Pope Leo, His Church Splintered by Schism, Doubles Down on Anti-War Crusade and Global Disarmament

The forthcoming publication of a collection of Pope Leo XIV’s speeches and writings on war — entitled “Unarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift” — signals that the Supreme Pontiff is doubling down on a pacifist stance that has angered President Trump.“Unarmed and Disarming” has been published in Italian and will soon appear in English. On Tuesday the Vatican released Pope Leo’s foreword to the volume. He insists that “Above all in the atomic era, the affirmation of the truth must push through: it is not atomic weapons that generate peace, but disarmament.” He decries a “race to armament that today frightens and terrifies.”In June the pope, who leads the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, declared that “in Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.” America’s envoy to the Vatican, Brian Burch, responded — condescended, it could be said — that “When the pope acts as the sovereign leader of the Holy See, he is coequal with world leaders” — meaning that the pope as chief executive is just another politician, not the Vicar of Christ and Successor of St. Peter.A similar sentiment was expressed by Vice President Vance in April, when he reckoned that “in some cases, it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on in the Catholic Church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.” Mr. Vance recently released his own book, “Communion,” which details his conversion to the Church of Rome. The pope, though, hardly sounds like a secular power when he writes that “Disarmed and disarming, Jesus Christ endured injustice, and he rose.” On the other hand, he reckons that “Today, a good 103 States are involved in some way, in a war on Earth. Weapons boom and kill in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Yemen, in Congo and in many other situations.” The former pope, Francis, called this reality a “third world war fought piecemeal.”While Pope Leo’s foreword is littered with references to religious texts, he also cites the “singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan,” who wrote, “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an’ man-handled.” That comes from an unpublished song from 1963, “Go Away You Bomb.” In “Blowin’ in the Wind” from the same year, Mr. Dylan asked “How many times must the cannonballs fly / Before they’re forever banned?”Pope Leo praises past efforts toward “nuclear de-escalation” and denounces “a race to armament that today frightens and terrifies.” He asks for divine leadership to steer humanity toward “paths of non-violence.” Sentiments like that pushed Mr. Trump in April to declare that the pope is “terrible on foreign policy” and “WEAK on Crime.” In February, the day after Operation Epic Fury was launched, Pope Leo called on the warring parties to “stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable abyss.”In 2017 Pope Francis declared that “Weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, create nothing but a false sense of security. They cannot constitute the basis for peaceful coexistence between members of the human family.” The pope’s broadside against nuclear weapons comes on the same day that Mr. Trump approved a landmark civilian nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. It contemplates the construction of a uranium-enrichment facility in the Kingdom. The Church is supportive of the use of nuclear power for strictly peaceful purposes, but it favors strict safeguards. Mr. Trump maintains that Pope Leo’s stance against the war means that in practice the Vatican believes that it is “just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon” because the Islamic Republic is unlikely to voluntarily give up that goal. The release of Pope Leo’s reflections on war and nuclear weapons comes as he vacations at the pontiff’s summer palace, Castel Gandolfo. Immediately before he decamped for that pile south of Rome, he was defied by an arch-conservative splinter group, the Society of St. Pius X. The faction consecrated four bishops against the express command of the Vatican, a step that triggered the excommunication of those bishops and any of the group’s formal followers. The SSPX has refused to repent.On the issue of nuclear weapons, though, the SSPX and Pope Leo could be of common mind. Last year the group published a statement, “Eight Decades of Catholicism and Nuclear Weapons,” that declared that “On the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 1945, the people of Hiroshima, Japan found themselves bathed not in the uncreated light of Our Lord on Mt. Tabor, but rather the infernal flames of the atomic bomb let loose by human design.”

Pope Leo, His Church Splintered by Schism, Doubles Down on Anti-War Crusade and Global Disarmament

Pope Leo, His Church Splintered by Schism, Doubles Down on Anti-War Crusade and Global Disarmament

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