When U.S. President Donald Trump sent Vice President JD Vance to negotiate with members of the Iranian regime in Islamabad, people initially thought that Vance—reportedly the most outspoken voice in the Trump administration against going to war with Iran—would be a soft touch.
When the talks in Pakistan broke down, however, Vance’s position could hardly have been tougher. Having seen the Iranian regime up close, he said, he was absolutely certain that these people must never be allowed to get nuclear weapons.
In recent days, he has again taken a position which contradicted previous assumptions about his worldview.
The MAGA movement is currently convulsed by a faction of poisonous, unhinged Jewish-conspiracy theorists, led by podcaster and political commentator Tucker Carlson. Believing that Israel drags America into needless foreign wars, they’ve been inflamed to the point of hysteria by the war against Iran.
A number of these people are Catholics who have positioned themselves against Christian Zionism, largely associated with evangelical Protestantism. Younger Catholics, particularly recent converts who reject modernity, are leaning into older, more “authentic” versions of the faith—and are thus embracing its earlier virulent antisemitism.
Vance, a passionate Catholic convert, has caused great unease among the Jewish community by refusing to distance himself from this tendency.
This past week, an explosive row was detonated between Trump and Pope Leo XIV that played straight into the MAGA convulsions.
The pope called the war in Iran 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.”
This caused Trump to lash out. “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 afterwards, Trump reposted an AI-generated image of himself laying his hand on a hospitalized man, producing outraged claims that he was portraying himself as Jesus.
After a few hours, Trump deleted this post. But he had needlessly put rocket fuel behind those outraged at criticism of the pope rather than at what the pope himself had said. Trump, critics claimed, had now lost the Catholic vote.
Yet Vance savaged the pope’s comments. In a discussion at the University of Georgia, the vice president responded to the pontiff’s claim that “God is never on the side of those who wield the sword” by protesting, “How can you say that?”
Referring to Catholic “just war” theory, which holds that war is justified as a last resort to prevent grave, certain and lasting damage by an aggressor, provided care is taken to protect civilian lives as far as possible, Vance declared: “There’s more than a thousand-year tradition of ‘just war’ theory. Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis? Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated Holocaust camps and liberated those innocent people from those who had survived the Holocaust? I certainly think the answer is yes.”
As a number of aghast Catholics have observed, the pope’s remarks were indeed against Catholic teaching itself. They’ve also reinforced suspicions that he is leading the capitulation of the church to Islamic conquest.
While lambasting America over the Iran war during the Easter weekend, the pope said nothing about the Islamist bloodbath in Nigeria at precisely that time, when dozens of Christians were gunned down and their homes set on fire.
On several occasions, he’s expressed sorrow over the victims of repeated such massacres in Nigeria and called on the authorities to protect all citizens. But he’s never called out the Islamic world for the attempt by Islamists to exterminate Christianity itself.
While the pope attacks America for waging war against Islamists, he fails to attack Islamists for their persecution and murder of Christians. He said instead last year that people should be “a little less fearful” of Islam, and this week that “Islam is a religion of peace we can learn from.”
On his visit to Algeria, immediately after the row with Trump, he appeared to promote an alliance between Muslims and Christians by signing the “Golden Book” ceremonial guestbook in the great mosque in Algiers and declaring it “a space proper to God.”
He also praised Algeria’s “rich diversity” and spoke about the importance of reciprocal respect and respecting the dignity of every person.
He thus totally ignored Algeria’s repression of Christians. The 2026 Open Doors World Watch List says that 47 churches of the Protestant Church of Algeria have been closed by the authorities, and the list puts the country in 20th place for Christian persecution around the world.
The pope said before his Algeria trip that his aim was to build “bridges between the Christian world and the Muslim world.” But building bridges between sheep and wolves merely provides the wolves with an easier way to tear the sheep to pieces.
His condemnation of the war against Iran rather than the Iranian regime itself serves to line up the Vatican with the debauched amorality of countries such as Britain, France, Italy and Spain, which have taken a similar position.
Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has adopted a particularly odious attitude. Having said the Iran conflict was “not our war” and “not in our national interest,” he then tried to cast himself as a peacemaker by flying to Saudi Arabia purportedly to negotiate a ceasefire.
While the United States is bringing Iran economically to its knees by interdicting Iranian maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, thus brilliantly turning the regime’s ostensible trump card against it, Starmer is sending out invitations to a risible summit to “break” Iran’s control of the Strait.
Top of their deliberations will doubtless be what gifts to put into the party bags they’ll give the Iranians to take home with them.
Shockingly, Starmer thinks that Israel has no right to defend itself against Hezbollah in Lebanon. He told the House of Commons this week: “Israel’s strikes are wrong. They’re having devastating humanitarian consequences and pushing Lebanon into a crisis. The bombing should stop now.”
He thus presented Israel totally falsely as a wanton aggressor, ignoring the thousands of rockets that Hezbollah has been firing at Israeli civilians—with all the death and destruction they’ve caused--and that show no sign of stopping.
Starmer thinks diplomacy brings peace. But more than four decades of diplomacy with Iran have resulted in thousands of Jews, Americans and others around the world being murdered, killed and wounded; a terrorized and butchered Iranian people; and the world’s most lethal terrorist state coming to the very brink of arming itself with the nuclear bomb.
Like the pope, Starmer and his fellow European fainthearts make pious incantations of peace while leaving the targets of genocidal war to swing in the wind.
This culture of appeasement reflects the dismal fact that Britain and these European nations are now on a trajectory of cultural collapse, as their countries become steadily Islamized while they refuse to defend a historic identity they no longer respect or even recognize.
Accordingly, the pope’s position should cause the utmost dismay to all who understand the need to prevent Western civilization from disintegrating.
Since religion is the moral scaffolding of a culture, it’s essential for the church to assert itself if the West is to be defended. For decades, the Church of England has tragically been instead at the forefront of civilizational decline. Now the Pope is sanctifying Europe’s surrender to Islam.
Trump’s crude and sometimes preposterous pronouncements dismay many. People’s real concern, however, should be for the survival of the civilization that only America’s president and the State of Israel are trying desperately to defend.
