the Trump administration could not be starker.

On the Friday before Palm Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth led a Christian worship service at the Pentagon and prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Two days later, Leo stood in St. Peter’s Square and preached that Jesus “remains steadfast in meekness, while others are stirring up violence.”

The theology here matters.

Leo is drawing on a tradition that stretches back to Pope Francis’s Fratelli Tutti, to John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraq War, and ultimately to John XXIII’s intervention during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Papal peace diplomacy is not soft.

John XXIII’s back-channel communications with Khrushchev and Kennedy helped avert nuclear war. John Paul II sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to Washington in 2003 to personally deliver his opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

Leo XIV is walking the same path, except he has a weapon his predecessors lacked: he is American.

He grew up in Chicago. He understands the domestic political pressures Trump faces, and he knows exactly how to frame an exit that allows the president to claim credit rather than concede defeat.

That is what the “off-ramp” language signals. The pope could have repeated his demand for an unconditional ceasefire.

He chose instead to meet Trump where the president says he already is — wanting to end the war — and to offer language that a dealmaker might accept.

“Off-ramp” is not theological vocabulary. Leo chose that word for Trump.

Whether the president will accept the invitation remains uncertain. His March 21 remarks suggest otherwise.

But the historical record will show that as the Iran war entered its second month, as Easter approached, one leader spoke with moral clarity about the human cost of bombing and invited the most powerful man on earth to choose peace.

If any movement toward de-escalation comes in the days and weeks ahead, Pope Leo XIV will deserve tremendous credit for making that outcome possible — and for refusing to stop asking when everyone else had moved on.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics around the world who believe that war is never a video game, that the deaths of children are never acceptable collateral, and that the Gospel demands we speak the truth about violence even when the most powerful government on earth tells us to be silent.

In a season of bloodshed and cynicism, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to look away from suffering or bow to the idols of power and vengeance.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for moral clarity in a world drowning in propaganda. As bombs fall on Iranian cities and an American pope pleads for peace, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the machinery of war — I am asking you to join us.

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