Conrad Black - US and Catholic Church must maintain a united front against ‘the Antichrist of our time’

 

The intemperate exchange between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV over the weekend said nothing flattering or even positive about either of them. The Pope knows perfectly well that the deranged Iranian theocracy is violently hostile to Christianity and that the fiercely pursued ambition of that regime to arm militant Islam with atomic weapons capable of being fired at the principal European cities, including Rome, is a menace to all mankind, and certainly to everything traditional to Christianity. He had absolutely no business identifying the attitude of the Iranian government as a pacifistic one in relationship to the United States.

What might have possessed him to imagine that antagonising the President of the United States could be a sensible or even justifiable use of the great moral and practical authority of his office certainly escapes my imagination, as a thoroughly practising Roman Catholic (converted from atheism many years ago), all of whose natural instincts are deferential to the Pope.

For Leo to express his preference for a peaceful resolution of the problems between Iran and its neighbours (extending 4000 km in all directions to accommodate the range of the missiles on which it is trying to fit nuclear warheads), is quite in order. For him to demur from the more bellicose of President Trump’s threats against Iran is comprehensible though it is a trespass of pontifical moralising into the stylistic expressive tendencies of the world’s foremost secular leader. The Pope could have been expected to be aware that when Trump was talking about “eliminating” a “civilisation” this was tactical hyperbole, since he was threatening the destruction of hydro electric generation plants and bridges and not mass murder of civilians of the kind that the Holy See should have been much more explicit in condemning when it actually occurred, particularly under the Third Reich.

As a strong though not uncritical supporter and long-time friendly acquaintance of President Trump, I also regret his intemperate responses. It is simply not appropriate to urge the Pope to “get his act together.” The Vice President, JD Vance, who led the American negotiators with Iran at Islamabad, did a good deal better on Fox News, speaking as a coreligionist of the Pope, for whom he expressed personal admiration. Leo should not have implied that recourse to direct hostilities had been unjustified or hinted at moral equivalence between the world’s principal terrorism-sponsoring state whose entire raison d’être is one of sectarian and racial hatred and unlimited violence, and the world’s principal democracy. The United States has done more to preserve Judeo-Christian values than any government or other entity in the world including the Roman Catholic Church for the last 110 years. The Pope, as an American, is well aware of this, including the liberation of Rome by the United States Army and its reception of a benediction of gratitude from Pope Pius XII from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on June 5, 1944.

Naturally, and it is fair to assume that this was not something the Pope intended or would approve, Trump’s domestic enemies clutched the hem of the Pope’s garments and swaddled themselves in ecclesiastical sanctimony. The CBS television program 60 Minutes, a long time spigot of anti-Trump bile, gathered together three haemophiliac bleeding-heart cardinals, Tobin of Newark, McElroy of Washington, and Cupich of Chicago, to amplify the scurrilous theme that Trump was fundamentally irreconcilable with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, which represents almost a quarter of Americans, including Melania Trump.

Cardinal McElroy claimed on the weekend that the US-Israeli attack on Iran was not a justified act of war, an assertion he knows to be false, given the countless murderous provocations by Iran and its promise to exterminate Israel as a Jewish state if it achieves nuclear military capabilities. Cardinal Cupich infamously minimized the horrible problem of deviant sexual exploitation of seminarians and children by many Roman Catholic clergymen as “another problem like climate change”, and recently proposed a lifetime Catholic achievement award for Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, one of the most militant proponents of unlimited access to abortion in American public life.

Both the Pope and the President of the US are entitled to misspeak and to utter injudicious reflections. And a vast organisation like the Roman Catholic Church has representatives that can be found to say almost anything. But both the Pope and the President and all who serve them have an obligation, especially in a time of crisis such as this, to avoid unnecessary abrasions between themselves. Despite many shortcomings, inanities, compromises, and even tragic misjudgements, the United States of America and the Roman Catholic Church are two of the mightiest pillars of Western civilisation and their leaders have an obligation to maintain as unified a front as possible against forces that can accurately be described as the Antichrist of our time.

https://brusselssignal.eu/2026/04/us-and-catholic-church-must-maintain-a-united-front-against-the-antichrist-of-our-time/