Pope Leo Declares ‘No Such Thing as a Holy War’ — Ignoring Bloody Crusades

Pope Leo XIV’s pronouncement on Thursday that “there is no such thing as a holy war” cements his status as the globe’s preeminent pacifist — and a pontiff at odds with his own Church’s history.The Bishop of Rome made the remark — he also declared that “only peace is holy” — in a video message to a group of religious leaders gathered in the Italian hilltop town of Assisi, some two and a half hours north of Rome. Assisi is a pilgrimage site famed as the birthplace of Saint Francis, the founder of the Franciscan order and a patron saint of Italy. Francis, though, spent a year fighting in a war between Assisi and another city, Perugia. Assisi was ultimately defeated in 1202 at the Battle of Collestrada.The pope was scheduled to appear in person at the gathering, which included the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, but he is recovering from surgery earlier this month to remove a portion of his lung that was found to be cancerous. The pontiff is believed to be cancer-free, and the Vatican insists that he will undertake an anticipated trip to South America next month.On Wednesday, the Holy See’s foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, acknowledged that the cancer diagnosis was “a bit of a game-changer” for the Vatican and a corrective to the narrative that the first American pope was something of a “Superman, a Superpope” after his election in 2025 and his decision to “hit the ground running.” His predecessor, Pope Francis, had been beset by health issues that muted the final years of his papacy. Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was the first pope in some 600 years to retire.Pope Leo’s contention at Assisi that “war can never be waged in the name of God” was accompanied by a denunciation of a “troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics.” In April, he described the conflict among America, Israel, and Iran as “a war which many people have said is unjust.” He also called President Trump’s rhetoric “truly unacceptable,” a barb that prompted the president to call the Vicar of Christ “terrible for foreign policy” and “a very liberal person.”On Palm Sunday, Pope Leo told throngs in St. Peter’s Square that “this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” That was understood as a veiled — or not-so-veiled — attack on the war being waged against Iran by Washington and Jerusalem.In May Pope Leo wrote in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” that “it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.” Humanity possesses far more effective tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, he argues, including “dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”The Catholic Catechism mandates that war is permissible only when “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain,” and when “all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.” “Serious prospects of success” must also weigh into consideration and the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.Pope Leo’s assertion that war undertaken under the banners of religion has no place in the Church sits uneasily with Rome’s sanctioning of the Crusades during medieval times to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim rule. When Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, he promised that “all who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.”The violent fervor claimed the lives of thousands of Jews who were massacred by Crusaders en route to the Middle East. The Church sanctioned a series of Crusades between 1096 and 1291 — most of which failed. Rome has never issued a blanket repudiation of the Crusades. In 2000, Pope John Paul II, as part of a “Day of Pardon” service, asked forgiveness for “infidelities to the Gospel committed by some of our brethren, especially during the second millennium” — an indirect allusion to the Crusades.The following year, John Paul traveled to Greece and expressed sorrow over the 1204 sack of Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox stronghold now known as Istanbul, by Western Crusaders. Almost four decades earlier, in 1965, the Church had formally repudiated antisemitism in the declaration “Nostra Aetate,” which transformed Catholic-Jewish relations. Earlier this month, Pope Leo commemorated that milestone by telling a delegation from the American Jewish Committee that “the Church does not tolerate antisemitism and fights against it, on the basis of the Gospel itself.”

Pope Leo Declares ‘No Such Thing as a Holy War’ — Ignoring Bloody Crusades

Pope Leo Declares ‘No Such Thing as a Holy War’ — Ignoring Bloody Crusades

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