“There Is No Such Thing as a Holy War” — Pope Leo XIV Rebukes the Iran War a Week Before the Midterms

Recovering from lung surgery, the pope sent a video to the 40th anniversary of John Paul II’s 1986 Assisi summit. JD Vance and Mike Johnson had tried to baptize the war with just war theory.

Pope Leo XIV delivers a video message to religious leaders gathered in Assisi, Italy, for the 40th anniversary of Saint John Paul II’s 1986 World Day of Prayer for Peace, on Oct. 27, 2026. (Vatican News)

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Pope Leo XIV told the religious leaders of the world on Tuesday that “there is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy.”

He said it by video.

The Community of Sant’Egidio had gathered hundreds of leaders from dozens of countries in Assisi for “Unarmed and Disarming Peace,” and Leo had planned to close the meeting in person, but his doctors advised against the helicopter flight two weeks after surgeons at Rome’s Gemelli hospital removed part of his right lung.

So he spoke from Rome, and he left no room for an exception.

“War can never be waged in the name of God,” the pope said.

The date carried its own meaning.

On Oct. 27, 1986, Saint John Paul II invited the leaders of the world’s religions to the tomb of Saint Francis to pray for peace, and Leo told the gathering he would very much have liked to stand there with them forty years later.

Instead he warned of a “troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics” and asked the faithful of every tradition to reject “the religious justification of war.”

He also quoted Magnifica Humanitas, his May encyclical on artificial intelligence, where Leo wrote that “to fight in the name of religion means attacking religion itself.”

None of this is new language for him, which is the point.

At the Colosseum a year ago, Leo took up a warning from Pope Francis and made it his own: “War is never holy; only peace is holy, because it is willed by God!”

In June, opening a consistory of the College of Cardinals, he told them that war “is never blessed by God.”

A pope who says the same thing three times in twelve months, in three different rooms, is telling you he means it.

A week before the vote

The message arrives seven days before Americans vote in the first midterm elections of President Donald Trump’s second term. It also arrives 242 days into the war the United States and Israel launched against Iran on Feb. 28, the conflict that has done more than any other to set this White House against the first American pope.

Trump has called Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and by May he was calling him “useless.”

In March, he rejected the pope’s plea for a ceasefire with a boast that the United States was “obliterating Iran.” This month, he promised there would be “no attacks before the elections,” which tells you how the White House now schedules its bombing.

The administration has also tried to argue for the war using Catholic teaching.

At a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia in April, Vice President JD Vance invoked “more than a 1,000-year tradition of just war theory” and warned that it was “very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, followed the next morning. “There’s something called the just war doctrine,” he told reporters, calling the matter “very well settled.”

The men who actually teach that doctrine had already applied it to Iran.

Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington judged the war “not morally legitimate” in March, explaining that Catholic teaching does not support a preventive war built on speculation about the future.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who shepherds every Catholic in the American armed forces, declared it unjust in April. And on the papal flight to Madrid in June, Leo told reporters that “in Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.”

The doctrine they borrowed

Now the doctrine itself is under review. In paragraph 192 of Magnifica Humanitas, Leo wrote that the “just war” theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” while preserving a nation’s right to defend itself in the strictest sense. His cardinals took up that paragraph at their June consistory.

Vance tried to get ahead of it.

After the encyclical appeared, he told NBC News that “you have new technologies of warfare, so you have to update just war doctrine.”

That is a strange sentence from a man who, weeks earlier, held up the old version as proof that the pope had his theology wrong. Johnson, for his part, built his rebuke of the pope on a tradition whose own guardian now calls it obsolete as a license for modern war.

Tuesday’s message hardens the case.

Under Church teaching, even a just war was a rare and tragic concession to a fallen world, and the idea of a holy war has no place in it.

When Leo says that no war can be waged in God’s name, he is speaking to every leader who has tried to draft heaven into a bombing campaign, and Washington has supplied plenty of them this year.

Pete Hegseth preached a Crusade theology from the Pentagon podium in March, and Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, answered him with a sharp rebuke. In April, Trump invoked the name of God while warning Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

Then, last Thursday, a dozen American bishops led by Denver Archbishop James Golka prayed over Trump in the Oval Office, and the president’s campaign posted the video twelve days before the election. Two of those prelates have since apologized or tried to distance themselves. Leo named no American on Tuesday, though anyone in Washington could hear whom he meant.

He ended with a prayer that God would make believers “unarmed instruments of his peace,” borrowing the voice of the saint whose tomb he could not visit.

Next Tuesday, millions of American Catholics will carry that prayer into a voting booth, with the war unfinished and a president who has promised only that the bombs will wait until after the vote.

Here is the pope’s full address, with Letters from Leo subtitles.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal McElroy, and the countless Catholics and people of goodwill who refuse to let the name of God be stamped on a missile.

Jesus reserved his blessing for the peacemakers and called them children of God; nothing in the Gospel extends it to the bomb or to the boast that comes with it. In a season when politicians quote Augustine to sell a war and campaigns turn bishops into backdrops, that blessing is worth defending out loud.

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