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Donald Trump renewed his assault on Pope Leo XIV in radio remarks last night, telling Hugh Hewitt that the first American pope is “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” because, in Trump’s telling, Leo “thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
The smear is a lie.
Pope Leo XIV has never said any such thing about Iran or anyone else. The Holy See has rejected nuclear weapons in every nation’s hands for more than half a century. Pope Francis declared even the possession of nuclear arms “immoral” in 2017.
Leo restated that teaching within days of his election and has reiterated it almost every week since — most recently from the papal plane home from Africa, where he called for aerial bombing itself to be permanently banned.
Trump’s attack lands forty-eight hours before Marco Rubio walks into the Apostolic Palace on Thursday for the first cabinet-level audience between this administration and the Vatican since the president’s April broadsides.
As I reported yesterday, JD Vance — the highest-ranking Catholic in the federal government — has been pulled from the assignment, sidelined by his own boss after a month of insulting the pope on Vance’s behalf.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin answered Trump from Rome before the day was out.
“The Pope continues on his path — in the sense of preaching the Gospel, of preaching peace — or, as Saint Paul would say, ‘opportune et importune,’” (Latin: “in season and out of season”) the Vatican Secretary of State told reporters. “The Pope’s stance remains the same.”
Asked whether Leo would respond directly to the latest attack, Parolin said the response had already been given. “The pope has already responded; I would not add anything.”
He described Leo’s posture as “a very, very Christian response, saying that he is doing what his role requires, which is to preach peace. Whether this is pleasing or not, that is another matter.”
The Latin tag is from Saint Paul’s second letter to Timothy — “in season and out of season.” Parolin chose the line carefully.
The cardinal also told the Italian news agency ANSA that the Holy See is advocating for full nuclear disarmament — precisely the position Pope Leo has held since the day he walked onto the loggia of Saint Peter’s. Trump’s slander reads exactly backward.
Trump has been repeating the same slander for almost a month, ever since Pope Leo XIV called the Iran war “unacceptable” and the U.S. military archbishop declared it unjust.
The president has been corrected by the U.S. bishops’ conference, and by virtually every American prelate who has spoken on the matter. He keeps saying it anyway, because the lie is doing political work that the truth would not.
The reason is Thursday.
Rubio is not flying to Rome on a goodwill tour.
As I detailed in yesterday’s piece, USA Today reports Cuba is near the top of the Secretary of State’s agenda, and the pattern is hard to miss. In January, a senior Pentagon official lectured Pope Leo’s Ambassador to the United States in a closed-door meeting that Vatican officials later described to me as a fishing expedition for preemptive blessing on American military action.
Four months later, the Cuban-American Secretary of State who built his Senate career on hawkish opposition to Havana is bringing the same ask through the Vatican's front door, with the island ninety miles from Florida on the table.
Today's smear runs the play yesterday’s piece predicted — preemptive neutralization of the pope before Rubio's Thursday ask.
The Trump administration appears to be looking for the Vatican’s blessing — or at least its silence — should Washington take military action against Cuba. The play is to cast Leo as reckless, tell American Catholics a fabricated story about Iran, nuclear weapons, and their own safety, and then dispatch the cabinet's most polished diplomat to extract a concession the pope will never give.
The official line from Trump’s own ambassador to the Holy See is that there is no problem to solve. Brian Burch told reporters Tuesday that he does not “accept the idea that somehow there’s some deep rift” between the United States and the Holy See, and that Rubio is coming to engage in a “frank dialogue” about American policy.
There is a deep rift. Trump just spent the morning widening it on the radio.
The plan misreads Rome.
Pope Leo XIV spent two decades as a missionary in Peru, helped bury Pope Francis last spring, and took the name of the pontiff who wrote Rerum Novarum against gilded-age greed. He has now been attacked by an American president for opposing an unjust war, defending migrants, and refusing to baptize his agenda — and his answer every time has been the same: I am not afraid.
Cuba will be no different. Saint Augustine wrote against the Roman empire’s wars of conquest in the fifth century, and no pope formed in the Augustinian tradition is going to bless a Marine landing in Cárdenas in the twenty-first.
This Friday, Pope Leo XIV marks his first year as Bishop of Rome. The American president’s gift to the first U.S.-born pontiff on the eve of that anniversary is a public lie about the Holy Father’s position on nuclear weapons, delivered to a friendly radio host two days before the Secretary of State arrives at the Vatican to ask for what the Holy See will not give.
Trump and Hewitt ended with the same answer today with three words: “He’s from Chicago.” That is what he cannot forgive.
The pope of the Catholic Church is American — a son of the South Side, a White Sox fan, a U.S. citizen by birth and a U.S. citizen still, and the first such man in two thousand years of Christianity to wear the fisherman’s ring. Trump cannot dismiss him as a foreigner across the Atlantic, a Latin American radical, or a soft European bishop.
Leo is one of us, and Trump knows it.
That is why the lying will not stop. The smear is the only weapon left when the pope you are attacking holds an American passport.
Parolin already said it. Opportune et importune. Whether it pleases the president of the United States or not, the pope is going to preach peace.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, with Cardinal Parolin, and with the millions of Catholics and people of goodwill in this country who refuse to let a successor of Saint Peter be smeared into silence two days before a meeting designed to pre-bless a war.
In an era when an American president can sit on a friendly radio show and tell the country a fabricated story about the Vicar of Christ endangering Catholic lives, we hold to the older confession of the Church: every human being is made in God’s image, war is an offense against that dignity, and no temporal power is exempt from the moral law.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They are hungry for courage, for truth, for love made visible in action — and right now, with the Vatican forty-eight hours away from a meeting that could shape the next American war, that hunger has never been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a White House that lies about the Holy Father — I am asking you to join us.
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