Pope Leo XIV Awards Top Diplomatic Honor to Iran’s Ambassador — Mid-War
The American pope named Mohammad Hossein Mokhtari a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Pontifical Order of Pius IX in the same week Donald Trump declared the ceasefire “on life support” and accused Leo of wanting Tehran armed with nuclear weapons.
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Pope Leo XIV has named Mohammad Hossein Mokhtari, Iran’s ambassador to the Vatican, a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Pontifical Order of Pius IX, according to a certificate dated May 8 and signed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the pope’s Secretary of State.
The honor raises the Iranian envoy to one of the most senior classes of the highest active papal order, founded in 1847 by Pope Pius IX and conferred today on senior diplomats and heads of state.
By itself, the award is not unusual. By Vatican custom, the Grand Cross is ordinarily conferred on resident ambassadors to the Holy See after roughly two years in post, and Mokhtari presented his credentials to Pope Francis in December 2023 — two and a half years before Cardinal Parolin signed this certificate.
But Iranian state media is not treating this as a routine retirement honor. PressTV and the West Asia News Agency are running the certificate alongside images of Mokhtari with Pope Leo XIV, framing the medal as a counter-signal from an American pope to a wartime American president — a quiet diplomatic verdict on Donald Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran
The timing is for them the story.
Top conservatives in the United States seem to agree. Some went to X (formerly Twitter) to express their dismay, including Fox News host Brian Kilmeade.
Leo gave the Holy See’s highest active diplomatic decoration to Iran’s envoy in the same week Trump declared the U.S.-Iran ceasefire “on life support,” called Tehran’s latest peace proposal “garbage,” and signaled openness to renewed military action against the country whose ambassador now wears the Order of Pius IX.
He awarded it days after Trump told Hugh Hewitt — in radio remarks I covered last week — that the first American pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics” because Leo “thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” The accusation is a lie.
The Holy See has opposed nuclear weapons since their advent, and Cardinal Parolin told the Italian press last week that the pope’s position on Iran’s nuclear program is identical to the position the Vatican has held since the dawn of the atomic age.
Parolin quoted Saint Paul’s second letter to Timothy — that Leo will continue to preach peace “in season and out of season” — and added that whether the pope’s message “is pleasing or not, that is another matter.”
Donald Trump has spent more than a month asking, in public and through surrogates, that the first U.S.-born pope behave like an American chaplain to American empire.
The president has told Catholics he does not want a pope who criticizes American wars, who calls Iranian civilian deaths unacceptable, or who tells the world that God does not bless any conflict. Stripped of euphemism, the White House is demanding a pope who does not criticize the United States.
This is the pope who told reporters last month on the papal plane to Angola that the U.S. administration “does not intimidate him,” whose first Easter address ordered the world’s warmakers to “lay down your weapons,” and who has now declared in Latin, on Vatican parchment, that Iran’s envoy is the Church’s colleague in the work of peace.
None of this should be confused with a Vatican endorsement of the Islamic Republic. Pope Leo XIV has condemned Iran’s killing of its own protesters — on the papal flight back from Africa in April, he answered a question about Tehran’s deadly January crackdown by saying,
“When a regime, when a country, takes decisions which take away the lives of people unjustly, then obviously that is something that should be condemned.”
The Vatican’s diplomatic instrument is not moral approval; it is the language by which the Church identifies its negotiating partners and signals that a door of dialogue remains open. That language carries a sharper meaning when the door it keeps open is the one the United States is trying to slam shut.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Catholics and people of goodwill who refuse the bargain the White House keeps demanding — bless the bombing or surrender your patriotism. Pope Leo XIV has refused that again and again since this war commenced in February. We refuse it from where we sit too.
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The fact that the Iranian regime did in fact murder a huge number of protestors cannot be denied, however.
God bless the Holy Father 🙏🏽 ✨️