George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His books include “Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II.”
“Blasphemy” — the definition of which, according to my beloved Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, includes “claiming the attributes of deity” — is not a term typically deployed these days to describe the actions of political leaders. Consider, however, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts on Sunday night.
In the first, with typically Trumpian rodomontade, the president of the United States smeared the 267th bishop of Rome as “weak,” falsely accused the pope of indifference to narco-terrorism and a nuclear-armed Iran, and tried to set Leo against his brother Louis.
Bad enough, to be sure, and certainly unworthy of a president, even by today’s debased standards. But this latest eruption of rhetorical lava from Mount Trump was quickly followed by another Truth Social post (subsequently deleted): an illustration in which the president was portrayed as a Christlike figure dressed in biblical-era robes, healing a sick man while light shone from his (presumably pierced) left hand.
And if that is not blasphemy, it is at the very least blasphemy-adjacent.
In an impromptu news conference on his flight to Africa on Monday morning, Leo responded like an adult to the inevitable questions about all this, insisting that he was “not a politician” but the messenger of the Gospel, adding: “I do not think the message of the Gospel should be abused as some are doing.” Surely the pope could be forgiven if he had Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (and perhaps others in the administration) in mind here.
Hegseth, after all, had recently compared the extraordinary rescue of a downed American aviator to the events of Good Friday, the entombment of Jesus on Holy Saturday and Christ’s resurrection on Easter. And Pastor Paula White-Cain, senior adviser of the White House Faith Office, has more than once described the president in messianic terms.
But from my own interaction with Leo, I am convinced that when he deplores violence in today’s world, he isn’t thinking solely about Donald J. Trump. He is also thinking about Vladimir Putin’s barbaric war on Ukraine; about those who wage bloody assaults on Christians in the African countries the pope will visit this week; and about the persecutors of journalists, to whose plight the pontiff called the world media’s attention after his election last year.
Had the Vatican press office, which has yet to adjust to the breakneck pace of the 21st-century media environment, made these points immediately after the pope’s Palm Sunday homily on March 29 called to account those whose “hands are full of blood” — and had the world media resisted the trap of interpreting everything as a reference to Trump (thus mirroring the president’s own proclivities) — perhaps a calmer discussion of war and peace in this fractious age could have been engaged.
Such a discussion would recognize, as Leo suggested, that he is not the papal equivalent of a global umpire, with the just-war tradition of moral reasoning functioning like baseball’s ABS (Automated Ball-Strike) system: The pope feeds in the data and out comes the correct call. That is not the papacy’s role in world politics. Nor is it the way the just-war tradition works.
The pope’s unique job is to constantly call the leaders of nations to reason their way to viable solutions for what often seem intractable problems. To do so, any pope, and the Vatican diplomatic apparatus, must recognize that there are limits to dialogue, not least with totalitarian systems, and that the proportionate and discriminate use of armed force can, according to just-war thinking, set the conditions for achieving a stable peace built on the foundations of security, freedom and justice. Leo — whose theological lodestar is Saint Augustine, Christianity’s first just-war thinker — should be in a distinctive position to foster that conversation between public officials and ethicists.
By the same token, a serious, morally grounded conversation about the pursuit of peace demands that those public officials make clear that the goals they seek by the use of armed force are just, honorable and attainable.
Putin has completely failed this test in his war on Ukraine. One hopes Trump knows that; Leo certainly does. But the White House has not done itself, or the debate over its Iran policy, any favors by its constant recalibration and changing explanations of its goals in the current war. Suppose the president had said from the outset, and then constantly repeated, that the goal of U.S. military action in Iran was “an Iran that is safe for the Iranian people and safe for the world”? Suppose the administration had then explained, as events unfolded, how that worthy goal was being advanced, or how its achievement was being impeded?
If such a statement of strategic purpose, and the moral conversation it could engender between Washington and Rome, is impossible today, it certainly should be established in the future.
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