For a long time, progressive Christians have tended to equate the faith with humanitarian illusions—with utopian sentimentality rather than a morally demanding politics of prudence rooted in right reason and natural law. Divine caritas has been displaced by a selective, highly politicized compassion, and the Christian affirmation of moral equality has transformed into a doctrinaire egalitarianism, at once naive and aggressive. Inequality per se is now treated as a grave moral fault, as if the comprehensive leveling of the social order were either possible or desirable.
An older Catholic Church’s recognition of the grave evils associated with totalitarian regimes and ideologies has largely been forgotten. Islam is described as a “religion of peace” by popes, theologians, and bishops alike, and any suggestion to the contrary is dismissed as rooted in fear or ignorance. In recent papal pronouncements, self-governing nations are treated with suspicion, while international organizations—however prone to denounce decent Western political orders and imbued with hostility to a Christian view of the human person—are assumed to be the primary vehicles of a global common good. Borders must remain open, whatever the consequences for the stability of political communities facing large-scale immigration; “migrants” are cast as the contemporary image of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt ahead of King Herod’s henchmen. The survival of Europe’s age-old “Christian mark,” as the French Catholic political philosopher Pierre Manent has put it, no longer appears to be a vital concern of the Vatican.
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Alas, Pope Leo XIV, in many ways an admirable shepherd and a sincere witness to the Gospel, repeats many of these claims, as if dissent can only arise from greed, self-interest, or a taste for conflict. He does not appear to be an especially political figure, and it would be a mistake to cast him as a full adherent of a secular “religion of humanity.” Nor should one expect him to endorse particular military interventions; his commitment to the “peace of Christ” is commendable. If his predecessor Pope Francis sometimes indulged leftist movements and ideologies (even those, like Castro’s Cuba, that persecuted his co-religionists) and was filled with an ideological animus against the United States, Leo seems motivated by specifically religious or spiritual considerations. Yet, troublingly, this rather apolitical pontiff appears to have adopted “humanitarianism” as his default position, so to speak.
As a result, the pope has issued a series of harsh, if general, admonitions directed at the efforts of the United States and Israel to prevent the Islamic regime in Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, supporting militant groups, and waging repression at home. He has said little to suggest a clear grasp of the nature of the threat. Pope Leo has also remained largely silent about the Iranian government’s conduct toward its own people and its decades-long hostility toward the West.
His condemnations thus appear selective, a tendency often associated with pacifist, or functionally pacifist, outlooks. A fuller recognition of the regime’s ideological zeal, and of the links some draw between concepts like jihad and the subordinate status historically imposed on non-Muslims, might complicate the assumption that negotiation or dialogue alone can resolve every political or military conflict.
These self-imposed blinders have led the pope to make some dubious empirical claims. During his November–December 2025 visit to Lebanon, the American-born pontiff praised the country as a model of religious “coexistence,” a place where “Islam and Christianity are both present and respected.” But Christians have fled Lebanon in large numbers since the Lebanese Civil War; the country has undergone a profound demographic shift; and Hezbollah has intimidated Christians and Sunni Muslims alike. Today, as many Maronite Catholics may live in places like France and Michigan as in Lebanon itself.
The pope’s occasional criticism of jihadists is not enough. He has an obligation to speak more forcefully on behalf of fellow Christians who face persecution in countries such as Nigeria and across parts of Africa and the Middle East. Respect for diplomatic restraint is important, but one should also expect theological and moral clarity, not reliance on humanitarian clichés. At the very least, the pope should avoid sounding like a political faction at prayer—surely not his intention—as the Canadian commentator David Warren recently warned in The Catholic Thing.
The Augustinian pontiff would benefit from engaging more deeply with the broader Christian tradition on Islam and on questions of war and peace. John of Damascus, writing during the early rise of Islam, offered a clear-eyed account of how its beliefs and practices diverged from biblical teaching. Thomas Aquinas addressed Islam and Muhammad with notable frankness in the Summa Contra Gentiles. In the twentieth century, Hilaire Belloc suggestively described Islam as a highly one-sided “Christian heresy.” And in his 2006 Regensburg Address, Pope Benedict XVI urged Muslims to engage the idea of the divine Logos, to reject the identification of God’s sovereignty with sheer will or arbitrariness, and to renounce violence as an essential instrument of religion.
Christians have long noted the contrast between Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, and Muhammad, a warrior, conqueror, and theocratic ruler. That contrast is worthy of acknowledgment and sustained reflection. Simplistic or politically correct formulas should not substitute for an honest reckoning with historical realities. At the same time, any pope, this one included, deserves credit for engaging respectfully with Muslims open to dialogue, and with all people of good will.
Recent social media posts by President Trump were lacking in respect for Pope Leo and expressed in a crude, indecorous, and extremely counterproductive way. A president who often does the right things for the right reasons once again committed self-sabotage by tweet. I am not among those who thinks he self-consciously committed blasphemy. But even someone who does, the Catholic New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, acknowledged in that newspaper’s pages just how unilateral and one-sided Pope Leo’s recent interventions about the military campaign against Iran have been.
As Douthat correctly notes, to Leo’s credit, “he has brought greater stability to the Church in part by presenting a more paternal face to conservatives and taking their concerns about ritual and doctrinal clarity more seriously.” That effort to heal internal divisions deserves praise. But, Douthat adds, “he still sounds like Francis when discussing issues like immigration or climate change,” in ways that “can show lapses of charity and clarity.” He also observes that papal economic commentary “can sound not just left-wing but vaporous.” More fundamentally, the Vatican’s approach to foreign policy “can drift toward a blithe pacifism that isn’t true to the Catholic tradition.” Leo, in this view, does not limit his critique to unjust wars or particular conflicts, but seems to oppose war “in principle.”
Douthat, who has his own reservations about both the justice of the U.S. conflict with Iran and the coherence of the administration’s approach to it, nonetheless suggests that it would be reasonable for a Catholic official in the Pentagon to press the Vatican to acknowledge that military power can have a legitimate moral role.
Despite certain statements to the contrary, Pope Leo often seems to assume that the Gospel requires a pacifist stance from conscientious citizens and statesmen. In doing so, he risks disarming them in the face of what Edmund Burke called “the inventiveness of wickedness.” More troublingly, in his Palm Sunday homily of March 29, 2026, he suggested that God does not heed the prayers of those who wage war.
That claim raises difficult questions. What of warrior saints such as Joan of Arc, Saint Sebastian, Saint George, Ignatius of Loyola, or Demetrius of Thessaloniki? Was Pope Benedict XVI mistaken to praise Winston Churchill and the British people for their stand against Adolf Hitler during the Battle of Britain, crediting them with helping to save the West from Nazism? And was the French Catholic patriot Charles de Gaulle wrong to resist Nazi domination and defend the liberty and independence of France after 1940? The questions answer themselves.
Pope Leo is devoted to Augustine of Hippo, as his recent visit to Algeria made clear. There, he again described Islam as a peaceful religion, despite ongoing violence against Christians in that authoritarian, often anti-Western state. Yet his Augustinianism appears highly spiritualized and selective. He gives little attention to central Augustinian themes—original sin, human fallenness, and the duty of responsible leaders to preserve an uneasy temporal peace, the “tranquility of order,” against the lawless and the wicked.
As the Assumptionist priest Ernest Fortin has argued, Augustine understood that no war is morally pure; all are tainted by injustice. But because human beings are flawed and conflict is part of the fallen condition, he developed the framework of just war to make war “a trifle less unjust.” He harbored no illusions about the limits of Roman virtue. Yet when an imperfect Rome faced barbarian invasions, Augustine did not hesitate to side with civilization against barbarism.
Nor did he think that doing so meant abandoning the Gospel. In his “Letter 189 to Boniface,” Augustine noted that when Roman soldiers asked what they should do, John the Baptist replied: “Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages” (Luke 3:14). Augustine pointedly added that John the Baptist “certainly did not prohibit them from serving in the military when he commanded them to be content with their pay.” Christ, too, did not question the military service of the righteous Roman centurion.
Two of the most influential Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr and C. S. Lewis, made similar arguments. In his 1940 essay “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” Niebuhr argued that pacifists “do not know human nature well enough to be concerned about the contradictions between the law of love and the sin of man.” He put the problem bluntly: refusing to acknowledge that sin “introduces an element of conflict into the world invariably means that a morally perverse preference is given to tyranny over anarchy (war).” The false peace imposed by tyranny, he added, “has nothing to do with the peace of the kingdom of God.”
Pope Leo would do well to engage these authoritative voices, and the broader Christian tradition, on questions of war and peace. He is right to call human beings to the “better angels of their nature” and to warn against hatred, rash recourse to war, and the lust for conquest. In doing so, he fulfills his responsibility as Vicar of Christ to remind us of “the peace of God which surpasses all understanding.”
But his tendency to conflate Christianity with a kind of functional pacifism marks a departure from older Christian wisdom. In thinking about war and peace, one must remember that the prudence of citizens and statesmen—guided by right reason and the moral law—remains the proper locus of judgment in political life. Invocations of the Gospel cannot substitute for the exercise of that moral and civic responsibility.