The War Is Not Over

As Trump tries to declare victory & move on, we must be clear about what's been attacked

After Donald Trump announced on social media Friday that the Straight of Hormuz was open, he told USA Today that he was celebrating a “great victory.” According to the US President, his war of choice had achieved its objectives without him ever clearly enumerating them. Spokespersons for the Iranian regime immediately contradicted Trump, and Iranian forces fired on two ships over the weekend, insisting that the Straight was still closed. Trump’s war of choice is not over, but it is increasingly evident that it is more than an exercise of military might against the Iranian regime. If we listen closely, it is clear that Trump is waging a war on divinity itself.

At a press conference this past week, Bishop Barber challenged the media to pay closer attention to what Trump has been saying, both about Iran and the Pope:

Why has he been talking about “reigning” down hell? Why does he write “reign,” not “rain”? What authority is he claiming to serve?

Why was he so threatened by Easter that he had to try to make it about him?

Why is the Pope teaching what Jesus and the church have always taught getting under his skin? The religious nationalist movement for so long has been saying he is an imperfect instrument being “used by God.” But he’s not satisfied with that. He wants to be God.

While public polling suggests that Trump’s attacks on the Pope and blasphemous portrayals of himself as God are not popular, even with much of his base, Trump seems unable to resist attacking religious authority that challenges his abuse of power. He says he should be able to decide who lives and who dies half a world away, who controls the governments of other nations, who has a right to citizenship in this country, and whose rights are respected by law enforcement. If the Pope says, as he must, that God opposes such an abuse of power, Trump thinks he can attack the person who holds the office - calling him “weak” and claiming that he wouldn’t be Pope if it weren’t for Trump.

But this is where the moral articulation of public theology is so important in challenging authoritarianism. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has written, “The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level.” When he makes personal attacks against Pope Leo the official MAGA doctrine, he forces JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and any Catholic who wants to stay in his good graces to side with the boss over their own faith community. This is not only the case for Catholics. By trying to make his defiance of moral authority personal through attacks against the Pope, Trump has intensified his campaign to make himself the arbiter of good and evil.

But this confrontation between Trump as strongman and the Pope as representative of the Catholic church’s just war doctrine is a window into the importance of moral witness in every generation. Pope Leo has been able to state clearly that he is not afraid of Donald Trump and challenge all who “misuse religions and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political ends” because this is not his personal conviction. It is the official teaching of the church. Archbishop Paul Coakley, the head of the US Conference of Bishops, said this week, “Pope Leo is not [Trump’s] rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.” Pope Leo’s opposition to total war is church doctrine. The story of how it came to be so clear is an important reminder why small acts of faithfulness matter, even when they don’t make front-page news.

More than 60 years ago, when the Second Vatican Council met in Rome, 2,300 bishops gathered from around the world to consider how the ancient faith of the church should be lived and interpreted in the modern world. Given the potential threat of nuclear weapons, the bishops debated how the church would interpret its just war doctrine in the face of 20th century realities. The most prominent Catholic theologian in the United States, Fr. John Courtney Murray, had argued since World War II that a limited nuclear war could be just. But the global community was increasingly clear that nuclear war could not be limited. The bishops had to wrestle with the question of whether a total war could ever be just.

Outside the White House this week, Trump told ABC News “you cannot let a certain country, which is a very mean-spirited country, have a nuclear weapon. If they did, they would use it.” At Vatican II, it was precisely this logic which led some theologians to argue that a total war against a potential nuclear power could be justified. Long theological treatises were written with much greater clarity than Trump has ever been able to muster, but toward the same conclusion. The threat of a bomb that could destroy the world might justify the destruction of a whole people, the advocates for total war argued.

Because she understood that some of the bishops could be persuaded by this cold logic, Dorothy Day organized a “peace lobby,” which held a 10-day fast in Rome during the final session of Vatican II in 1965. “I had offered my fast in part for the victims of famine all over the world,” Day wrote, “and I could only feel that I had been given some little intimation of the hunger of the world.” By calling the bishops to remember Christ’s presence in the least of these, the fast persuaded the bishops that the church could never justify total war. “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and humanity itself,” the Second Vatican Council wrote in Gaudium et Spes. “It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.” As Catholic theologian James W. Douglass, who was instrumental to the peace lobby’s communications with the bishops has noted, it was the only condemnation of Vatican II.

When Pope Leo offered “unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation” of Trump’s threat to annihilate a whole civilization, he wasn’t acting on his personal convictions alone. He was speaking as the head of a church that has a moral position on total war - a position that was debated carefully over years and influenced by the moral witness of people who practiced the power of nonviolent love through a fast and vigil in Rome. As we prepare for another week of Moral Mondays, both in Washington, DC, and in local communities across the nation, the Pope’s moral clarity is a powerful reminder why faithful moral witness, however small, is important in every moment.

This moral position is not just church tradition; it is the result of listening to the words of the prophets and the words of the Gospel, especially the words of Jesus that have ultimate authority for Christians. “Blessed are the peacemakers” can’t just be pushed aside or written away or changed whenever there is a new president or a new pope. Every generations of the church is met with this reminder of Jesus and call to be faithful, not to politics or a particular power structure, but to the Gospel.

To be sure, the church - both Protestant and Catholic - has not always been consistent in its witness to the message of Jesus, but in this moment the Word of the Lord is clear, and the Pope, along with many other moral leaders, is clear that the religious nationalism embraced by Trump, Hegseth, and the MAGA movement is wrong, sinful, and blasphemous. The 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, “The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.” We can’t bow down to a false god in a president, nor to the false and immoral narrative that this war of choice is holy and can bring a lasting peace.

The moral authority of a voice in the public square is never dependent on their personality alone. It is the articulation of a consensus that has been built over generations, often by people who consistently show up to insist that some things cannot be about what is most expedient or even what is immediately possible. This is why, whenever we hold Moral Mondays, we say people of faith enter into the public space not with partisan facts and focus, but with the truths of the Gospel and the prophets, declaring, “Thus saith the Lord.” To take a moral stand is to insist that some things must be resisted no matter how inevitable they may seem, simply because they are wrong.

Because this war on divinity is not over, we must continue to mount a moral resistance to it.