The following reflection is offered by members of the Pax Christi USA nonviolence working group.

As members of the Catholic movement for peace and nonviolence, we support Pope Leo and condemn all threats of violence.

“God does not bless any conflict,” Pope Leo wrote on social media on April 9, 2026. He stated clearly that “[a]nyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” He continued: “Military actions will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.” 

In early April, while President Trump called for a “whole civilization to die tonight,” referring to Iran, Pope Leo wrote that “[a]bsurd and inhuman violence is spreading ferociously through the sacred places of the Christian East. Profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives, which are considered at most collateral damage of self-interest.” 

In Fratelli Tutti, his encyclical on social friendship, the late Pope Francis called people of faith to “form a new society” and “write a new page of history that changes the conditions that create suffering for our neighbors,” including our brothers and sisters in Iran, Palestine, and throughout our nation.

This is our time to witness to the Prince of Peace, to the liberator of humanity, to stand with and for every Iranian, every Palestinian, and every person and community afflicted by death-dealing war, violence, genocide, ecocide, racism, and poverty. 

This is our time to form a new society, grounded in peace through justice, that writes a new page of history for all of our human and non-human kin to thrive free of violence, coercion, and every form of racial, economic, and military domination. Forming a new society means building a new collective consciousness of God’s kin-dom of loving care for the entire web of life. 

This call to transformation is echoed in Pope Leo’s inaugural Easter homily, in which he calls people of faith to witness the life of resurrection in a world of death. “Through the cracks of resurrection that open in darkness, Christ entrusts our hearts to the hope that sustains us.” The pope named the darkness of death that invades our hearts and the world everywhere – it invades through “violence, the wounds of the world, in the cry of pain that rises from every corner because of 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.” 

At the core of Jesus’ ministry, and ours, is the prophetic proclamation of good news for those who are poor and liberation for all who are oppressed in any shape or form. In his inaugural homily in the synagogue, Jesus grounded his mission in the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim an acceptable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4: 18-19)

Jesus’ message is clear: We are called, not only to resist war, poverty, and racism, we are called to work with people who are oppressed for their liberation. 

And yet, how the US spends tax dollars reveals a death-dealing reality that Dr. Martin King, Jr. called the triple evils of racism, poverty, and militarism. On August 31, 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam war, Dr. King spoke to the National Conference for a New Politics: “Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both Black and white, both here and abroad.” The only solution, Dr. King concluded, is “a radical redistribution of political and economic power.” Yet we, as the United States, celebrate a sanitized and flattened MLK day as we pour unfathomable funds into war, policing, and violence against our own people and all over the globe.

According to economist Nancy Folbre, the US war on Iran is costing at least $1 billion per day and is likely much more because the Pentagon put a price tag of $5.6 billion on the munitions expended in the first two days of the war. Folbre writes: “The so-called Big Beautiful Bill cut Medicaid funding by … $100 billion per year [for the next 10 years] and cut taxes to the top one percent of earners by… $116 billion per year. Low income Americans will lose the most – especially in rural areas that supply a disproportionate share of US military recruits but have been especially hit hard by hospital closures and cutbacks to care services. The cuts to Medicaid [in the first year of the Big Beautiful Bill] are enough to finance 100 more days of bombing Iran or tax cuts for the rich…” US taxpayers are literally funding war and filling the pockets of the richest Americans over and against our own health and well being.

In his homily at the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday (April 1), Pope Leo said, “[I]t is now a priority to remember that neither in the pastoral sphere nor in the social and political spheres can good come from abuse of power… The imperialist occupation of the world is thus disrupted from within; the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. The poor, imprisoned, rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death, yet in so doing he brings a new creation to light….”

“The threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified. There are other ways to resolve conflict between peoples. I call on President Trump to step back from the precipice of war and negotiate a just settlement for the sake of peace and before more lives are lost.

“After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem, and his first words were ‘Peace be with you.’ As the Holy Father, in his Urbi et Orbi message on Easter reflected, the peace that ‘Jesus gives us is not a peace that merely silences the weapons, but one that touches and transforms the heart of each of us! Let us make heard the cry for peace that springs from our hearts!’ …

“Let us entrust to the Lord ‘all hearts that suffer and await the true peace that only he can give. Let us entrust ourselves to him and open our hearts to him! He is the only one who makes all things new.” (cf. Rev 21:5)

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