Pope Leo has called Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran a “scandal to the whole human family”. The conflict carries a powerful divine dimension too, with administration officials and military leaders reaching for religious rhetoric to justify the fight.
At a recent Pentagon worship service, defence secretary Pete Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. In what appeared an indirect rebuke, Leo said that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war”.
The war in Iran is not the only point of contention. The Vatican and the White House are sharply at odds over immigration policy, the assault on Venezuela, the US confrontation with Europe and the dismantling of multilateral institutions.
The Holy See is also monitoring the situation in Cuba with mounting anxiety. Many of Washington’s wars and domestic crackdowns run on Palantir software, which is why the Vatican has also pushed back against Trump’s allies in the tech world.
Last month, the apocalyptically oriented tech investor Peter Thiel descended to the Eternal City to deliver his highly secretive yet well-known lectures on the antichrist and the end times. The Catholic world welcomed him as though he were a Visigoth coming to sack the city.
Catholic dignitaries treated the Palantir co-founder as a dangerous apostate to be shunned, not as an unconventional Christian deserving to be heard. The Catholic press attacked him as a sinister pseudo-thinker promoting a twisted political theology, and one theologian at a pontifical university suggested that Thiel himself may be the antichrist.
Orders from above were issued to keep bona fide theologians away from the conferences, and Italian media reported that in the Roman palazzo where Thiel lectured, the flâneurs with waxed moustaches vastly outnumbered the Bible scholars. The evangelical tech mogul was informally excommunicated by a church he doesn’t even belong to.
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