Pope Leo has become the world’s most eloquent peacemaker. But is it possible to call for peace where there is no peace in one side’s heart?

At Battle near Hastings, the landscape shows that on 14 October 1066 the Normans had an uphill struggle to overcome King Harold’s superior forces on the ridge above. Harold might have prevailed but for the all-or-nothing determination and cleverer tactics of Duke William of Normandy.

Harold and William were related through the late Edward the Confessor; each had a case for succeeding him. Was it a just war? Pope Alexander II sent a papal banner in support of William, but he was hardly impartial: he had trained at Bec in Normandy under Lanfranc, who was to become King William’s Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070. Nonetheless, the victorious King founded an abbey over the spot where Harold was slain in atonement for the blood spilt that day by Normans and Anglo-Saxons alike.

Pope Leo’s observation that “God does not bless any conflict” and that anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is “never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs”, denies to any nation the attempt to enlist God and override the obligations of Catholic faith and virtues. In his 1899 apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, Pope Leo XIII reminded American Catholics that the Church was not there to conform to the culture and values of the US, but to conform America to the faith and culture of Catholic life in Christ. Yet a Catholic vice president, with his particular American view of Catholic theology, instructs the Pope to anchor his comments on matters of faith in the truth and to “stick to morality”, while the Catholic Church’s ultimate arbiter on faith and morals quietly reminds us that when we pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth, public policy, particularly on war and peace, is not exempted. Likewise, while the US president threatened an entire civilisation with death and destruction, Leo XIV recalled that Christ only blesses the peacemakers.

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