The Week the Pope Went Woke
Like the Left, Pope Leo thinks the side with less power has no moral responsibilities
Much of the week has been taken up with the evolving feud between President Trump and the Pope. It began with Pope Leo’s first Easter mass, that many, including the President, took to be a passive aggressive swipe at the President:
“Let us allow our hearts to be transformed by his immense love for us. Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue!” Said Pope Leo.
One wonders where His Holiness’s exhortation to the Iranians to lay down their weapons after they murdered 30,000 citizens. How many nukes should Iran be allowed to acquire before we may use weapons to fight them?
Many defended the Pope on the grounds that his message was a general one about choosing peace over force. But that is an inherently political position when we have adversaries who would, who have, absolutely taken advantage of any kind of appeasement as capitulation.
The President, of course, did not keep his feelings on the subject a mystery, calling the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” in a long post to Truth Social.
Trump’s comments offended some in the Catholic community, who felt that the Pope’s remarks were general, and not political, and did not justify the President lashing out against the leader of the Catholic Church, though polling showed his support among Catholics unchanged.
But any illusion that the Pope meant his commentary to be a-political dissolved by the end of the week, when the Pope followed up with a series of tweets that it is just impossible to read in an a-political light.
On Thursday, Pope Leo wrote, “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”
He followed up with another post on the beauty of global humanity and accepting everyone equally: “#Peace is not something we must invent: it is something we must embrace by accepting our neighbor as a brother or sister. We do not choose our brothers and sisters: we must simply accept one another! We are one family, inhabiting the same home: this wonderful planet that ancient cultures have cared for over millennia.”
This sounds like a general message of peace, but it is the anti-nation state, open borders, peace through weakness view of the woke Left. For Pope Leo, Iran has no moral responsibilities because America is more powerful. And because America is powerful, it is not allowed to protect its borders or defend its interests and deprive our adversaries, who, again, murdered 30,000 of their own citizens, from acquiring a nuclear bomb.
No culture is better than any other. “We are one family,” says Pope Leo, “we must simply accept one another!” The culture that massacres 30,000 innocents is the same as the one fighting to keep them from acquiring a nuke. Actually, it’s better. It can behave as it likes and not get a tweet from the Pope—because it’s not western.
This is wokeness.
As President Trump pointed out, the Pope is of course entitled to his opinion—and the President is entitled to respond.
Catholic here. I like the Pope, and I like Trump, but I only voted for one of them.
Thank you Batya. Why the Pope is completely silent about the electoral fraud going on in Perú? After all, he sees himself more of a Peruvian than American.