While Trump Promises Hell on Earth, Pope Leo XIV Preaches Peace

From Isaiah’s rebuke on Palm Sunday to “Lay down your weapons!” on Easter morning, the pope chose the poor over empire. An Easter letter about our mission ahead.

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Dear friends,

We have just lived through a Holy Week unlike any in modern memory. From Palm Sunday through this Easter morning, Pope Leo XIV planted himself between the powerful and the powerless — and refused to move.

On Palm Sunday, the pope stood before tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square and quoted Isaiah 1:15 to a world at war: God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

The White House responded within hours with patriotic platitudes about Judeo-Christian values, while MAGA commentators claimed the passage has “no biblical basis.” Isaiah 1:15 appears in every printed Bible on earth.

On Tuesday, Pope Leo implored President Trump directly to find “an off ramp” and end the Iran conflict by Easter.

By Holy Thursday morning, the pope was invoking the memory of Archbishop Óscar Romero — the Salvadoran priest martyred for defending the poor — and calling Christians to “kneel alongside the oppressed.”

That evening, he said, “the imperialist occupation of the world is thus disrupted from within. The violence that until now has been the law is unmasked.”

While the pope washed feet in Rome, priests in Chicago washed the feet of shackled detainees at the Broadview ICE facility.

The Department of Defense, that same week, excluded Catholic personnel from Good Friday services at the Pentagon for the first time in four decades.

Military Archbishop Timothy Broglio went on national television to declare the Iran war unjust under Catholic moral doctrine.

On Good Friday, Pope Leo carried the cross through all fourteen stations at the Colosseum.

His Easter Vigil homily proclaimed that “man can kill the body, but not love” and that “no tomb can imprison the God of love.”

This morning — Easter Sunday — he stood on the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica and delivered his first Urbi et Orbi: “Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace!”

We will never forget this week. It’ll be one of the defining points of Leo’s early pontificate.

I want to speak from my heart for a moment.

This Lenten season has been one of the most meaningful of my life. A little over forty days ago, we began this journey together — ashes on our foreheads, the weight of the world pressing down.

We walked, day by day, through scripture and silence and struggle, toward this Easter morning. I have poured everything I have into this work, and you have met me at every turn with generosity, prayer, and a shared conviction that the Gospel still has the power to change this country.

Reading your messages, feeling your prayers, knowing that twenty thousand people are on this road alongside me — I am grateful beyond measure. I thank God for the gift of this resurrected community, and I will never take it for granted.

I dedicate my entire heart to this work — not because I have all the answers, but because I believe, with everything in me, that God is doing something through this community that is bigger than any one of us.

Letters from Leo has become something I could not have imagined when I started writing a few months ago: a community of Catholics and people of goodwill who refuse to accept cruelty as the final word, who believe the Gospel demands more than silence when human dignity is under assault, and who have walked together through this entire Lenten season with a purpose I have never experienced before.

As one renowned Vatican journalist wrote this week, Pope Leo is “a lion who knows when to roar.” This community has found its own voice alongside him.

Now we must carry the pope’s mission forward in our own country.

The MAGA movement spent this Holy Week comparing Donald Trump to Jesus Christ at the White House while the Pentagon excluded Catholic troops from worship.

Certain bishops rewrote the pope’s anti-war message on conservative talk shows, hoping no one would notice the distortion. Catholic social teaching calls what we are witnessing by its proper name: authoritarianism dressed in the language of faith.

Under Pope Leo XIV, with the grace of God, we will defeat this scourge of MAGA authoritarianism once and for all — because the Gospel will always outlast the empires that try to co-opt it, and no tomb, as the pope proclaimed last night, can imprison the God of love.

I am asking you to join us in this mission.

Letters from Leo is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for truth and courage — for a faith that refuses to kneel before the idols of power and nationalism.

We are winning — Catholic support for this administration is collapsing, the moral argument is breaking through — and this is the moment to go all in.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the forces of authoritarianism — please join us.

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