On the letter from Minab, and why grieving Iranian parents wrote to an American pope
by R Tamara de Silva
There is a line of criticism, much in circulation at the moment, that Pope Leo XIV should stay out of politics. The objection is usually framed as a theological one, or a matter of appropriate papal reserve. It is neither. It is a historical claim, and as a historical claim, it is wrong. The papacy has been a force in European and global statecraft for roughly a thousand years. The Medici popes of the Italian Renaissance ran the Vatican as an instrument of dynastic politics, financed kings, commanded armies, and shaped the outcome of European wars. Julius II personally led troops into battle in 1511. Clement VII helped precipitate the English Reformation. The papacy in that era was not involved in politics. It was politics, fused with banking and diplomacy and dynastic ambition. That was an extreme version of the pattern, not its invention. In the last century, popes have spoken on war, power, and the moral limits of statecraft with a consistency that American political memory tends to forget. What follows is a brief tour of that more recent history, offered as context for a letter that reached the Vatican last week.
On April 19, the families of 168 children killed in the February 28 United States bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, wrote a letter to Pope Leo XIV. They called themselves “the fathers and mothers of 168 children who, these days, instead of embracing the warm bodies of our children, press their burned bags and bloody notebooks to our chests.” They thanked the Pope for what they called his courage in asking the powers of the world “to reduce the level of violence and the bombings.” They asked him to continue to be the voice of their voiceless children.
(I have written elsewhere about the Minab bombing, which Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for investigation as a possible war crime, and about the Anthropic case in which Catholic moral theologians filed an amicus brief on the ethics of autonomous targeting. This piece is about something else.)
This piece is about the letter itself. Why did grieving Muslim parents in a bombed Iranian town write to an American Catholic pope? They could have written to the United Nations Secretary-General. They could have written to any number of heads of state. They could have written, for that matter, to the President of the United States. They chose the Pope.
The answer is not theological. It is historical. Popes have spoken on war for most of the last century, often with more moral clarity than the political leaders of their moment. The parents of Minab did not invent the practice of appealing to Rome. They were participating in a pattern that has been available to grieving people for generations, because popes have made it available.
The Tradition
In 1954, nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pius XII told the World Medical Association that the atomic bomb had made modern warfare a different moral question than any war that had come before. “When the methods of warfare reach such an extreme that they entirely escape the control of man,” he said, “their use must be rejected as immoral.” Two years later, in his Christmas address, he declared that a war waged purely as an instrument of national policy was “to be outlawed as a moral sin.” These were not quiet statements. They were written against the grain of a Cold War in which both superpowers were actively building the arsenals he was condemning.
In October of 1962, with Soviet ships approaching the American naval blockade of Cuba, John XXIII broadcast an appeal on Vatican Radio. “We beg all rulers not to remain insensible to the cry of humanity. May they do everything in their power to save peace.” The message was transmitted to Moscow and Washington. Khrushchev later cited it, in remarks to the Supreme Soviet, as one factor in his decision to turn the Soviet ships back. The Pope’s words moved a superpower. The next spring, John XXIII followed the crisis with the encyclical Pacem in Terris, the first papal encyclical addressed not only to Catholics but to “all men of good will.” It remains one of the clearest statements the Catholic Church has ever produced on the moral impossibility of nuclear war.
In October of 1965, Paul VI became the first reigning pope to address the United Nations General Assembly. He spoke in the middle of the Vietnam War, to an audience that included representatives of the countries fighting it. “No more war, war never again,” he said. “Peace, it is peace which must guide the destinies of peoples and of all mankind.” Two years later, in his encyclical Populorum Progressio, he offered the formulation that has since become almost proverbial in Catholic social teaching: development is the new name for peace. He meant it as a diagnosis, not a slogan. Wars were being fought, he argued, because the underlying conditions that make peace possible were not being built.
John Paul II opposed both American wars in Iraq. Before the 1991 Gulf War, he warned against “the dark shadow of war” and pleaded publicly with President George H. W. Bush to pursue every diplomatic alternative. Before the 2003 invasion, he was more direct. He dispatched Cardinal Pio Laghi to Washington to warn President George W. Bush in person that the war could not be justified under Catholic just war doctrine. “War is not always inevitable,” Laghi told Bush, delivering the Pope’s message. “It is always a defeat for humanity.” The Vatican’s opposition to the 2003 invasion was unambiguous. It was stated repeatedly. It was ignored.
Benedict XVI, often treated in American political coverage as the Church’s conservative figure, continued the opposition. In 2006 he described the Iraq war as producing “nothing but destruction.” In 2007 he warned against the “theologization” of war, the claim that military action could be understood as the execution of divine purpose. He meant the phrase in specific reference to rhetoric that invoked Christian civilization to justify military campaigns. He was not, as some American commentators suggested, softening his predecessor’s position. He was sharpening it.
Francis carried the pattern into the present moment. On Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, and the long crisis in the Central African Republic, he intervened with a consistency that sometimes embarrassed both American and European governments. In 2013, with the Obama administration publicly weighing strikes on Syria, he called an unprecedented day of fasting and prayer for peace and personally lobbied G20 leaders in a letter to reject military intervention. The strikes did not happen. In 2022, he described the war in Ukraine as fueled by “the prevarication of the great powers.” In 2024 he called the situation in Gaza “terrorism,” using the word without qualification. No pope in living memory has been more willing to name specific governments and specific decisions.
This is the tradition within which Leo XIV is speaking. He did not invent it. He inherited it.
The American Pope
Robert Prevost, who took the name Leo XIV on his election in May of 2025, came to the papacy from an unusual trajectory. Born in Chicago. Formed in the Augustinian order. More than two decades as a missionary in Peru, before being called to the Vatican’s episcopal appointments office. He led the worldwide Augustinian order for twelve years. Augustine, the fourth-century bishop who first worked out a Catholic doctrine of just war, treated that doctrine as an act of grief rather than a permission slip. Every peaceful alternative had to be exhausted before force could be considered. The only legitimate aim was the defense of the innocent. This is the intellectual tradition in which Leo was formed.
The name he chose matters. The last Leo was Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum is the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching. It addressed labor, capital, wages, and the proper role of the state. It was, among many other things, an argument against the idea that economic arrangements were beyond moral judgment. Choosing the name Leo, for a first American pope, was a signal. It said this pontificate would speak to questions others preferred to treat as technical.
Leo XIV’s interventions on the war in Iran have followed that pattern. His first public address after election called for an “unarmed and disarming peace.” Through the summer and fall of 2025, as conflicts intensified in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, he spoke repeatedly in the language of human dignity rather than strategic interest. When American and Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28, 2026, he addressed the conflict in the same register. In March he condemned “the delusion of omnipotence” and declared that “God does not bless any conflict.” In April, after President Trump threatened to destroy Iranian civilization, the Pope responded that such threats against a people were “truly unacceptable.”
The President attacked the Pope personally in response, calling him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” Leo answered, to reporters outside Castel Gandolfo, that he had no fear of the Trump administration and no interest in a political debate with the President. “I don’t think,” he said, “that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing.”
This is not, as some American commentators have suggested, a politicized papacy. It is a traditional one. What is unusual is not the Pope’s opposition to the war. It is that the pope doing the opposing is American, speaking to an American audience in English, from within the same national moral vocabulary as the administration he is criticizing. That makes his interventions harder for American ears to dismiss as foreign. It also makes them harder for American political actors to absorb without anger.
The Letter
The parents of Minab knew none of the internal Vatican theology when they wrote to Rome. They were not Catholic. They were not scholars of papal history. They were grieving fathers and mothers who had watched a school full of their children be struck by a missile in the middle of a school day, and who had searched for someone whose moral authority was not compromised by national allegiance to any of the governments responsible. They found the Pope.
What is striking about the letter, on first reading, is how little explanation it requires. The parents wrote in the confident tone of people addressing an authority they expected to hear them. They were not wrong. The Vatican confirmed receipt. Leo continues to speak.
The letter ends with a request. “Our children will never return home again to build a better tomorrow, but the prayer of us bereaved fathers and mothers is that your message to ‘lay down weapons’ is heard. We ask you to continue to be the voice of the voiceless children and strive to reopen ‘all paths of dialogue,’ so that no more weapons are built, and no father or mother anywhere on this earthly sphere is forced to whisper a nighttime lullaby over the cold tombstone of their child.”
This is what popes have always been asked to do. It is what, more often than American political memory acknowledges, they have done. Pius XII on the bomb. John XXIII on Cuba. Paul VI on Vietnam. John Paul II on Iraq. Benedict XVI on its continuation. Francis on Syria, Gaza, Ukraine. Leo XIV on Iran.
The objection one hears, in American political commentary, is that the Pope should stay out of politics. The parents of Minab have answered that objection more eloquently than I could. They wrote to him because no one else was listening. That is not a political observation. It is a description of what the papacy has been, at its best, for longer than any American generation has been alive to remember.
R Tamara de Silva is a Chicago attorney and writer. She has written previously on the Anthropic v. Department of War case and on the Minab bombing.