This past evening, the United States military bombed Iran. The President of the United States declared the mission a “spectacular military success,” “an operation the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades,” and maintained that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

He concluded:

And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God. I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.

This frankly rather peculiar valediction was hardly in line with the appeal of Pope Leo, who in his most recent Wednesday General Audience, had issued this plea: “We must never get used to war!” The pope had added that “[i]ndeed, the temptation to have recourse to powerful and sophisticated weapons needs to be rejected,” and further admonished: “In the name of human dignity and international law, I reiterate to those in positions of responsibility the frequent warning of Pope Francis: War is always a defeat! And that of Pope Pius XII: “Nothing is lost with peace. Everything may be lost with war.”

This afternoon, following the Angelus address, the Holy Father added:

Today more than ever, humanity cries out and calls for peace. This is a cry that requires responsibility and reason, and it must not be drowned out by the din of weapons or the rhetoric that incites conflict. Every member of the international community has a moral responsibility to stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable chasm. There are no “distant” conflicts when human dignity is at stake.

War does not solve problems; on the contrary, it amplifies them and inflicts deep wounds on the history of peoples, which take generations to heal. No armed victory can compensate for the pain of mothers, the fear of children, or stolen futures.

May diplomacy silence the weapons! May nations chart their futures with works of peace, not with violence and bloodstained conflicts!

No one knows where the course of action undertaken by President Trump on behalf of the United States will lead; no one knows when or where the spiral of violence will be closed, or how far it will reach. And it is important to note that this course of action was by no means a foregone conclusion. Earlier on the day of the bombing itself, Reuters had reported that Vice President JD Vance was pushing back against entering the conflict as late as Thursday. The previous week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had posted a video following on a visit to Hiroshima, in which she warned that: “As we stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elites and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” Indeed, there is (or was) a faction in the Trump cabinet more “dovish,” as it were, than any since the first years after the Cold War. What, if anything, is to become of that now is doubtful, at best.

It was, to say the least, saddening to see the Vice President literally standing behind the President last night and to witness Ms. Gabbard’s hasty retreat from the substance of her sworn testimony to Congress in March, to the effect that U.S. intelligence had concluded that Iran had no immediate plans or capacity to build a nuclear weapon. It would have been naïve to impute the motives expressed by Pope Leo to the Vice President or Director Gabbard. However, it is not unrealistic to point out that, as regards wars and rumors of war, this administration had been anything but a monoculture; indeed, the Vice President continues to insist, however absurdly, that “the United States is not at war with Iran.” (Whether Iran is at war with the United States, in the wake of last night’s bombing, is perhaps another question.) Concerns about and condemnations of the bombing pour in from around the globe and across the political spectrum. It is not that there were no voices of moderation, nor even that (behind closed doors) there may not yet be such voices. When it comes to politics and policy, however, it would appear to have been too little, and to be too late.

So is this World War III? Although these words do not appear on the Vatican website, press sources cited Pope Leo as speaking of an ongoing “world war fought piecemeal” during his first Angelus address on May 11; Pope Francis had been speaking of World War III fought piecemeal since no later than 2014. Perhaps the repository of our hope should be, not policy or politics, but the work of God – the true God, not some particle of political rhetoric – of the God who works, not through domination, but through the grace he imparts to human souls. In much of the world, today is Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ. And as the world rings with outcry of war, in thousands upon thousands of tabernacles, let us remember that there rests, silent and omnipotent, often unregarded, sometimes invoked by men hungry for domination, yet always present to the lowly, the Prince of Peace.

Image: Vatican Media