Can’t Pope Leo make better arguments against the war?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 18, 2026

If Pope Leo hopes to swing American Catholic opinion against the war in Iran—and still more if he hopes to convince the Trump administration to sue for peace—he’s going to need some more persuasive arguments. Those arguments are available. But to date the Holy Father hasn’t used them.

Thus far, in his public statements on the war, the Pope has simply repeated his appeals for peace: a peace which, he insists, can be attained through negotiations. His call for a cease-fire, at his Angelus audience on Sunday, was typical: “May paths of dialogue be re-opened! Violence can never lead to the justice, stability, and peace for which the peoples are waiting.”

We can all readily agree that “justice, stability, and peace” are the proper goals. And it’s true that violence by itself never achieves those goals. But aren’t there times when, after the violence of war, a peace settlement brings the warring parties closer to those goals?

Pope Francis consistently argued that war is always a failure for mankind, and although Pope Leo has not used the same language, to date his statements have been in line with those of his predecessor. To be sure, war is always a tragedy; on that much, every Roman Pontiff has agreed. But at times, an unjust peace is an even greater tragedy. Thus the Church has for centuries allowed that in certain circumstances, war can and should be fought for a just cause.

To say that every conflict can and should be resolved by negotiation is to suggest that the appropriate solution to the conflict lies somewhere between the stands of the two contesting parties: if each side will give a little, peace can be preserved. But what if one side is a peaceful, democratic society that only wants to preserve its security, while the other is an oppressive regime, with an inclination toward terrorism, bent on world domination? The former country cannot compromise without sacrificing principles and tolerating injustice; the latter country will not compromise at all. Negotiation will not be the solution.

Even if they do not support Trump, most Americans will readily agree that the situation in the Middle East resembles the scenario sketched in the paragraph above. The Iranian regime is inhuman, oppressive, and dangerous—a threat to its neighbors and to its own people. It is a chief sponsor of terrorist activities all around the world. (We cannot accept a negotiated compromise that would allow Iran to indulge in a little bit of terrorism.) It is frightening to contemplate what the Islamist government would do with nuclear weapons, and negotiations have failed to secure that government’s agreement to abandon the pursuit of nuclear weaponry.

So it is easy for the Trump administration to make that case that negotiations have proven fruitless, and some more aggressive action against Iran is now necessary. If his only plea is for more “dialogue,” the Pope is not likely to change minds.

But this does not mean that the Pope cannot make an effective argument. He could quite reasonably acknowledge that the US and its Israeli ally have ample reason to fear Iran, but argue that the costs of the war might outweigh the benefits—so that we must search for other ways to address our fears. He could warn that a war in this, the world’s most volatile region, is even more dangerous than the threats posed by the Iranian mullahs.

Pope Leo did begin to introduce such arguments on Sunday, when he commented on the spread of the fighting into Lebanon. There, he said, “Thousands of innocent people have been killed, and countless others have been forced to flee their homes.” He noted that the latest attacks had “struck schools, hospitals, and residential areas.” Here the Pope was calling attention to two of the criteria traditionally set by the just-war tradition: proportionality and discrimination. Will the war cause death and destruction at a level that is disproportionate to the benefits that will be achieved—bearing in mind that the outcome of a war is always uncertain, so we cannot be overly confident about those benefits? Will Israel and the US conduct the fighting in a way that discriminates between enemy combatants and civilians, so that as far as possible, innocent lives will be spared?

The question to be asked—the moral challenge to be addressed—is not whether the elimination of Iranian terrorism and the liberation of the Iranian people are worthy goals. The question is whether those goals can be achieved by war, and at what cost.