In recent weeks, Catholic leaders have been increasingly outspoken in their criticism of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, especially its military intervention in Venezuela and saber-rattling over Greenland.

On Jan. 19, 2026, the three cardinals heading U.S. archdioceses – Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark – issued a rare joint statement. “The United States has entered into the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War,” they began, calling for “a genuinely moral foreign policy.”

The cardinals quoted Pope Leo XIV’s annual address to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, delivered earlier that month, in which he deplored that “a zeal for war is spreading,” and the norm governing the use of force “has been completely undermined.”

In follow-up interviews, Cupich criticized the U.S. operation to capture President Nicolás Maduro for sending a message that “might makes right.” Tobin noted that some members of the Trump administration seemed to be advancing “almost a Darwinian calculus that the powerful survive and the weak don’t deserve to.”

As a former foreign policy adviser to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and now director of Catholic peacebuilding studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute, I know how rare it is that the cardinals’ short statement became headline news – especially because what they said mostly reiterated long-standing church teachings.

More novel, however, were statements by Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who leads the Archdiocese for the Military Services. In December 2025, Broglio issued a detailed critique of the morality and........

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