“More Voices Against the Madness” — Cardinal Parolin Urges Catholics to Not Leave Pope Leo XIV Alone on Iran

The Vatican Secretary of State invoked John Paul II's lonely stand against the 2003 Iraq War — and warned that silent agreement is no longer enough. A new tool lets every American answer.

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication dedicated to standing with Pope Leo XIV. To receive new posts and support this mission, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin spoke to an Italian magazine on Wednesday and said what the Vatican has been trying to make every Catholic and person of goodwill hear for weeks: Pope Leo XIV cannot carry the weight of this war alone.

“There is a need for more voices of peace, more voices against the madness,” the Secretary of State said, warning that the pope risks becoming “a voice crying in the wilderness if it is not supported and helped concretely.”

Parolin reached back to 2003, when Pope John Paul II pleaded with George W. Bush and the Catholic faithful to stop the invasion of Iraq, and was ignored by both.

“We cannot move from the force of law to the law of force,” he added, describing a diplomacy that has gone “practically mute” in the face of American escalation against Iran.

The warning came at the end of a Holy Week unlike any Rome has witnessed in a generation. Pope Leo XIV spent every major liturgy of the Easter Triduum turning the Catholic calendar into a public indictment of the world’s march toward war, particularly that of the Trump-Vance administration.

On Holy Thursday, the pope offered a condemnation of what he called the “imperialist occupation of the world.”

By Good Friday, Military Archbishop Timothy Broglio — the man charged with the pastoral care of every American in uniform — had called the Iran war “not sponsored by the Lord” and unjust by every measure of Catholic moral teaching.

Easter morning brought the moment the rest of the week had been building toward: from the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, the pope looked out over a rain-soaked square and said, “Lay down your weapons.”

The days since Easter have moved the standoff from the pulpit to the brink of diplomatic rupture.

By Tuesday evening, Pope Leo had called Donald Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilian infrastructure “unacceptable” — and within hours, the White House quietly walked back its ultimatum.

This is the context in which Parolin spoke. The Vatican’s second-highest-ranking official was not issuing an abstract plea for peace.

He was naming a specific fear: that the pope’s Holy Week witness will collapse into the same lonely silence that swallowed John Paul II in 2003 if American Catholics do not give it bone and breath.

Passive agreement will not carry this moment. The pope needs American telephones ringing in every congressional office from Honolulu to Portland, Maine, before this tenuous cease-fire ends.

Which brings me to something else. Right after the pope’s remarks, we launched standwithpopeleo.com — a free, non-partisan tool that lets any American, Catholic or otherwise, send a direct message to their member of Congress demanding an immediate halt to military action against Iran.

Enter a ZIP code, and the site helps you draft a message grounded in Catholic social teaching and Pope Leo’s own words for you to review, edit, and send. The whole process takes about three minutes.

In the past 48 hours, over 20,000 Americans have taken action through this website.

Pope Leo asked Americans directly to “contact your congressmen.”

Cardinal Parolin has now told us what will happen if we ignore the request.

The last time a pope begged America to stop a war and was brushed aside, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, the moral authority of the United States collapsed across the Middle East, and the Catholic Church in this country spent a generation trying to recover its public voice.

That cannot happen a second time.

The Holy Father has not asked us to pray quietly while he carries this alone on the world stage. He wants phones ringing in every House and Senate office in Washington by the end of the day. The Cardinal Secretary of State has now made the ask explicit on behalf of the Apostolic Palace. At this hour, silence is a vote for the bombs.

Go to standwithpopeleo.com, send the message it drafts for you, and then put it in front of three friends who have not yet heard what the Holy Father is asking of them.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Parolin, Archbishop Broglio, and the millions of American Catholics — along with countless others of goodwill — who refuse to let this papacy face the American war machine alone.

John Paul II was abandoned in 2003 by the same bishops, politicians, and commentators who now claim to revere his memory. That abandonment cost hundreds of thousands of lives and an untold measure of the Church’s credibility in the public square. We will not watch it happen again in 2026.

In an era poisoned by cruelty and cynicism, Letters from Leo remains rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of empire. This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than propaganda and partisan rage.

They are looking for courage, for truth, for a Church willing to stand between the bombers and the bombed — and right now, as the White House prepares to turn the skies over Tehran into a graveyard, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against an administration that has declared war on a nation of ninety million people — I am asking you to join us.

If you would like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help this Easter season:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo XIV and help sustain this work.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who needs to read it.

Paid subscribers also receive the full biographical series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, the ongoing Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and access to the Best Of archive — the reporting that has made Letters from Leo the fastest-growing Catholic publication in America.

Whether you give $0, $8, $80, $800, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.