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On the evening of May 15, Cardinal Michael Czerny celebrated a Mass for Peace and Social Development in Cuba at the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola in Rome — and from the altar, delivered the Vatican’s answer to the Trump administration’s escalating campaign against Cuba.

Eight days earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had crossed the Tiber to meet Pope Leo XIV in the Apostolic Palace. The U.S. statement on the meeting stayed vague, describing “cordial discussions.”

The Vatican’s readout was more specific, naming the disagreements the Holy See had pressed with the secretary of state. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, had told reporters the day before that Trump’s recent attacks on Leo struck him as “a bit strange.”

On the same day as his audience with the pope, Rubio announced a fresh round of sanctions targeting GAESA — the military-controlled conglomerate that anchors Cuba’s economy. He wrapped the move in humanitarian language, pointing to $6 million already routed through Caritas Cuba and promising more if Havana cooperated.

Trump was less restrained. From the Oval Office earlier this month, the president suggested that a U.S. aircraft carrier returning from Iran could stop “about 100 yards offshore” of Cuba, where “they’ll say ‘thank you very much, we give up.’” In March he predicted he would soon have “the honor of taking Cuba.”

According to a CNN review of flight data, surveillance flights off the island’s coast have surged since February. Havana’s foreign ministry called the new sanctions “collective punishment of a genocidal nature.”

This was the diplomatic terrain Czerny stepped onto when he approached the ambo on Friday night.

The Mass for Peace and Social Development in Cuba was organized by the Cuban Embassy to the Holy See, and Czerny — the Jesuit prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the pope’s senior voice on migration and global justice — chose his words knowing every line would be parsed by the State Department, by Havana, and by the Vatican’s own diplomats.

Here’s what he said.