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Pope Leo Is Speaking Truth to Donald Trump’s Power

The pontiff’s Easter address, like so many of his recent statements, countered Trump’s Iran bombast with a cry for peace—and sanity.

Pope Leo XIV greets the faithful at the end of the Easter mass, on April 5, 2026, in Vatican City.

With the war in Iran growing ever more chaotic, and with violence spreading throughout the Middle East, there was no mistaking the urgency of the message that Pope Leo XIV delivered to the world’s Catholics on Easter Sunday.      

“Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace!” announced the pontiff, who has emerged as the world’s most prominent advocate for an end to the crisis that Donald Trump sparked with his late February decision to attack Iran. “Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!”

The pope’s Easter statement, coming in a time of mounting global uncertainty and trepidation, was an appeal to reason in the face of military madness. “From without, death is always lurking,” he warned. “We see it present in injustices, in partisan selfishness, in the oppression of the poor, in the lack of attention given to the most vulnerable. We see it in violence, in the wounds of the world, in the cry of pain that rises from every corner because of the abuses that crush the weakest among us, because of the idolatry of profit that plunders the earth’s resources, because of the violence of war that kills and destroys.”

This was the latest in a series of powerful statements from the American-born pope, who in recent months has provided the steadiest counterpoint to Trump’s ranting and raving. For........

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