This story has been updated.
By Gary Gately
Pope Leo XIV made a rare direct appeal to President Donald J. Trump Tuesday to seek an “off-ramp” to end the Iran war as the conflict rages across the Mideast.
“I’m told that President Trump recently stated that he would like to end the war,” the first U.S.-born pontiff told reporters outside the papal retreat Castel Gandolfo, near Rome.
“Hopefully, he’s looking for an off-ramp,” Pope Leo added. “Hopefully, he’s looking for a way to decrease the amount of violence, of bombing, which would be a significant contribution to removing the hatred that’s being created and that’s increasing constantly in the Middle East and elsewhere.”
The leader of the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church also called on all world leaders to return to dialogue and pursue “ways to reduce the amount of violence” so that “peace, especially at Easter, might reign in our hearts.’’
Easter, he said, “should be the holiest, most sacred time of the year” and “a time of peace, a time for much reflection.”
But Leo lamented: “As we all know, once again in the world, in so many places, we are seeing so much suffering, so many deaths, even innocent children. We make continuous appeals for peace, but unfortunately, many people want to promote hatred and violence, war.”
The 70-year-old Leo’s latest appeal for an end to the U.S.-Israel-led war on Iran came two days after he warned in a Palm Sunday homily that those who wage war or invoke God to justify it have “hands full of blood” and that the Lord rejects their prayers.
The pontiff’s sharp rebuke of those who invoke God to justify war came against the backdrop of Trump administration officials — most notably Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — employing religious rhetoric to rationalize their military campaign against Iran.
But the U.S. is not alone in invoking religion to justify war; all sides have done so, including Israel and Iran.
Before Tuesday, Leo had refrained from naming any specific world leaders in his increasingly forceful appeals for peace since the war erupted on February 28 with U.S. and Israeli strikes across Iran.
The conflict has left more than 2,800 dead, nearly three-quarters of them in Iran, over 20,000 injured and millions displaced across the Mideast while disrupting energy supplies and threatening to plunge the global economy into a tailspin.
Meanwhile, the Vatican said Tuesday that Pope Leo will carry the cross himself through all 14 stations of the Via Crucis (“The Way of the Cross”) at Rome’s Colosseum on the first Good Friday of his pontificate.
It will mark the first time a pope has carried the cross for every station in the Via Crucis since Pope Paul VI revived it in 1964.
Leo’s predecessors Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II carried the cross only at the opening and closing of the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum. Pope Francis presided over the Via Crucis from the nearby Palatine Hill and in his final years did not attend because of declining health.
Pope Leo also will revive another Holy Week tradition by celebrating a public Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, including the washing of feet.
Pope Francis had broken with that tradition, instead celebrating the Holy Thursday liturgy at prisons and washing the feet of inmates.
See related story: In Palm Sunday Appeal for Peace, Pope Leo Condemns War Waged In the Name of God. Jesus, the Pontiff said, “Does Not Listen to the Prayers of Those Who Wage War.”