The three highest clerics of the Roman Catholic Church who lead archdioceses in the United States said, in a blunt statement released on Monday, that the “moral role of the United States in confronting evil around the world” is in question for the first time in decades. Their criticism of the principles of the Trump administration — although without mentioning President Donald Trump by name — intensifies demonstrations by the American Catholic Church against the country’s main leaders.
In 2026, the country entered “the deepest and most painful debate about the moral foundation of United States actions in the world since the end of the Cold War”, says the unusual statement signed by Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago; by Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington; and by Cardinal Joseph Tobin, archbishop of Newark, New Jersey.
Citing recent events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland as factors that have raised fundamental questions about the use of military force, the cardinals call for a “genuinely moral foreign policy” in which “military action should be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not as a normal instrument of national policy.”
The cardinals did not elaborate on specific policies or offer concrete positions on the countries mentioned in the statement. They made a point of framing the statement as a message that goes beyond partisan categories. But the context is clear. The president threatened to “take Greenland by force.” In Venezuela, the Trump administration ordered US troops to attack vessels that, according to Washington, were trafficking drugs, and American forces captured and removed President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from the country, without authorization from Congress.
Pope Leo XIV has highlighted Venezuela’s “sovereignty” and has called for dialogue rather than violence. He also repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine and said Trump’s peace plan would bring a “huge change” in the alliance between Europe and the United States.
In interviews and in their statement, the American cardinals expressed concern about the rise of a global order based on force and domination rather than peace and freedom.
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“The post-World War II consensus of dialogue among nations, the sovereign rights of countries, the refusal to use war to pursue goals of national predominance and gain — that consensus is breaking down now,” McElroy said in an interview. He was appointed by Pope Francis to the influential position of Archbishop of Washington just weeks before Trump’s second inauguration in 2025.
The cardinals’ statement was inspired in part by conversations the three had earlier this month in Rome, during a closed-door meeting to which Leo had summoned all the world’s cardinals.
In discussions with other cardinals, the three Americans were struck by “a sense of alarm about the direction things were going in the world and some of the actions that were being taken here in the United States,” Cupich said in an interview. Among his colleagues’ concerns was the dismantling, last year, of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a decision that interrupted foreign aid flows destined for the world’s poorest countries.
Shortly after meeting with the cardinals, Leão gave a speech to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican, in early January, in a speech that, in practice, functions as the pope’s annual foreign policy declaration. In the speech, the American-born pontiff condemned “a diplomacy based on force” and a “zeal for war”, without mentioning world leaders by name.
Leão succeeded Francisco in May and is seen by many observers as more reserved than his predecessor, known for his expansive style but generally committed to similar priorities of solidarity with the weak and oppressed. In his eight months leading the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Leão has repeatedly called for peace and dialogue in sensitive international conflicts and reprimanded political leaders for what he describes as unfair treatment of migrants, the poor and the exploited.
Leão has, until now, avoided direct confrontations with Trump, but his stance in the face of the turbulent political scenario in his home country has been closely monitored in the United States and abroad. In October, as Trump stepped up his deportation campaign in the pope’s hometown of Chicago, Leo urged American bishops to firmly support immigrants. He then encouraged Catholics and others to read a statement from the U.S. bishops criticizing the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.
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The new statement from the three American cardinals is presented as an interpretation of Leo’s emerging vision for international relations, seen as an “enduring ethical compass to guide the course of American foreign policy in the years to come.”
“The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination seem too fragile in a world of ever-increasing conflagrations,” the cardinals wrote. “Building a just and sustainable peace, so crucial to the well-being of humanity now and in the future, is being reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.”
The text also mentions abortion and euthanasia as obstacles to the right to life, described as the foundation of other human rights. And he criticizes cuts in foreign aid and “increasing violations of conscience and religious freedom in the name of an ideological or religious purity that ends up crushing freedom itself”.
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The three cardinals command dioceses that, together, bring together almost 4 million Catholics, more than 550 parishes and hundreds of Catholic schools.
Trump told The New York Times this month that his decisions as commander in chief are limited only by his “own morality.”
“I don’t need international law,” he declared. “I’m not trying to hurt people.”
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Tobin said in an interview that he was struck by voices in the Trump administration that seemed to defend a moral vision that he described as “almost a Darwinian calculation that the powerful survive and the weak don’t deserve to survive.”
He added: “I would say this is less than human.”
c.2026 The New York Times Company
