In a presidential term characterised by jaw-dropping moments, last night’s attack by Donald Trump on Pope Leo XIV made my jaw drop even lower than what has become usual. The pope was described as weak and unfit, as though the measure of his office were the same as that of a political leader. Beneath the criticism lay something very revealing: Trump’s insistence that authority must resemble power in order to count.
Leo has not, of course, responded in kind. He has not attempted to prove his strength in the arena of power. Instead, he returned to something very simple. He said he will continue to speak for peace and he said he has no fear.
To understand why that matters, it helps to look back.
In the nineteenth century, the conflict between church and state in Prussia became very strained. Under Otto von Bismarck, the state sought to bring the Catholic Church under its control. Schools were taken, clergy regulated, influence curtailed. The assumption was clear. The modern state would define the terms of public life, and the Church would adapt or diminish. It did neither.
Guided by Pope Pius IX, the Church resisted. It declined to let its authority be redefined as merely political. In the end, the state stepped back. It had discovered a limit. There are forms of authority that cannot be appropriated by a state. This period in history became known as the Kulturkampf.
What we are seeing now is not a new Kulturkampf in the legal sense. There are no laws, no expulsions, no decrees. But the instinct behind it is recognisable. A political leader encounters a moral voice that does not align with him. The response is to discredit it, to reduce it, to pull it into the same arena.
Context matters here. The war in Iran did not emerge from a single unavoidable moment. It followed a series of choices. The United States and Israel launched strikes with goals unrelated to immediate defence, including weakening Iran’s regime and its military capacity. We are now witnessing an escalation as a naval blockade is announced following failed talks. This is not a situation forced upon the United States in a moment of necessity. It is one that has been shaped, step by step, by decisions. Leo sees this clearly.
His criticism is not vague. When he calls the destruction of a civilisation “unacceptable”, he is naming something concrete. The scale of violence, the human cost, the willingness to speak of annihilation as though it were strategy, all this is blatantly immoral to Leo. And this is precisely where his authority lies.
There is a tendency in modern politics to treat moral language as secondary, something that follows action rather than precedes it. Leo reverses that order. He begins with the human reality, with suffering, with loss, and he judges actions in that light. Not the other way around. This is why Trump’s accusation of weakness against him does not hold.
Weakness would be silence. It would be the quiet adjustment of language to match the mood of the powerful. It would be the decision to speak carefully, to avoid offence, to remain within safe limits. Leo was having none of this. He spoke plainly.
There is, in this, a continuity with what came before him. Pope Francis shifted the tone of the Church towards mercy, towards attention to those who suffer at the edges of political decisions. He was criticised for it. Too soft, too political, too unclear. One of the most common attacks on him was that he confused the faithful with his ambiguity.
What was really being resisted was not confusion or ambiguity, but emphasis. Francis refused to let the powerful define what matters. He insisted that the measure of any action lay not in its success, but in its human cost. That insistence often sounded unfamiliar, even disruptive, because it refused the language that power recognises.
Pope Leo XIV does not depart from this. He sharpens it. Where Francis unsettled, Leo states plainly. Where Francis invited reflection, Leo draws a line. The principle is the same, but the expression is firmer. He cannot allow the powerful to define war as a useful tool on the path of human progress, because to do so would be to abandon the very ground on which Francis stood.
That ground depends on distance. The Church’s distance from power is essential to its integrity. It is what allows it to speak without calculation, to name things as they are. That distance can easily be misread as irrelevance. Authority is expected to align itself with influence, to prove its worth within the structures of political or cultural authority. That is precisely what we saw in the White House on Good Friday, when religious language was drawn towards power. It had no integrity.
Leo refuses the expectation that he join the powerful. He does not seek proximity to power. He does not attempt to shape policy from within. He remains outside, and because he remains outside, he is able to say what those inside often cannot.
This is why the comparison to the Kulturkampf is not entirely misplaced. The forms are different, but the underlying question is the same. Can a moral authority exist independently of the state, and speak against it when necessary, without being dismissed or absorbed?
History suggests that it can. It also suggests that the attempt to diminish that voice often strengthens it. The more it is pressed into the language of power, the more clearly it stands apart from it.
Leo does not need to win this argument in the conventional sense. He is not running for office, not building a coalition, not seeking approval. His task is narrower, and in some ways more difficult: to speak truthfully about what is happening, regardless of how that truth is received. There is a simplicity to that task that can be mistaken for naivety. It is anything but. It requires a refusal to adjust, to soften, to translate. It requires the acceptance that such a voice will be misunderstood, criticised, dismissed. It requires, above all, a certain indifference to power.
“I have no fear,” he says.
It is a line that sits awkwardly in a political age, because it does not fit easily into its logic. Fear is so often the currency of power. It shapes decisions, justifies actions, narrows the field of what seems possible. To step outside it is to step outside the entire framework. This is what Leo has done.
And in doing so, he has reminded us of something that is easily forgotten. Not all authority derives from force. Not all strength is measured by the capacity to act. He reminds us that there remains, even now, a place for a voice that does not seek to command, but to call into question. In a moment shaped by escalation, that is not weakness. It is the only serious position left.
Consilium 
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