Leo may help break a trend that has dominated American Catholicism – less religion as national glue, more faith as a critique of power._

There is a way of speaking that consists of never raising one’s voice and, precisely for that reason, making oneself heard more than anyone who shouts. It is the register that Leo XIV seems to have chosen – and perhaps history has also imposed on him – in the weeks when the world is once again growing familiar with the language of total destruction.

While governments calibrate their nuclear threats with the nonchalance of someone updating a press release, and while the rhetoric of war settles into western democracies like furniture, the first American Pope in history is speaking about peace, shaped by the winds of war blowing from his country of origin.

In contemporary grammar, the word “peace” has undergone a peculiar process of semantic erosion. To utter it in public, especially in the context of an active conflict, often amounts to placing oneself in the realm of moral irrelevance: one is immediately labeled an idealist, a beautiful soul with no grasp of the reality of power.

Leo, however, has found a way to escape this rhetorical trap – not by raising his tone, but by lowering it to the point that the precision of his words becomes a form of authority.

His latest appearances – the Easter message on April 5 and the address at Castel Gandolfo on April 7 – mark a shift that warrants close attention. This is no longer a generic appeal for harmony among peoples. The focus has now tightened on two points as dense as reinforced concrete: one theological, the other moral and juridical.

The first: God cannot be invoked to bless war. The second: the threat directed against an entire people – the Iranian people, in this specific case – is “truly unacceptable”; attacks on civilian infrastructure violate international law; and the ongoing war has been called unjust by too many for anyone to keep pretending otherwise.

At Castel Gandolfo, Leo went further: he called for a return to the negotiating table and – something rare for a pontiff – urged citizens to press their political representatives to work for peace.

Those watching from the outside might be tempted by a simple reading: the Pope versus Trump. It is a narrative frame that has the merit of clarity and the defect of falsehood. Anyone who reduces Leo’s position to a personal duel commits two simultaneous errors. The first is analytical: they fail to understand what is happening. The second is political: they play directly........

© Pearls and Irritations