‘Stop the Spiral of Violence’ — Pope Leo XIV Demands End to Trump’s Iran War

The first American pope used his Angelus to deliver a forceful moral plea to end Operation Epic Fury — the latest in a pattern of prophetic opposition to Trump’s military campaigns across the globe.

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On Sunday morning, as the smoke still hung over Tehran and Isfahan, Pope Leo XIV stood before the faithful in St. Peter’s Square and did what he has done at every turn of this brutal presidency — he spoke the truth.

“Stability and peace are not built with mutual threats, nor with weapons, which sow destruction, pain, and death,” the pope declared, his voice carrying over the thousands gathered for the Angelus, “but only through a reasonable, authentic, and responsible dialogue.”

The words landed less than 36 hours after the Pentagon launched Operation Epic Fury — a joint U.S.-Israeli assault that struck hundreds of targets across Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leveling military installations from Tehran to the southern coast, and, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, claiming more than 200 lives — including at least 85 children at a girls’ primary school.

Eighty-five children.

As I reported yesterday, a source close to the pontiff told me Pope Leo viewed the strikes as “immoral, illegal, and a grave threat to the entire human family.” Today, he made that conviction public — and unmistakable.

“Faced with the possibility of a tragedy of enormous proportions,” the pope continued, “I address to the parties involved a heartfelt appeal to assume the moral responsibility to stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable abyss!”

A Pope Who Sees It Coming

What makes Pope Leo XIV’s moral witness so extraordinary is not just that he speaks after the bombs fall. It’s that he speaks before they do — and the world ignores him.

When Donald Trump sent special forces into Venezuela in January to seize President Nicolás Maduro, the pope had already warned against it. “I truly believe that it is better to look for ways of dialogue, maybe pressure, including economic pressure,” Leo had counseled — words that went unheeded as American soldiers landed on Venezuelan soil.

When the administration turned its gaze toward Cuba, threatening an economic blockade that Cuba’s own bishops warned could spark “social chaos and violence,” Pope Leo voiced his “great concern” and called for “sincere and effective” dialogue.

The Vatican quietly began mediating between Washington and Havana — a diplomacy that, sources say, remains neither “rosy nor easy.”

And when Trump escalated threats against Iran’s nuclear sites last June, Pope Leo stood in this same square and pleaded: “Stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss.”

He warned that “war does not solve problems, but rather it amplifies them and produces deep wounds in the history of people that take generations to heal.”

No one listened. And now the abyss has opened.

The Moral Crescendo

There is a pattern here that demands our attention. Venezuela. Cuba. Iran — twice. In each case, the first American pope has placed himself between the machinery of American military power and the people it would crush. In each case, he has spoken first in the language of diplomacy and then, when diplomacy was ignored, in the language of prophecy.

In his annual State of the World address to 184 ambassadors this January, Pope Leo warned that “war is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.”

Those words were not abstract. They were diagnostic. He was naming the sickness he saw metastasizing through Washington — a government addicted to force, contemptuous of dialogue, and indifferent to the bodies it leaves behind.

Today, as he closed his Angelus appeal, the pope offered what amounted to a prayer and a command: “May diplomacy recover its role and may the good of peoples be promoted, peoples who long for peaceful coexistence founded on justice. And let us continue to pray for peace.”

Diplomacy had been recovering its role. An Omani foreign minister had announced that Iran had agreed to nuclear concessions. Peace was, in the pope’s own assessment, within reach. And then the bombs fell.

Catholic moral theology is unambiguous about this.

The just war tradition — developed by Augustine, refined by Aquinas, reaffirmed by every pope from Leo XIII to Leo XIV — requires that war be a last resort, that it protect the innocent, and that the violence inflicted not exceed the threat.

A strike that kills 85 schoolgirls while a diplomatic channel remains open violates every one of those conditions.

Simply put, it is sin.

This is a moment that will define this pontificate — and it should define us, too. Pope Leo XIV has spent nine months building a moral case, brick by brick, that the Gospel does not bend to the flag. Not even the American flag.

He has done what prophets do: he has warned, and warned, and warned again. And today, standing in the sunlight of St. Peter’s Square with the weight of dead children on his conscience and ours, he warned once more.

The question is no longer whether Pope Leo XIV will stand against this war. He has. The question is whether we will stand with him.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of American Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who believe that peace is not weakness and that war is never the first answer.

In an era poisoned by cruelty and division, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and authoritarianism.

We’re not just watching history. We’re making it.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and cynicism.

They’re looking for courage, for truth, for love made visible in action — and right now, as American bombs kill children in Iran and our pope pleads for peace, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you’re ready to build a country — and a Church — that chooses dialogue over destruction and justice over domination, then I’m asking for you to join us.

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