Catholic Leaders Bashed White House, Trump’s Iran War Before Pope Leo Attack | EUROtoday

A Catholic cardinal ripped the White House on Sunday over its “gamification” of warfare, and different church leaders criticized the administration in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired earlier than President Donald Trump’s not-so-holy phrases for Pope Leo XIV.

“We’re dehumanizing the victims of war by turning the suffering of people and the killing of children and our own soldiers into entertainment,” mentioned Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, of the White House’s popular culture clip-filled wartime hype content material.

Cupich, Cardinal Robert McElroy and Cardinal Joseph Tobin — all thought-about progressive voices within the Catholic Church — sat down with “60 Minutes” correspondent Norah O’Donnell, the place they criticized the administration’s strategy to the warfare and its immigration insurance policies.

The three knocked the administration’s overseas coverage earlier this yr, with Cupich notably taking purpose on the White House’s “deeply offensive” use of social media to advertise the battle final month.

He revived the argument in his interview with O’Donnell.

“It is sickening,” Cupich mentioned.

“To splice together movie cuts with actual bombing and targeting of people for the purposes of entertainment is sickening. This is not who we are. We’re better than this.”

Elsewhere within the phase, McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, famous that Iran has an “abominable regime” deserving of elimination earlier than stressing that the warfare has been one “of choice.”

“I think it’s embedded in a wider moment in the United States that’s worrying, which is this: We’re seeing before us the possibility of war after war after war,” he mentioned.

The first U.S.-born pontiff has known as for peace amid the battle and, whereas not mentioning Trump by title, has gone after the “delusion of omnipotence” and has bashed his “unacceptable” risk to finish Iran’s complete civilization.

Less than two hours after “60 Minutes” aired its phase on Sunday, Trump melted down on Truth Social in a rant the place he took credit score for Leo’s election and described the pope as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

Leo has since declared that he’ll proceed to “speak out loudly” in opposition to the warfare, telling reporters on Monday that he has “no fear of the Trump administration.”

Trump’s assault has led Bishop Robert Barron — who was picked to serve on the administration’s Religious Liberty Commission final yr — to go after the president’s “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful” assault on the pope.

The phase dropped amid a cloud of current reporting detailing how Pentagon brass flexed that the U.S. navy can do “whatever it wants in the world” and demanded the church “better take its side” in a gathering with Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Holy See’s former ambassador to the U.S., earlier this yr.

Both the Vatican and the White House pushed again on the report final week.