Crux

Pope Leo XIV’s remarks during a prayer vigil on Saturday evening in St. Peter’s Basilica are already being framed as part of a contest between the pontiff and the U.S. President, who happen to be the two most influential Americans on the planet, the embodiment of soft power and hard power respectively. It is a tempting storytelling frame, and it isn’t entirely wrong. It only captures a little of the content and the import of the pope’s remarks, however, which invoked several of his modern predecessors and rooted itself in an historical sensibility stretching back centuries. If you’re expecting the pope – any pope – to come out in favor of your military campaign, you’ve got another thing coming. That’s a fact, these days, and has been for a good while. It was not ever thus, and the fact is largely a function of contingent historical circumstance, the same as gave rise to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s infamous rhetorical question: “How many divisions has the pope?” John Paul II was among the more recent popes Leo XIV mentioned, quoting directly from his predecessor’s fervent 2003 appeal for peace in the run-up to the second U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I belong to that generation that lived through World War II,” John Paul II said on March 16, 2003, mere days before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began. “I have the duty to say to all young people, to those who are younger than I, who have not had this experience: ‘No more war’,” John Paul II said, himself quoting then-venerable Paul VI during his first visit to the United Nations in 1965. “We must do everything possible,” John Paul II said. “We know well that peace is not possible at any price,” he said, “[b]ut we all know how great is this responsibility.” “I make his appeal my own,” Leo said Saturday, “relevant as it is today.” John Paul II was nothing if not subtle and nuanced in his thinking about the morality of armed conflict, his subtlety and nuance arguably best evidenced in his addresses to the NATO Defense College during the 1980s, still near the height of the Cold War. “[A] true peace often eludes our grasp precisely because we view it more as a framework to be imposed from without rather than a process to be cultivated from within,” John Paul II said in a speech to NATO Defense College participants in February 1981. With that remark, he was preparing his audience for a riff on some lines from his encyclical letter, Dives in misericordia, of November 1980. “The technical means at the disposal of modern society conceal within themselves not only the possibility of self-destruction through military conflict,” John Paul II wrote, “but also the possibility of a ‘peaceful’ subjugation of individuals, of environments, of entire societies and of nations, that for one reason or another might prove inconvenient for those who possess the necessary means and are ready to use them without scruple.” Historically inclined readers may hear, in those papal takes, more than a faint echo of a Caledonian chieftain’s complaint against the Romans, quoted by Tacitus: “They make a wasteland and call it peace.” Observers of current events may also consider them not entirely irrelevant to Trump’s recent threats against the “whole civilization” of Iran, but they were penned more than forty years before the current crisis and were – as were Leo’s remarks on Saturday evening – a statement of principle, whatever else they may have been. In his July 1982 meeting with the NATO Defense College – he held two audiences with Defense College classes that year, one in February and the other in July – John Paul II again quoted Paul VI, noting how his now-sainted predecessor had warned against the confusion of “[p]eace with weakness (not just physical but also moral), with the renunciation of genuine right and equitable justice, with the evasion of risk and sacrifice, with cowardice and supine submission to others’ arrogance, and hence with acquiescence to enslavement.” “This is not real Peace,” John Paul II said, still quoting Paul VI’s Message marking the 1974 World Day of Peace. “Repression is not peace. Cowardice is not peace. A settlement which is purely external and imposed by fear is not peace,” the pope said. Those remarks – John Paul II’s and Paul VI’s – were given in the context of the Cold War, and John Paul II’s description of what constitutes real, authentic peace (and what doesn’t) was not lost on observers on both sides of the Iron Curtain, who were more than capable of following the implications. Though they had the Cold War as their backdrop, they are broadly applicable, too. History is always happening and always messy, precisely because human nature is constant. “[T]he cause of peace and justice has never been successful when linked with violent struggle and the suppression of the deepest human aspirations,” Pope St. John Paul II told another Defense College class in 1983. “[W]e are confirmed in our conviction that the truth about man pervades the ways of peace and is the condition for all progress in the modem world.” Though he did not mention the great saint in his Saturday remarks, Leo is keenly sensible of Augustine of Hippo’s great insight: That peace is the tranquility of order in the soul and in human affairs. “Dear brothers and sisters,” Leo said on Saturday, “let us return home having made a commitment to pray without ceasing and without growing weary, a commitment to a profound conversion of heart.” That calls to mind his remark to diplomats in May of last year: “Peace is built in the heart and from the heart, by eliminating pride and vindictiveness and carefully choosing our words. For words too, not only weapons, can wound and even kill.” The heart is not only or even primarily an organ with a physiological function and purpose for St. Augustine. It is the seat of our inmost desire, the secret region in which we may find God always waiting for us. (Interested readers looking for a place in which this is spelled out and discussed can do worse than this author’s Leo XIV: The New Pope and Catholic Reform.) By the way, some historians place Stalin’s purported remark about the pope’s lack of military strength in 1943, at Tehran. It also bears mention that Pius XII is widely said to have quipped, when the remark reached him, “Tell my son Joseph he shall meet my divisions in the next life.” The Italians have an expression: Se non è vero, è ben trovato, literally, “If it is not true, it is well found,” meaning, “If it ain’t true, it oughtta be.” It’s been that sort of week in the news. Follow Chris Altieri on X: @craltieri

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