On Tuesday evening, 7 April 2026, as he was leaving Castel Gandolfo, Leo XIV spoke words that deserve to be read with care, without reducing them to a generic spiritual appeal. The Pope described as “truly unacceptable” the threat directed against the entire Iranian people and urged the citizens of the countries involved to make their voices heard before the political authorities, going so far as explicitly to mention members of Congress. It was an extraordinarily forceful moment: a Pontiff addressing a people directly so that they might call their own rulers to account. Nothing like it had ever happened before. At the very same time, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, called on Donald Trump to “step back from the precipice of war”, stating that the threat to destroy “an entire civilisation” and to strike civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified.
Here, one of the most superficial readings that has accompanied these first months of the pontificate falls apart. Media hacks claimed that Leo XIV spoke too little, that he was cautious to the point of irrelevance, that he lacked incisiveness. The facts tell a different story. Leo XIV simply does not submit to the timetable imposed by these professional purveyors of disinformation, bent to politics and ideological interests. He does not adopt their language, made up of jibes, insinuations and reckless words. He speaks when he judges that something cannot be left unsaid. His voice is raised when conscience is faced with a moral threshold that can no longer be crossed in silence. That is why his words carry more weight than so many speeches crafted for the cameras: they come at a moment when the language of politics has become barely distinguishable from that of street bullies and now goes so far, through social media, as to contemplate the destruction of an entire people.
There is also another element that makes these words even more significant. Leo XIV is the first American Pope, and precisely for that reason his appeal takes on particular weight when it is directed, in effect, to the civic conscience of the United States. He does not retreat into abstract formulas. He does not simply call, in generic terms, for dialogue. He tells citizens to find a way of communicating with their representatives. He tells them that they must say to politicians: we do not want war, we want peace. This is an important step, because it brings the democratic responsibility of the people into play in the face of the warlike drift of political power.
Leo XIV’s appeal does not stop at the circumstances of the moment, but bears directly upon the proper mission of the Petrine ministry: to confirm the brethren in the faith and to call peoples back to the truth of the common good. Where politics allows itself to be seduced by force, the Pope recalls the primacy of conscience, the value of the lives of peoples, and the duty of peace. There is no weakness in any of this. There is, rather, the firmness of one who knows that there are words which cannot be left unspoken, because from their silence depends the ruin of the innocent.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Silere non possum