The Church has to pronounce “clear” words about the victims of wars and violence. This is the message that Leo XIV sent this Wednesday in his traditional weekly audience. Not a hint of turning back. The Pope insists and insists, he continues forward. Also a few hours before the meeting with the Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, scheduled for this Thursday, supposedly intended to cool spirits between the Vatican and Washington after weeks of tension.
It’s only been about twenty-four hours since Donald Trump’s last attack against him. On Tuesday, the American president assured that the head of the Catholic Church, his compatriot, “puts many Catholics and many people in danger.” He has even hinted that the Pontiff sympathizes with the idea that Iran obtains nuclear weapons. Too much, even, for León.
with the truth
León responded immediately. First from his residence on the outskirts of Rome, in an improvised meeting with journalists. “The Church speaks of peace and of the Gospel”, not of nuclear weapons, he has settled. And he has added: “For years the Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons, so there is no doubt about it.” He has gone further, bordering on direct accusation: “If someone wants to criticize me for announcing the Gospel, which do it with the truth“, he stated. Clear and crystalline like water.
Then the new message arrived, this time from St. Peter’s Square, within the framework of the general audience. Again, the wars in the center; again, . “The Church is a universal sacrament of salvation,” he recalled, citing the fathers of the great reforming meeting of the last century, the Second Vatican Council, to define the ecclesial community as a “sign and instrument” of the fullness of life and peace promised by God. Not as a perfect reflection, he has clarified, but as “germ and beginning.”
A clear shock
A clear clash, this one, started already last January with the Pope’s increasingly clear criticism of the White House’s immigration policies, the intervention in Venezuela, the attack on Iran, even the death penalty just as the Trump Administration was taking measures to expand methods of execution of federal inmates.
The death penalty es “inadmissible” for the Catholic Church, León said. “The right to life is the very foundation of all other rights humans,” he insisted. One more. One more.
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