This piece also appears in the Sunday Des Moines Register
“The Pope is the true American leader,” Italian Senator and former prime minister Matteo Renzi said Monday on National Public Radio’s On Point. “Not President Trump. President Trump is a nightmare.”
Stumbling upon that clip Monday without context might have stopped some in their tracks: Trump supporters, because a foreign leader seemed to be gratuitously insulting their president; secular Americans recoiling at the implication that all should become Catholics, if we weren’t already.
But as a non-Christian who’s been waiting for someone with international clout, prominence and a conscience to stand up to Trump’s brutish, dictatorial ways, it felt as if a call to the universe had been answered.
Where have the president’s Cabinet, fellow GOP Congress members or Supreme Court appointees been when they should have been challenging his unilateral actions including warfare? Where were state and local Republican officeholders when he was having innocent people grabbed off the streets to deport them to who-knows-where,based mainly on how they look or sound? And that, after he’d pardoned nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 2021 insurrectionists.
Clinging to Trump like wet t-shirts is where. And they still are.
So it took Pope Leo – the first American pope – to stand up and speak truth to power in a way no one else could or would. The Catholic Church claims 1.4 billion members worldwide.
What provoked the pope were Trump’s Easter Sunday and subsequent social media posts the next day threatening to blow up Iran if it didn’t promptly open the Strait of Hormuz. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,”Trump boasted.
Pope Leo responded that the threat was unacceptable. It was. In a prayer service, he said, “Lord, enlighten the leaders of the nations, so that they may have the courage to abandon projects of death, halt the arms race, and place the lives of the most vulnerable at the center.”
Trump responded by calling Leo “weak on crime,” as if law enforcement was in his job description. The president also cut $11 million in federal funding from Catholic charities in Miami.
Not to be overlooked, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is Catholic, weighed in from a Turning Point USA event to say, “In the same way that it’s important for the Vice President of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
That’s interesting because Turning Point, the Christian Nationalist organization, has built its brand mixing religion and politics to serve its conservative agenda. And in Republican-led states whose leaders kowtow to Trump, they’re forcing religion into public education and other places it doesn’t belong. Last week’s news included an Iowa bill allowing foster families to force their religious views on the children in their temporary custody. And in Texas, a federal appeals court gave its blessing to letting the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms.
How does Vance defend any of that?
America has been feeling like a lonely place for those of us who believe the U.S. has no business being at war with Iran - or, for that matter, Venezuela, Cuba or Gaza. But no Iowa member of Congress will say that. Iowa’s entire delegation – Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, Representatives Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller Meeks and Randy Feenstra - gave Trump the green light to attack Iran, undermining the War Powers Act.
And South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsay Graham went so far as to declare, “America First is to kill people who wish us ill…”
Just for wishing that? Couldn’t another country follow that same logic against us?
Trump even stresses that he’s not just after Iran’s nuclear weapons, but also its infrastructure, in ways that would hurt civilians - like leaving bridges and power plants “burning, exploding, and never to be used again.”
But in a visit to Cameroon the week before last, the Pope continued to underscore his message: “The masters of War pretended not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild… Jesus told us blessed are the peacemakers, but woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain.”
It often seems, under this Administration, that we’re functioning without a moral compass to pull us together - a leader who appeals to our better selves, and reminds us who we were when the Constitution was written, when the Statue of Liberty welcomed migrants, and the Civil Rights and women’s movements ushered in equal treatment. As someone who courted and won the votes of many religious Christians, it seems odd that Trump never talks about the core values and principles that guide his thinking - religious or otherwise. That is, other than the gratuitous uses of abortion and transgender people.
Are there any, or is it purely power? What does it mean when Trump goes and replaces Jesus’ picture with one of himself in an AI post? It means nothing is sacred to this President.
So for now, I’m pinning my hopes on a broad public response from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, endorsing what Pope Leo is saying about America’s war on Iran. He has said he won’t be intimidated into silence because, “Too many innocent people are being killed, and I think someone has to stand up and say, there is a better way.”
Amen to that.
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