Cardinal Robert McElroy  of Washington

Although Pope Leo XIV has called for an end to the U.S.-Israel war in Iran, he has left US Cardinals McElroy of Washington and Cupich of Chicago to make the most stinging criticisms of the US decision to go to war without the backing of the UN. 

Cardinal Robert McElroy argues that  the United States and Israel have failed to meet the basic criteria for the war to be considered morally just. There was no imminent threat to either power; the US and Israel did not explain clearly what their intentions were; there was no clarity around the level of harm that would ensue, set against any likely benefits.

“Lebanon may fall into civil war,” insists McElroy. “The world’s oil supply is under great strain. The potential disintegration of Iran could well produce new and dangerous realities. And the possibility of immense casualties on all sides is immense. For all of these reasons, Catholic teaching leads to the conclusion that our entry into this war was not morally legitimate.”

Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Leo’s hometown Chicago, strongly criticised the use of media by the Trump administration to popularise the war.

“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening,” says Cupich.  “Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store.”

Meanwhile the Filipino Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, vice president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences, expressed the same disdain for high-tech warfare:

“From distant command centers, military operators stare at screens where maps, radar signals and algorithm-generated targets move like icons in a computer game. A cursor moves. A coordinate is selected. A click is made. And a missile is launched.” 

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State told Vatican Media last week:

“If states were to be recognized as having a right to ‘preventive war,’ according to their own criteria and without a supranational legal framework, the whole world would risk being set ablaze.”

Disdaining the very idea of ‘supranational legal frameworks’ the Trump administration seems set on a collision course with the Catholic church’s leadership, at the very moment the church has acquired its first ever US pope.

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