By White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said there is nothing wrong with the president and military leaders “calling on the American people to pray for our service members.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said military leaders and the president urging prayers is “a very noble thing to do,” pushing back after Pope Leo XIV said God rejects prayers of leaders who wage war.
Leavitt, when asked March 30 by a reporter to respond to the pope’s statement that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” said: “I think our nation was a nation founded, 250 years ago almost, on Judeo-Christian values. And we’ve seen presidents, we’ve seen the leaders of the Department of War, and we’ve seen our troops go to prayer during the most turbulent times in our nation’s history.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with our military leaders or with the president calling on the American people to pray for our service members and those who are serving our country overseas. In fact, I think it’s a very noble thing to do,” said Leavitt, who is Catholic.
“And if you talk to many service members, they will tell you they appreciate the prayers and support from the commander in chief and from his cabinet,” Leavitt said.
The pope, whose father served in the U.S. Navy on a D-Day tank landing ship, sharply condemned war in his Palm Sunday homily and said God cannot be used to justify war. He did not name specific leaders.
God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” Pope Leo said during Mass in St. Peter’s Square. The pope, who has repeatedly called for a ceasefire to war in the Middle East, presented Christ as the “King of Peace,” contrasting Jesus’ meekness with the violence surrounding him as he entered into his passion.
The pope tied the Church’s contemplation of Christ’s passion to the suffering of people in conflicts today, especially Christians in the Middle East.
The pope recalled: “When one of his disciples drew his sword to defend him… Jesus immediately stopped him, saying: ‘Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.’”
Leavitt’s response also follows the opening of two lawsuits against the U.S. Departments of Defense and Labor by Americans United for Separation of Church and State regarding prayer services organized by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Hegseth last week invoked Christian language and prayed for “overwhelming violence of action” against U.S. enemies.
The suits allege that the Christian prayer services abuse taxpayer resources, promote Christian nationalism, violate the separation of church and state, and pressure federal employees to participate.
U.S. communication with Israel
During the press briefing, Leavitt also confirmed that the U.S. communicated with Israel after Israeli police prevented Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco lelpo, custos of the Holy Land, from enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday.
“I did speak with Secretary [Marco] Rubio this morning and we did express our concerns with Israel with respect to these holy sites being shut down,” Leavitt said.
“We want worshipers to be able to access these holy sites,” she said. “Of course, safety is a top priority, but we understand Israel is working on those security measures, to reopen the sites throughout Holy Week, and that’s something that we’re appreciative of,” she said.
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This is a fallen world laced with conundrums through and through. The article mentions Normandy…
My own trivial history includes growing up in a boomtown bedroom community to one of the Manhattan Project’s two massive nuclear warhead production facilities (to offset HItler’s feared program). The new and single Catholic Church was thrown up in December 1945 (I was baptized the following April) and was and still is conspicuously named “Christ the King Parish,” a reference to the feast of Christ the King (and Pope Leo’s theme today) established in 1925 to offset the not-so-peaceful incubation of totalitarian regimes in Europe.
We might be reminded of a much longer history, too, with all of the deeper moving parts still in play….The great amateur historian and theologian Henry Ford summarized, “history is just one damn thing after another!” Earlier, in A.D. 1095, at the start of two centuries of Crusades (say what?), Pope Urban II’s call to arms at Clermont appealed to many motives— and the assembled crowd erupted with almost Islamic simplicity, “God wills it! God wills it!”
What can one say about our ratcheted-up, technocratic, anonymous, and hair-trigger 21st Century, when the downside of doing something and of doing nothing likely might be equally catastrophic in the long run? Five years ago, my own amateur anguish— and pause— at history’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki…resulted in a researched meditation. The role of imprecise and culture-bound language and elastic words played their parts: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2021/08/meditations-bomb-small-town-cul-de-sac-peter-beaulieu.html
We live in existential and newly apostolic times, and media soundbites.
“When one of his disciples drew his sword to defend him… Jesus immediately stopped him, saying: ‘Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.’”
Why was Peter even carrying a sword?
The pope and we should pray for Trump as well as for the men in uniform. Catholics and Christian people everywhere should pray for heretical nations and for people who know nothing of Judeo-Christian principles while despising, espousing, and acting against people and nations who hold them.
How exactly does the pope know that God does not listen to another man’s prayers? What man is privy to the mind of God?
It was at a time when it was unthinkable that a Roman pontiff would condemn a nation’s blessing of the troops as they marched off to battle.
The scene was the army of Tsarist Russia marching off to defend Borodino from Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Division after division marched by the crowds lined with priests singing, incensing soldiers and waving banners, religious Khorugv of Christ, the Blessed Mother.
The movie, Russian version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, filmed 1965 when Khrushchev and Brezhnev ruled. Its message was France won the battle but lost the war. Hardened communists Khrushchev and Brezhnev realized appeal to Russia’s religious roots, which Stalin was well aware, invoking its history under the Tsars, religion a unifying fact during the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany.
At our moment in history it’s irony at its best that a Catholic leader, the supreme pontiff should not appreciate the historical religious bloodlines of the American people in their very human desire to call on their God for assistance in their resistance to the growing menace of a nuclear armed fanatic Shia regime.
Pope Urban II prayed and organized the First Crusade to help the Christian Emperor of the Christian Greek Roman Empire (Byzantine) whose land was been overwhelmed by the Muslim Turks. Pope Saint Pius V prayed and organized the Holy League that fought against the Muslim Turks at Lepanto and helped check the Islamic advance against Christendom. Many Christian heroes have done the same. See historian R. Ibrahim, Defenders of the West. The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.
https://www.amazon.com/Defenders-West-Christian-Heroes-Against/dp/1642938203
Luke 12:51 – “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.”
Matthew 10:34 – “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.”
The Holy Father’s comments bode poorly for a pontificate with an adequate engagement with world affairs theologically or practically. Schooled in the nonsense emerging in the seventies and eighties he just can’t shake the Catholic Leftism masquerading as virtue. Bergoglian absurdity in the extreme. One could not hope for a more accurate impersonation if the Jorge rose from the grave. Leo appears subsumed in mid-century post-conciliar leftism up to his neck.
As Pope Benedict predicted, this crisis will not pass until the generations with any investment in the mid-century cataclysm have passed on.
This could not be more disappointing. Here we go again.
a) peter carries a sword because earlier Jesus had told his disciples to do so: In Luke 22:36, Jesus instructed his disciples to take their money and bags, and to sell their cloak to buy a sword if they did not already have one.
b) later he would tell Peter not to use the sword because that would have interrupted the fulfillment of Jesus journey and sacrifice. Peter wanted to use the sword at the wrong time. No contradiction. Christians are not forbidden to use deadly force to defend themselves and especially their loved ones. Imagine a husband allowing his wife to be raped and his children enslaved by just turning the other cheek and forbidding his enemies. This is not what Christianity teaches. See what Pope Urban II did, what Pope Saint Pius V did, what the great Christian heroes who saved Christianity did. See historian R. Ibrahim, Defenders of the West. The Christian Heeroes Who Stood up Against Islam.