Warmongers’ Prayers For No Mercy for Iran Fall on Deaf Ears

Last updated on: March 29, 2026 at 2:13 pm by Andrew Chesnut

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Warmongers’ Prayers For No Mercy for Iran Fall on Deaf Ears 2026-03-29T14:13:32-04:00 Andrew Chesnut

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On Palm Sunday, Pope Leo XIV did not mince words. As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran entered its second month, he declared that God rejects the prayers of leaders whose “hands are full of blood.” He called the conflict “atrocious,” insisted that Jesus cannot be used to justify war, and reminded the world that Christ is the “King of Peace,” not the patron saint of missiles, bombers, and airstrikes. For a pope known for caution, it was a scathing denunciation.

And honestly, it needed to be said. Because one of the ugliest features of this war has been the attempt to cloak it in Christian language. Some members of Trump’s cabinet have used overtly Christian rhetoric around the conflict, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s prayer for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Pope Leo answered with something far more authentically Christian: Jesus rebuked the sword. Jesus did not save himself through violence. Jesus did not build peace through domination. That is not just pious language. That is a direct rebuke of the theology of militarized power now being peddled by the Trump administration.

From a Catholic perspective, this is where the whole enterprise starts to collapse. The Church’s just war doctrine is not a rubber stamp for whatever war a powerful nation happens to want. The Catechism lays out strict conditions: the damage caused by the aggressor must be lasting, grave, and certain; peaceful options must have been exhausted; there must be a serious chance of success; and the use of force must not create evils worse than the ones it claims to stop. These are not decorative moral footnotes. They are meant to restrain rulers and make war difficult to justify.

And by those standards, this war is morally bankrupt. Was it truly a last resort? Pope Leo’s repeated calls for an immediate ceasefire suggest otherwise. Was it proportionate? His condemnation of indiscriminate airstrikes suggests otherwise. Is it producing peace? Hardly. Instead, the war is spreading fear, deepening instability, and leaving Middle Eastern Christians and other civilians caught in the blast radius of decisions made far above their heads.The pope warned Christians in the region may not even be able to celebrate Easter because of the conflict. That is not the fruit of a just war. That is the fruit of escalation.

There is also the basic issue of civilian suffering. Modern war is always sold as precise, disciplined, surgical. In practice, it almost always spills outward. Churches empty. Neighborhoods shake. Families flee. Worship is disrupted. Holy days become survival days. Reuters reported on March 29 that even Palm Sunday observances in Jerusalem were disrupted in extraordinary ways because of the regional fallout from the war. Once again, the people paying the price are not the men making the speeches.

This is where Pope Leo’s intervention becomes so powerful. He is not offering a vague appeal for everybody to be nicer. He is naming a spiritual fraud. He is saying that Christ cannot be conscripted into the service of empire. Jesus is not a branding device for geopolitical violence. He is not a celestial signature at the bottom of a bombing order. “No one can use Jesus to justify war,” Leo said, and that line should hit like a hammer. Because it exposes what so much political religion tries to hide: that invoking God does not make bloodshed holy.

The domestic U.S. political backdrop only makes the timing look even darker. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on March 24, Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 36%, the lowest of his current term. Only 25% approved of his handling of the cost of living, and only 29% approved of his handling of the economy. Reuters also reported that gas prices had surged amid the war. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices were up 2.4% year over year in February 2026, and the unemployment rate stood at 4.4%. In plain English: Americans were already frustrated about prices, jobs, and the economy before this war added more instability and pain.

Not forgetting the attempt to distract the American public from the Epstein Files, we are confronted with an age-old pattern: a politically struggling administration, sagging approval, economic anxiety at home, and then a dramatic foreign war that invites the tired language of strength, patriotism, and national emergency. World history has seen that script before. Even when the motive cannot be nailed down with complete certainty, the political usefulness of war is often obvious enough.

And the public isn’t exactly rallying around it. Reuters/Ipsos found that 61% of Americans disapproved of the Iran strikes. That matters. A war with this much public skepticism, this much regional fallout, and this little moral clarity is already on thin ice politically. Under Catholic just war teaching, it is on even thinner ice morally.

What Pope Leo has done is rip away the Christian veil. He has reminded Catholics, and really anyone willing to listen, that there is a profound difference between power and justice. States can always produce arguments for war. They can always find experts, slogans, and prayerful language to make violence sound regrettable but necessary. But the Christian tradition, at its best, exists to resist exactly that temptation. It asks harder questions. It asks who is dying, who is lying, who is profiting, and who is using God’s name to sanctify the whole thing.

By that measure, this war fails miserably. It doesn’t look like a last resort. It doesn’t look proportionate. It doesn’t look contained. It doesn’t look like a conflict being waged with moral seriousness and deep restraint. It looks like another catastrophic act of militarized hubris dressed up in the language of necessity. And Pope Leo, to his credit, is refusing to let that language pass unchallenged.

Holy Week begins with the compelling image of Christ entering Jerusalem unarmed. Against the chest-thumping feigned piety of warmongers, Pope Leo posited the still more radical image of a God who rejects violence and sheathes the sword. That is why his words are landing so hard. He is not just condemning a war. He is exposing blasphemy. Leaders may pray over their bombs all they want. But if their hands are bloodsoaked, as Leo warned, God does not listen.

About Andrew Chesnut

Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut earned his Ph.D degree in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and joined the History Department faculty at the University of Houston in 1997. He quickly became an internationally recognized expert on Latin American religious history Professor Chesnut was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at VCU in 2008. The chair was established as the Most Rev. Walter F. Sullivan was nearing retirement as the 11th bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond to honor his nearly thirty years of service. For Professor Chesnut the chair became a unique opportunity to develop Catholic studies in a global context and at a large public university. Professor Chesnut’s early work, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 1997), traces the meteroric rise of Pentecostalism among the popular classes in Brazil following the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church. His second book, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford University Press, 2003) focuses on the three groups that have prospered most in the region’s pluralist landscape, Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African disasporic religions (e.g., Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou). Professor Chesnut's most recent book is Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2025). It is the first in-depth study of the Mexican folk saint in English and has received widespread media coverage. You can read more about the author here.

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