Trump Backs Down Hours After Pope Leo XIV Called His Iran Threat “Unacceptable”

A two-week ceasefire is now on the table after Leo’s rebuke and more than 15,000 calls and emails from the this community — but Netanyahu is already lobbying against it.

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Pope Leo XIV walked out of his residence at Castel Gandolfo on Tuesday evening and called President Trump’s threat to annihilate Iran “truly unacceptable.”

Hours later, Trump backed down.

Earlier in the day, Trump had warned that if Iran’s leaders refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. Eastern, “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

His administration had already drawn up target packages for Iranian power plants and bridges — strikes that legal experts warned would likely constitute war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.

Then the pope spoke.

“There are certainly issues of international law here,” Leo told reporters in Italian, “but even more so a moral issue for the good of the whole, entire population.”

He asked the world to think about “the many innocent people, so many children, so many elderly, completely innocent, who would also become victims of this escalation.” The war with Iran, the pope said, is “unjust” and “resolving nothing.” He urged “all people of goodwill to search, always, for peace and not violence, to reject war.”

And then Leo asked ordinary Americans to do something about it. “People want peace,” he said, calling on citizens to contact their political leaders directly and demand an off-ramp.

We have been asking the same of you for the past few hours.

Over the past few hours, more than 15,000 phone calls and emails have been sent through standwithpopeleo.com, the tool the Letters from Leo community built and launched.

Readers of this movement have flooded congressional offices. Those calls carried the pope’s message into the rooms where war decisions get made, and those emails landed on staffer screens across Washington.

This is the sixth time since early March that Pope Leo XIV has publicly called for an end to Trump’s war on Iran.

He first demanded a ceasefire on March 15 in a homily at Santa Marta, then repeated the call at his first Easter address, then publicly implored Trump to “look for an off-ramp” on Holy Saturday. The Holy Father called the threat “unacceptable” this evening and meant it. By tonight, Trump had reversed course.

The reversal did not come out of nowhere. It happened because the moral authority of the papacy met the organized conscience of a community that refuses to stay quiet.

Pakistan brokered the ceasefire. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif shuttled between Washington and Tehran through the afternoon and emerged with a two-week pause in hostilities, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and a framework for talks beginning Friday in Islamabad.

The deal rests on a ten-point proposal Iran delivered through Pakistani mediators. Among its provisions: a full halt to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, the lifting of U.S. sanctions stretching back to the Bush administration, reparations from the United States for the damage caused by recent strikes, the withdrawal of American combat forces from bases across the region, and a permanent end to the current war.

Vice President Vance is expected to lead the U.S. delegation to Islamabad.

Here is the warning.

The ceasefire is temporary and already fragile. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is deeply skeptical of the deal, and within hours of the announcement, the White House was signaling that both the reparations clause and the sanctions rollback were “off the table.”

Two central terms of the Iranian proposal may be stripped before peace talks even begin.

Let the pressure slip now, and the ceasefire dies in Islamabad on Friday. Keep it up through the weekend — with calls and emails pouring into every office that matters — and Vance walks into those talks with the pressure of American Catholics on his back.

Pope Leo has called for a prayer vigil for peace at the Vatican this Saturday, April 11. He is asking the universal Church to fast and pray for the negotiators. We should answer him — and pick up the phone again at standwithpopeleo.com.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics and people of goodwill around the world who refuse to accept that the killing of innocents is the price of American foreign policy.

Our place tonight is alongside the children and the elderly the pope named this morning — the ones Trump was ready to bomb by sundown and whose lives were spared because the Holy Father spoke and a community listened.

In an era poisoned by cruelty and cynicism, this community remains rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and war.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because readers are hungry for a faith that meets the moment with the courage to put real pressure on real power.

That hunger has never been more urgent than it is tonight, with a fragile ceasefire hanging by a thread and the pope himself asking us to keep going.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing with Pope Leo XIV against the machinery of war — I am asking you to join us.

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