Pope Leo XIV Says Christians Never Side With Those Who Launch Bombs

The pope told Chaldean bishops that Christians never side with those who launch bombs. In the United States, Trump and Hegseth insist that God blesses the Iran campaign.

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Pope Leo XIV stood before the bishops of the Chaldean Church in Rome on Friday and delivered a theological verdict on war as his home nation perpetuates a new one in the Middle East: “God blesses no conflict,” the pope told the gathered prelates.

Christians who follow the Prince of Peace, he said, “never side with those who yesterday wielded the sword and today launch bombs.”

The address came during the Chaldean Synod, convened in the Apostolic Palace to elect a new patriarch for one of Christianity’s oldest communities — a church whose roots stretch back to the apostles Thomas, Addai, and Mari, and whose faithful carried the Gospel as far as India and China centuries before European missionaries left port.

These are the Christians of Iraq, the very people living under the bombs the pope was describing.

Pope Leo spoke as a pastor who has been confronting the Trump administration’s Iran war for weeks.

He called the violence “absurd and inhuman,” driven by “greed and hatred” and spreading “ferociously in the very lands that witnessed the birth of salvation.” The sacred places of the Christian East, he said, are being “desecrated by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives.”

“No interest can be worth the lives of the weakest, of children, of families,” Pope Leo said. “No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood.”

Compare that with what is happening at the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who has the words “Deus Vult” tattooed on his arm, the battle cry of the medieval Crusaders — has described the Iran campaign as a fight against “religious fanatics” and introduced monthly Christian worship services at the Department of Defense, framing American military power as an instrument of divine purpose.

On March 25, he prayed to God that there would be “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received more than 200 complaints from service members at roughly 50 installations reporting that their commanders are telling troops the Iran war is “part of God’s divine plan” to usher in the return of Jesus Christ.

One commander reportedly told his unit that President Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.”

Trump himself said earlier this month that God supports the Iran campaign, because “God is good.”

Pope Leo sees what this language is doing to the faith he leads.

The Chaldean Christians he addressed on Thursday trace their lineage to the first century, and they are watching American warplanes — blessed, their pilots are told, by God himself — destroy the region where Christianity was born.

The pope named the pseudo-theology behind those bombs as fraudulent.

A faith built on the Beatitudes cannot coexist with a foreign policy that rips Psalm 144 from its liturgical context and repurposes it as a Pentagon talking point\.

“It is not military action that will create spaces of freedom or times of peace,” the pope told the bishops, “but only the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue between peoples.” He urged the Chaldean Church to “cry out to the world” that followers of Christ stand against the violence consuming their homeland.

On Tuesday, called Trump’s escalation “unacceptable” and urged American Catholics to contact their members of Congress.

Friday’s address was not directed at Washington. The audience was a small gathering of Eastern Catholic bishops preparing to elect a patriarch. But the pope chose that room — and that community, whose history is scarred by the wars now being waged in God’s name — to make the case against the war machine that Catholic teaching has always demanded.

Hegseth asks God for “overwhelming violence” and “no mercy” towards his enemies behind a Pentagon podium. Across the Atlantic, the pope stands with Iraqi bishops whose Christianity predates America by fifteen centuries and calls the bombing a blasphemy.

The question for American Catholics is which man sounds more like a follower of Jesus Christ.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the Chaldean Christians — and with every person of goodwill — who believe that the name of God cannot be stamped onto a bombing campaign and that the faith born in the lands now under fire demands peacemakers, not larping crusaders.

In an era when the most powerful military on earth invokes Christ to justify war, we remain rooted in a Gospel that commands us to love our enemies, to shelter the vulnerable, and to refuse the blasphemy of baptizing violence in holy water.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth about power — a faith that stands with the ancient Christians of Iraq rather than with the men dropping bombs on their homeland. That hunger has never been more urgent.

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

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