During his Algeria apostolic journey, Pope Leo XIV denounced US-Israeli strikes on Iran as “continuous violations of international law” and “neocolonial tendencies,” referencing the killing of schoolgirls by a Tomahawk missile. The pontiff’s intervention, citing Saint Augustine’s just-war doctrine, directly rebukes Trump as a manipulated and reckless actor.
Open conflict with the President of the United States was not something Pope Leo XIV expected when his Apostolic Journey took him to the largest country in Africa. The leader of some 1.4 billion Roman Catholics was in Algeria last week, following in the footsteps of Saint Augustine, his spiritual mentor, who was born there in the 4th Century AD.
Pope Leo was first received in the capital city of Algiers, at the Martyrs’ Memorial, where he paid tribute to the 1.5 million victims of the country’s eight-year war of independence from France, which ended in 1962. The Pope then visited the Algiers Grand Mosque – the third largest in the world after the ones in Mecca and Medina.
On April 14, there was a papal mass in Annaba, the northeastern port city which was called Hippone when Augustine wrote his most significant theological works. Celebrants packed Annaba’s magnificent Basilica of Saint Augustine – a building as revered by pilgrims from Algeria’s 48-million-strong Muslim population as it is by the 10,000 Catholics who live there.
Instead, Pope Leo was forced to respond to a fierce attack by President Donald Trump over America and Israel’s devastating war against Iran. It should not be necessary to reference any pontiff as a man of peace, but Trump is weak on facts, and was outraged that his military adventure was not being supported by the Vatican which – according to Trump – should “stop catering to the Radical Left”.
Catholicism is rooted in love and reconciliation, and the Chicago-born Pope pointed out that an Iran campaign which started off with the killing of some 100 school girls by an American Tomahawk missile in late February did not display an “understanding of what the message of the Gospel is”. The Pope called for an end to hostilities and to the “continuous violations of international law and neocolonial tendencies”.
In this sense, it was not just Trump’s support for quasi-imperialism and contempt for legality that Pope Leo highlighted, but his sheer stupidity. In contrast to leaders who have helped forge great civilisations over the centuries, the convicted criminal is a divisive clown with next to no understanding of the ancient values that bind decent people.
Trump’s latest catastrophic failing – the war in Iran – has seen him manipulated by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal suspect accused of never-ending murderous attacks on civilians across the Middle East, including the Gaza genocide, and in Lebanon and Syria. In the words of Joe Kent, the director of America’s national counter-terrorism centre, who resigned in opposition to the Iran conflict : “It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Netanyahu has been claiming an imminent threat from Iran for the past three decades, and has always wanted to pulverise the country, with the help of the USA. His close friend Trump, the incumbent military chief of the world’s only superpower, was a monumentally useful idiot in pursuing such a reckless objective.
Sure enough, the death and destruction are multiplying, and the conflict is spreading, along with chronic damage to the global economy, as other countries protest against the folly. There is no sign of the reactionary Ayatollah regime in Iran crumbling. On the contrary, it appears to be becoming more ruthless, as it fights back.
Netanyahu added: “Europe is losing control of its identity, of its values, of its responsibility to defend civilisation against barbarism”.
This from the leader of an Israel that uses billions of dollars-worth of American weapons to constantly attack multiple neighbours. It slaughters with impunity, while refusing to own up to its own stockpile of nuclear warheads, because this would technically open it up to inspections and sanctions. Meanwhile, Israelis further continue to illegally occupy land belonging to other people, as heavily armed settlers move in to Palestinian territory with their army’s support.
That Netanyahu should use the word “barbarism” as part of his decrepit propaganda is of particular significance to Algerians, a people who were regularly portrayed as savages by colonial invaders. France used a vast arsenal of genocidal weapons, including gas chambers and napalm, to ethnically cleanse territories before its defeat by Algerian nationalists. All the while, Berber and Arab Muslims were treated as something less than human, who could be exterminated in the interest of French “security”.
Words such as “terrorists” were deployed to describe those showing dissent against the invaders, while those who opted to stay in their own homes, and who were killed anyway, were conveniently branded “human shields”. Such cynical jargon remains as popular as ever with the Israelis, who need to try to justify the extermination of human life, including tens of thousands of children.
There is of course a notion of a just war in the teachings of all the three great Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. It was Saint Augustine himself who invented the first Catholic one, but none would apply to what Netanyahu and his oafish American lackeys are doing. Instead, Pope Leo has referred to a “delusion of omnipotence” that has manifested itself in Trump posting an image of himself apparently looking like Jesus, and Netanyahu acting like a manic preacher.
There was no specific reference to Trump and Netanyahu by this time, but there is no doubt that both warmongers exemplify the most abhorrent recesses of the human psyche, and it is not just learned theologians who condemn the evil they are spreading around the world.