If the purpose of trolling — the posting of offensive or inflammatory messages about an individual on social media — is to produce an overreaction, Donald Trump is a grandmaster of the genre.
He lashed out at Pope Leo XIV for opposing the Iran war.
“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”
Shortly after, he shared an AI-generated image, first posted by a supporter in February, depicting himself with a light emanating from his person, laying his hand on the forehead of a prone figure in a hospital bed.
This produced outraged claims that he was portraying himself as Jesus. Since his AI self was dressed in indeterminate red and white robes and was surrounded by an American flag, the Statue of Liberty, eagles and jet fighters, this was more likely a bit of pagan kitsch depicting Trump healing the world through the exercise of American power.
This didn’t prevent a near hysterical clamor that he was clearly a sacrilegious megalomaniac and had now lost the Christian vote.
The furor over the image (which Trump subsequently deleted) detracted from his words about the Pope. Stripping aside Trump’s boastful and bombastic ramblings, his core point was justified.
The Pope’s attitude to the Iran war is shocking.
Last week Leo called it an “unjust war,” which was “continuing to escalate and not resolving anything.” He said God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” that “God does not bless any conflict,” and that “no cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood.”
At the weekend he decried the “madness of war” and said: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life.” In January he declared that “war is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.”
Presenting this as a war of unjustified aggression is nothing less than moral inversion. The Pope has chosen to ignore totally the deliberate and mass shedding of innocent blood by the Iranian regime, which earlier this year murdered around 40,000 innocent protesters and has spent the past 47 years waging war on America and the West through murderous terrorist atrocities.
According to both the US and Israel, it was also within a few months or perhaps weeks of getting the nuclear bomb. It is one of the world’s most evil regimes and a direct and acute threat to the innocent.
To represent the attempt to defang such a menace as a vogueish “zeal for war” is moral inversion.
The Pope interpreted Trump’s statement that “a whole civilization would die” if the regime didn’t come to heel as a threat against the “entire people of Iran.” But that threat was clearly designed to bring Iran to the negotiating table — which duly happened.
By exaggerating the harm done to the innocent in Iran, the Pope has also ignored the astonishingly precise bombing of military targets. The US and Israel have taken as much care as possible to avoid harming civilians.
The Pope’s refusal to support a war to end one of the world’s greatest evils has called to mind the disturbing example of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust.
In 1933, he signed the Reich Concordat, which secured for the German Catholic church protection from the Nazis and effectively bought its silence over the extermination of the Jews. Arguably, Leo’s stance is yet more shocking, because even Pius didn’t say it was morally wrong to fight Hitler.
So why has the Pope taken this position? Is he merely anti-Trump? Or is Leo, as Trump claimed, an ideological subscriber to the liberal universalist dogma that every conflict can be resolved through negotiation and compromise?
On the papal plane to Algeria this week the Pope said: “I am not a politician . . . let us always seek peace and put an end to wars. The message of the Church is the message of the Gospel; blessed are the peacemakers.”
But the alternative to defeating the Iranian regime is not to make peace. It is to abandon the innocent to be further murdered, tyrannised and threatened by fanatics who have a non-negotiable agenda and who regard dialogue sought by their enemies merely as an opportunity to capitalise on such demonstrable weakness.
Trump’s “Jesus” post shocked many Christians but the Pope’s stance too has shocked a number of Catholics.
By not only opposing this war but also saying “God does not bless any conflict,” he is said to have abandoned the Catholic church’s own “just war” theory. This holds that war can be justified as a last resort to protect innocent life by preventing grave, certain and lasting damage by an aggressor, provided care is taken to protect civilian lives as far as possible.
What makes the Pope’s stance even more shameful is that he has remained silent about the massacre of Christians in Nigeria over the Easter weekend, when other kinds of Islamist fanatics stormed Christian communities and churches and slaughtered men, women, and children.
Sadly, we have come to expect moral bankruptcy from our temporal leaders.
Hearing it from a supreme leader of the church chills the blood about the fate of western civilization.
From The Times of London.
