OF ALL the institutions on this planet, surely the Catholic Church must have the longest record of surviving periods of rule by men who fail to rise to the standard of clarity and virtue one would expect from the near-absolute master of Christianity’s first denomination. The Catholic faith has survived Borgia-era decadence and nepotism, becoming the plaything of the imperial ambitions of the monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire and France, and centuries of direct entanglement in the wars and affairs of princes, quite frequently with Popes themselves leading armies within Italy. As long ago as the 14th century Boccaccio included a wry tale of conversion in the Decameron that is relevant here.
In Boccaccio’s story, which begins a little like a traditional joke, a Christian and a Jew are the firmest of friends. The Christian believes his Jewish friend is doomed by his Judaism to suffer in the afterlife and seeks to convert him. The Jew replies that he will experience Rome, meet its priests and cardinals, examine the Pope and his behaviour, and decide whether or not to convert on that basis. The Christian is in despair, because he knows that the priesthood in Rome are decadent and vile and display none of the virtues he has asserted for Christianity as a whole. He is sure that after witnessing their depravity his friend will refuse to convert. His friend duly returns and tells him that he has witnessed nothing but cruelty, stupidity, malice, selfishness, pride, corruption and venality from the priesthood of Rome, and that it seemed to him that the Pope was the worst of all.
He then astonishes his Christian friend by saying that he will convert – on the basis that a Church which can survive such immoral leadership must truly be blessed by God.
It’s a beautifully constructed satire on the state of the Holy See and the Catholic Church in the 14th century, and on the uncorrected vices which would eventually lead to the blazing indignation of Martin Luther, the Reformation, and a long series of wars between Catholics and Protestants whose effects are still felt today. And it’s an unusually humane treatment of the awkward witness (and sometimes blamed victim) role of the Jewish people in Christian history too.
With the hopeful message for Catholics that their faith has an astonishing ability to survive bad leadership, I turn to the head of the Catholic Church today, Pope Leo XIV.
Robert Francis Prevost is only the second Pope to have come from the Americas, following his immediate predecessor, the Argentine Pope Francis. The current Pope was born in Chicago, the US Democrat stronghold that invented machine politics, was the formative stomping ground in the rise of the ‘community activist’ Barack Obama, and remains a byword for Democrat misrule and corruption. These connections of origin seem relevant given Pope Leo’s latest comments regarding the Iranian air strikes conducted by the US Trump administration and by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government.
On his appointment I and others warned that Pope Leo would likely follow the example of Pope Francis in being, for want of a kinder description, a ‘Woke Pope’. He comes from a modern Western Church tradition which seems united in subordinating traditional Christian teaching to contemporary political agendas. US, UK, Canadian and other national church hierarchies of the Christian faith have largely identified Christian spiritual guidance with leftist-progressive political causes, invoking Christ’s example and biblical scripture in ways which consistently suggest that to be a good Christian means to be a left-wing voter supporting left-wing causes and policy choices.
Pope Leo has consistently made it clear that he interprets Catholicism and Christianity in general as a pacifistic faith, and that he considers all wars as wrong. In his Regina Caeli address on May 11, 2025, he included a directly political pacifist phrase used by both extreme US isolationists of the right and by equally extreme US voices of the left, both of which consider Middle East conflicts to be solely the result of Western intervention, Jewish-Israeli conspiracy and aggressive US foreign policy rather than conflicts generated from Islamic terrorism and terrorist sponsorship via Iran. In declaring ‘No More Wars!’ Pope Leo showed quite blatantly that he either aligns wholly with these people or is ignorant enough not to know who else deploys the same slogan (given Leo’s US origins and long familiarity with US politics, such ignorance seems unlikely).
In 2022, while merely a bishop, Leo said much the same, and here we see another consistent feature. When he first condemned the war in Ukraine, the current Pope did so in the exact same manner as leftist-progressives. He didn’t just say that he wished for peace. He said the war was an ‘imperialist’ attack.
The question then becomes: are Christian and moral reasons for opposing a war (concern about the loss of innocent life, general moral instruction on avoiding violence) simply aligned with a leftist response because they happen to be condemning the same thing, or are people like the Pope reaching their conclusions based on faith in leftism and its rhetoric, which then seeks Christian messages to buttress that initial leftist political take?
It matters whether the Pope decides to condemn a war based on Christianity and its teachings, or whether he decides to condemn a war based on an unrealistic pacifism that extends to all conflicts no matter how just, or whether he decides to condemn a specific war more strongly than any other because, as a leftist, he hates Donald Trump.
If the Pope tells us that all war is unchristian and that leaders authorising military actions are bad Christians and not real Christians, and if he focuses that understanding on Donald Trump intervening in Iran, this moves his commentary from the spiritual to the political, and from established Catholic doctrine to modern leftist-progressive activism. It places him exactly where Democrat controlled and funded, leftist activist websites are sitting, many of which simply appropriate Christian and biblical verses selectively as weapons fighting for leftist and even Communist ends.
In his latest commentary Pope Leo fully reveals that his faith, so far as I can see, is not a traditional Christian one. Traditionally, it was the Catholic Church and Catholic scholars who formed the Western world’s understanding of what a just war is, emphasising that even a such a war must be fought with moral restraint, especially in protecting non-combatants.
It has never been Catholic doctrine that all wars are unjust, and if that is the position the Pope is now taking, an absolutist pacifist position, he is contradicting the entire Catholic heritage of ethics on war. Technically, too, he is stating that every prior Pope who blessed a military endeavour, every Pope who called for a Crusade, every Pope who actively campaigned himself, and every lesser clergyman too who took part in any war (World War II chaplains, for instance) were bad Christians or non-Christians in the same way he thinks that Donald Trump is a bad Christian or a non-Christian.
And it is leftism-progressivism or outright Marxism to condemn all Western action in war, to make your comments based primarily on hatred of Donald Trump, or to describe western wars and interventions as ‘imperialism’ while ignoring the Islamic terrorism that preceded them.
So far as I can tell we do not have a record of strong condemnation of all war from Pope Francis or from Pope Leo applied to wars that do not involve the West, and we did not have that record when wars were entered into by parties and leaders of the left either. According to repeated search enquiries, there is no public record of Robert Francis Prevost ever condemning any military action, intervention, drone strike, bombing or warfare conducted by any US administration prior to Donald Trump. Barack Obama dropped 92,000 bombs on seven different countries and there is no record, or no easily obtained public record based on search enquiries, of the current Pope having criticised that.
Here, however, is the same man talking about the current conflict:
‘Many of our brothers and sisters today suffer because of violent conflicts, caused by the absurd claim that problems and differences can be resolved with war. Instead, we must tirelessly pursue dialogue for peace.
‘Some even claim to involve the name of God in these choices of death. But God cannot be enlisted by darkness. Rather, he always comes to give light, hope and peace to humanity – and it is peace that those who invoke him must seek.’
This moves far beyond a desire for peace. It describes this conflict, and by obvious implication US and Israeli actions as well as Iranian ones, as serving darkness, being a ‘choice of death’, and being inimical to the wishes of God and to hope itself. The final line suggests that nobody who supports the US-Israeli actions can find God.
It’s certainly true that Christianity over the centuries has become a peaceful religion, and it is to its credit that it has done so. Christians largely do not fight the religious wars that once devastated Europe and that set Catholic against Protestant, nor do Popes now raise the sword in their own hand. But that evolution has always been at the urging of spiritual compassion moderated by a pragmatic Catholic realisation, shared by other Christian denominations, that some wars are just. Most particularly, wars in defence of Christendom itself were considered just, and in those the foe being faced was nearly always a prior version of the Islamic foe faced today in Iran itself and for 47 years before that in every place touched by the terrorist proxies Iran was funding.
In his comments on this war, Pope Leo has not once mentioned Islamic terrorism, nor has he condemned the Iranian regime anywhere near as strongly as he has condemned the US administration and the Israeli government. At ‘best’ he has introduced a Christian heresy that the only way to find and serve Christ is through absolute pacifism, at worst he has distorted Christian teaching to serve and excuse a fundamentalist Islamic foe based on a seeming decision, akin to that of leftist-progressivism generally and of neo-Nazis such as Nick Fuentes, of seeing Islam even in its most savage forms as far less of a threat than Trumpian western nationalism or Israeli self-defence and US alliance with Israel is.
It should be noticed when an absolutist call for peace is calling for a peace with monsters, or when that call for peace is shared with monsters too.
The truth is that both an absolutist pacifist approach through the last 2,000 years of Christian history, and a West-hating and blaming approach that saw no possible grounds ever for Western military action being justified, would have seen the likely extinction of the Western world, Christianity as a major religion, and the Catholic faith in particular, long before today. On multiple occasions Christian faith was required to save the West from Islamic conquest, and Pope Leo’s modern progressive leftist politics, however wrapped in a concealing theological cover, would be the shroud on Christendom’s corpse.
