Afrasianet - Subhi Hadidi - U.S. President Donald Trump deliberately flirted with Pope Leo XIV over the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, starting with accusing the pontiff of loving crime, the Iranian nuclear bomb and favoring the far left, and that he was "not doing a very good job," and was elected "only because he is an American, and they thought that was the only way to deal with President Donald J.
Trump." Regardless of the dangers of this rift in Trump's Catholic electoral base in particular, and white Christianity in general, the US president's drift behind a politically costly and ideologically costly rhetoric is not new, and is rooted in Trump's narcissistic inflation, the shallowness of his polemic vocabulary, and his overall submission to derogatory phrases.
It is noteworthy, however, that his vice president, J.D. Vance, took the fight further when the debate moved to a sensitive area of Christian jurisprudence, a carrier of cross-interpretations, namely the theorizing of the concept of "fair war."
When the pope says that God is not on the side of those who wield the sword, there is a more than 1,000-year-old tradition of just war theory," said Vance, a convert to Catholicism.
Speaking at an event organized by a conservative right-wing group at the University of Georgia, he had to elaborate, quoting the example of the American forces that liberated France from the Nazis and freed Jewish prisoners from Holocaust camps.
He also had to ask the pope to be careful: "I think it's very important and important for the pope to be careful when he talks about theology. If you are going to give an opinion on matters of theology, you have to be careful."
Disagreement, disagreement, or discord can develop into sharp levels of mutual accusations and conflicting interpretations, to the point of recruiting Jesus Christ from one side against the other, pursuing a central goal of maintaining the Christian popular incubator, or developing other ways to co-opt it.
The most striking example, because it is also melodramatic in form and content, was Trump's video post on his personal platform, Truth Social, which showed him in a figure that is difficult not to refer to Jesus, but in which the US president was dressed in a biblical white robe, with a red scarf on his shoulders, touching the forehead of a blindfolded patient, and the light filtering through his fingers, surrounded by a nurse, a soldier, a woman praying, and a man (in a baseball cap!) The counterexample has been issued by Christian religious bodies, ecclesiastical or private, including the group of "Ancient Irish Monks," which considered that Trump is not only mocking the Pope as the "successor of Christ" on earth, but also disguising himself as Jesus and "committing an act of desecration of the sacred faith of more than a billion people."
For his part, James Massa, the Catholic archbishop in the United States, did not delay in issuing a statement explaining that the Catholic Church has limited the concept of "just war" to "self-defense, when all peace efforts have failed," reminding the White House that Pope Leo XIV is the "priest of Christ."
It is not out of an over-conclusion that the observer sees in this quarrel a pattern of disagreement, and some will not hesitate to consider it a conflict or discord, between a theology that contemporary imperialism, as represented by Trumpism in particular, does not find much embarrassment in settling down, and an ecclesiastical theology that has fundamentally changed in the description of religious wars under the name of "fair war," and considerations regarding the spread of Christianity among vulnerable peoples who were the first victims of the wars of the Titans, within the Christian ranks.
It is only for the sake of objective reading, at its minimal, that the fair observer should not limit this imperialist tendency to one American administration, and not many others. Because Trump does not miss an opportunity without slandering his predecessor, the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, and mocking the color of his skin and his triple name, and his intense pre-two policies, it may be good, and fair, to restore Obama's own positions on the theory of "fair war" and return to their natural contexts within the approach of American administrations.
In his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, Obama concluded: War is necessary for peace, and there are just wars of the kind that America was fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq; and that, if the likes of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King co-won the prestigious prize, he would bring peace through war alone, until further notice.
In the White House's theology on the theory of "just war," what ideas from St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas do Trump, his vice president, or his secretary of war do?
In application to the current U.S.-Israeli war, what kind of "justice" does the three pillars of the theory imply, before, during, and after the war? The most crucial question is: How much of Jesus Christ is left, here and today?
