Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.

-Pope Leo XIV, April 16, 2026

 

In Athens, Georgia earlier this week, JD Vance posed quite the thought-provoking query. Clearly, it was meant by the Vice President to complete a papal hot-take on the Iran War with the subtlety, depth, complexity and nuance as befits a truer theology. The superficiality of Leo’s assessment, to Vance, is easily demonstrated, and Leo himself knows this. Perhaps he is merely bypassing the full weight of the issue in a pastorally motivated simplification for a world audience of non-experts?

Vance had recourse to a logical maneuver well known to the rhetorical sciences since antiquity. A reductio ad absurdam draws out the self-refuting nature of an inherently illogical claim (a commodity with which Vance should be well familiar). A positive truth value is assigned hypothetically to the dubious proposition, just long enough to conclude to its ridiculous consequences.

On Palm Sunday, Leo preached:

Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war… He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.

By examining Vance’s remarks, logically we can see that he, as a professed Christian, is drawing an implied equivalence between Jesus, King of Peace, and God. Belief in the divinity of Christ; so far, so good. Embedded further in Vance’s reasoning is the generous supposition that God rejects war in all cases. But, if this were true, then Jesus, King of Peace, would have been neutral to the most heinous activities of the Nazis:

Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis? Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated Holocaust camps and liberated those, those innocent people, you know, those who had survived the Holocaust? I certainly think the answer is yes.

So all is settled; the Pope was “confusing,” carelessly sharing sloppy theology to the innocent masses.

Yes, very tricky. This would be the case where the only option to rejecting one side of a conflict is the embrace of the other – for we do know that an all-knowing God cannot be indifferent. Again, so far, so good; this is indeed the logic we presume, the logic of this world, kosmos houtos.

Just over twenty years ago, in a homily for Good Friday, 2005, Cardinal Rainero Cantalamessa, Preacher to the Papal Household under John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, taught that Jesus, King of Peace, is with us always, present-in-sacrament:

This presence is a guarantee, not only for the Church, but for the entire world. Yet we feel afraid to use the words “God is with us”, because they have been used before in an exclusive sense: God is “with us”, on our side, meaning not with others, and even “against” those others who are our enemies. But since Christ has come, there is no longer any exclusiveness, everything has become universal. “God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men’s faults against them.” The whole world, not just a part of it; humankind as a whole, not just one people…. “God is on our side,” that is, on the side of humankind, our friend and ally against the powers of evil.

Is this wishful thinking, therapeutic Christianity, calculated softening of the hard edges of truth? No. It is the opposite. Immaculée Ilibagiza was ruthlessly hunted amid the Rwandan genocide, struggling against hatred and despair, tempted to wish evil on the murderers of her people and tempted to abandon prayer as hypocritical in the face of her experience of bitterness. In the very moment as the feeble cries of a dying infant were forever extinguished, she heard the voice God within: “You are all my children.”

Dr. Takashi Nagai, now Servant of God in the early stages of a canonization process, was working in his office in the radiology department at the University of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 when American pilots dropped the atomic bomb which, drifting in the unexpected wind, exploded directly over Urakami Cathedral, the centuries-old center of Japanese Catholicism. (Was God “on our side,” then? Yes – but not in the way Mr. Vance was implying in his argument.) Later that year, in November, survivors among the faithful gathered in the ruins of the cathedral for a Requiem Mass. Dr. Nagai, ragged, bandaged, and already sick with the leukemia that would take his life a few years later, spoke at the end of that Mass. He recounted finding, in the ruins of their home, the charred bones of his wife, a melted Rosary between her fingers. Yet he said more, much more, as well:

Is there not a profound relationship between the destruction of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Nagasaki, the only holy place in all Japan—was it not chosen as a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War?

The human family has inherited the sin of Adam who ate the fruit of the forbidden tree; we have inherited the sin of Cain who killed his younger brother; we have forgotten that we are children of God; we have believed in idols; we have disobeyed the law of love. Joyfully we have hated one another; joyfully we have killed one another. And now at last we have brought this great and evil war to an end. But in order to restore peace to the world it was not sufficient to repent. We had to obtain God’s pardon through the offering of a great sacrifice.

Before this moment there were many opportunities to end the war. Not a few cities were totally destroyed. But these were not suitable sacrifices; nor did God accept them. Only when Nagasaki was destroyed did God accept the sacrifice. Hearing the cry of the human family, He inspired the emperor to issue the sacred decree by which the war was brought to an end.

Our church of Nagasaki kept the faith during four hundred years of persecution when religion was proscribed and the blood of martyrs flowed freely. During the war this same church never ceased to pray day and night for a lasting peace. Was it not, then, the one unblemished lamb that had to be offered on the altar of God? Thanks to the sacrifice of this lamb many millions who would otherwise have fallen victim to the ravages of war have been saved.

How noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace! In the very depth of our grief we reverently saw here something beautiful, something pure, something sublime. Eight thousand people, together with their priests, burning with pure smoke, entered into eternal life. All without exception were good people whom we deeply mourn.

How happy are those people who left this world without knowing the defeat of their country! How happy are the pure lambs who rest in the bosom of God! Compared with them how miserable is the fate of us who have survived! Japan is conquered. Urakami is totally destroyed. A waste of ash and rubble lies before our eyes. We have no houses, no food, no clothes. Our fields are devastated. Only a remnant has survived. In the midst of the ruins we stand in groups of two or three looking blankly at the sky.

Why did we not die with them on that day, at that time, in this house of God? …

We Japanese, a vanquished people, must now walk along a path that is full of pain and suffering. The reparations imposed by the Potsdam Declaration are a heavy burden. But this painful path along which we walk carrying our burden, is it not also the path of hope, which gives to us sinners an opportunity to expiate our sins?

“Blessed are those that mourn for they shall be comforted.” We must walk this way of expiation faithfully and sincerely. And as we walk in hunger and thirst, ridiculed, penalized, scourged, pouring with sweat and covered with blood, let us remember how Jesus Christ carried His cross to the hill of Calvary. He will give us courage.

“The Lord has given: the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!”

Let us give thanks that Nagasaki was chosen for the sacrifice. Let us give thanks that through this sacrifice peace was given to the world and freedom of religion to Japan.

If we can open our hearts, we are at an evaluative crisis – and more: a religious crisis, indeed an existential crisis.

God does not abide evil, nor is grace so cheap. The Second Person of the Trinity, incarnate, died for sin. Nazism is evil. Genocide is evil. The terror bombing of civilians is evil. Nuclear war is evil. We have moved beyond any sphere of ambiguity. The crushing magnitude of all this evil far surpasses the resources of human justice.

Can there even be an answer? Cantalamessa continues: “God alone personifies the kingdom of good against the kingdom of evil.”

God’s is an altogether different logic, and none of us (save for one singular notable exception, so we as Catholics believe) is sufficiently untainted as to represent the Kingdom of Peace with the perfection of intent it demands; to do so is martyrdom, whether literal bodily death ensues or one stands, witnessing and fearless, at the foot of the Cross.

For Cantalamessa, the zeal consuming the apolitical, transcendent Christ is not present among us in any cause, however just, but as Eucharist, which:

…makes present in the world the one who, by his teaching and by his life, has unmasked and broken forever the system that makes something sacral of violence.
The Eucharist is the sacrament of non-violence! Thanks to the Eucharist, God’s absolute “no” to violence, spoken on the cross, echoes alive down the centuries. And, at the same time, it is God’s “yes” to the innocent victims, and it is the place where all the blood spilled on earth joins with the blood of Christ and cries out to God and “pleads more insistently than Abel’s.

If I may add, from Pope Benedict XVI:

When in Matthew’s account the ‘whole people’ say: ‘His blood be upon us and our children’ (27:25), the Christian will remember that Jesus’ blood speaks a different language from the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:24); it does not cry out for vengeance and punishment; it brings reconciliation. It is not poured out against anyone, it is poured out for many, for all.

Cantalamessa follows René Girard (the favorite professor of Vance’s mentor, Peter Thiel) in noting that, only in fully taking sin upon himself, has Christ “put an end to the perverse recourse to the scapegoat.” Else, in believing ourselves to right the order of justice, the hammer inevitably misses its mark and falls hardest on the weakest: the infant in Rwanda, the starving children in Gaza and the bombed child victims in Iran… the faithful of Nagasaki. Vengeance is gratified enough to hold its thirsts in abeyance, but in this world, ultimately, there is no justice at all – and with this we must reckon.

Beneath the dome of our murky web, duress and domination reign. For us, the notions of power and force – pushing, pulling, cajoling, punishing – are as one indistinguishable tissue. Our power is a function of our total and complete impotence. Of ourselves, we can do nothing. The power this earth offers is always authoritarian, always destructive, always bears the seeds of death. We live in futility. Earthly power is futility.

Pope Leo preached today in Cameroon:

The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is oft not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation.

Our power is repulsive, and futile, and we exert it all the more in sterile and compensatory desperation, like a deranged tyrant who massacres his subjects to forestall the inevitable loss of his throne. We can stockpile weapons of destruction, threaten cataclysm from here to the edge of the galaxy, loose the damning force of a billion bombs – all without replicating the vital energy of a single microbe.

How idly the powerful in the eyes of this world vaunt their power! But what, in truth is power?—Christus Dei virtutem!  Christ, the power of God! The power of God is veiled to us by its excessive splendor, yes… but also because it is pure. We are duly impressed by pageantry, by armies, by the smoke of tyrants and charlatans. But a pure flame burns clean.

During Advent, we implore God precisely as Almighty Lawgiver, to come “in cloud and majesty and awe.” Let us witness the outcome as interpreted by his logic, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI:

–Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?
–I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.

I am. And with that confession there now erupts over Jesus… the brutal mockery of those who know they are in a position of strength: they make him feel their power, their utter contempt… in attacking him who now seems utterly powerless. It does not occur to them that… they are causing the destiny of the Suffering Servant to be literally fulfilled in him. He is the Son of Man, coming in the cloud of concealment.

The power of God is love.

Yes, there is another and greater power at work, simultaneous to our own. We encounter this power, this logic, this love, this justice in an Easter mode of presence, transcending our own. Let us adore the silent and gentle eucharistic Lord who keeps vigil among us, for “we need to cry out this our hope to help ourselves and others to overcome the horror of death and the mood of gloomy pessimism common in our society,” as Fr. Cantalamessa noted in his 2005 homily. We need to do this especially now, as ever – for yes, thankfully, now as ever, God is on our side.

Image: Wikimedia Commons: Takashi and Midori Nagai, 1936.