The Antipope Gives Military Advice
Aircraft should always be vehicles of peace, never of war!
No one should fear that threats of death and destruction
will come from the sky.
—Leo XIV in a recent comment to the press.
It seems that in the Vatican we have a fine tactician
__Who knows how modern warfare should be waged.
He’s opened up his mouth, and yet I have a strong suspicion
__His mental gears are stripped, or unengaged.
This antipope dislikes it when our pilots drop their bombs—
__He’s furious that targets are destroyed.
He moans about the casualties, sings penitential psalms
__(And since our side is winning, he’s annoyed).
He doesn’t think that aircraft should be instruments of war,
__Though bayonets and bullets are OK.
He’ll tolerate the Abrams tank, a howitzer, and more—
__But not our guided missiles on their way
To hit well-chosen targets on precisely plotted grids
__With minimal destruction and no trouble.
The antipope’s infuriated that we’ve greased the skids
__For Persia’s metamorphosis to rubble.
Could it be he’s worried that his fellow sermon-sayers
__(The mullahs, ayatollahs, and imams)
Might get hit by rockets as they howl their daily prayers
__And not be held exempt from U.S. bombs?
After all, they share with him the specialist profession
__Of spouting moral certitudes and laws.
Perhaps the antipope will call for prayerful intercession
__To put a muzzle on our savage jaws.
But that’s not gonna happen while The Donald calls the shots—
__Our planes, our ships, our paratroops, Marines
Are set to raise the juice up to some lofty megawatts
__And blast Iran to bloody smithereens.
So let old Leo whine and moan, and call for empty skies.
__We’re not inclined to listen to him whimper.
Perhaps he simply should tone down the pacifistic cries
__And stick with his Chicago swish and simper.
Poet’s Note: Leo XIV’s comment on the immorality of using skyborne weaponry in warfare wouldn’t be taken seriously even if he were an actual Pope, with magisterial authority. In warfare, one’s uses whatever weapons are necessary. But his comment is doubly absurd coming from someone who supposedly knows scripture, where we are told that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah by raining fire and sulphur from on high, slaughtered nearly everyone in Jericho by causing its walls to collapse, and wiped out all human civilization by sending down a massive inundation of rain to drown all but his chosen favorites. Moreover, the example of Pope Julius II, a hardboiled warrior who led full-scale attacks on Bologna and other Italian cities, shows that popes were not always wilting flowers in the mold of this Leo.
Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide. He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.
Brilliant invective, Joe, and whilst we must all lament war, the duty of government is to protect its citizens; and the thing that’s missing from so many of these so-called Christian ‘pacifists’ is either an acknowledgement of the complexity of scripture and tradition on the topic, and secondly an acknowledgement of what do you do when you are faced with real evil? Great work.
This pope said nothing when 30,00 protesters were murdered but now he wants the fighting to stop which would leave this satanic regime in power. Jesus should have him recalled.
By the way… I really enjoyed the poem.
I marvel at such auspicious poetry ascending to previously unattainable heights honeycombed with daggers of verbal destruction. Perhaps I should stop there, since I am awe-struck with what you have provided us and accomplished. I have never doubted your verbal capabilities, courage, and veracity in exposing anyone of any rank, pomp, or circumstance for who and what they are.
To James, Dick, and Roy —
I thank you all for your words, which give me heart to maintain my indignation over the fact that this antipope said what he said. This battle might well be a second Lepanto, and this guy sympathizes with the enemy?
Leo is a mouse. And as Stalin once asked, “How many legions does the pope have?”
Joe, your poem is excellent, entertaining, infuriating and inspiring. I am thoroughly gratified by your exposure of this antipope’s ignorance, hypocrisy and atheocratic liberal ideology. Of course you are right to be indignant: this woke individual who sits on the throne of St. Peter has surprisingly little in the way of factual knowledge — political, historical and tactical — and his theology is pure Democrat shill. He seems perfectly content to sell Europe down the river — and the Church along with it. I think you are quite right about his motives: I think he’s worried about the imams to whom he has somehow become beholden. Is he being pressured to submit Judeo-Christian culture to Islamic hegemony? The extent to which he appeases interests hostile to the West certainly make it seem so. I’d like to know what is said behind closed doors in Rome.
It is amusing in the most cynical and sardonic of ways to see how Leo zeroes in on the weapons of war that are most effective and most likely to end the war that he claims to hate. It’s as if the man’s moral compass has been surgically removed. Ironic since he purports to be the arbiter of moral certitudes and laws.
Thank God for “the Donald.” I suspect he and Pope Julius II would get along famously. In fact, that would make for an interesting poetic meeting.
The Pope should stick to matters of the spirit. Period.
To Kip Anderson, Brian, and Cheryl —
My sincerest thanks to all three of you. What infuriates me as a Roman Catholic is to see a cleric of such high standing whose Woke bigotries and reflexively anti-Western thought patterns are being imposed upon the institutional Church.
Joe, as a Roman Catholic I sympathize. We live in an age when deism, naturalism, modernism and rationalistic faith in progress are overripe fruits consumed by too many clerics. In the great Creeds we profess our belief in The Church, not in decadent institutionalism.
I must, however, correct Dr. Lackman’s statement that Pope Leo said nothing about the Iranian protesters who were killed. I can also excuse Lackman because he may well have seen no evidence of it. Before mid-January, the Pope had begun to deplore the violence in Iran, to call for its end, and to warn of further tragedy. In English, the only reporting of this came in the Catholic press, never the mainstream media. And on March 2, the third day of the war, the Middle East Forum declared with fanfare that Pope Leo had been silent about Iranian tyranny. MEF is not a Middle East organization but an American think tank of conservative outlook, whose leaders want to support the war effort and are unlikely to subscribe to the Catholic press. They should have checked; they made a mistake.
If Leo did make a statement deploring the mass slaughter of Iranian civilian demonstrators, then that is certainly to his credit. But publicly saying that the use of aircraft in combat is morally illicit — and that is what effectively was perceived by the press –well, that was contextually a slap at the U.S.-Israeli offensive, and was meant as such. All his blather about technology being misused and perverted is historically preposterous. After the invention of the machine gun in the 1870s, was its spread to all the armies of the world a moral offense?
Leo, like his hero and mentor Francis, has a need to shoot off his mouth in public without thinking clearly beforehand. Oh, for the good old days, when Popes just stayed in Castel Sant’ Angelo, said their rosaries, and occasionally issued a long document in Latin.
Very thoughtful poem. We should demand from our leaders clearly articulated visions for peace and security, rather than moral posturing.
Thank you, Murray.
Joe, firstly (and most importantly) I admire the technical skill and satirical verve of this powerful poem. I can feel its white-hot passion spitting fire from every scathing and scintillating line. Your poem has swept me up in its sizzle and singed my synapses… the measure of an excellent piece!
I’m glad you have called out the antipope who presides over the ethics of war from a papal position of hypocrisy that never fails to astound me. His ice-blessing theatrics in the interest of furthering an ideology that costs lives tell me all I need to know about every word he speaks.
Thank you, Susan. I try to make everything I write interesting, exciting, or provocative. When I get angry, it really fires up my creative juices. I sense that it is the same with you.
The blessing of the chunk of ice was the last straw for me. A posturing, performative piece of silly virtue-signaling, designed to please the Greta Thunberg brigade, and to let Catholic liberals know that he was on their side. It was worse than a display of effrontery — it was an attempt to show the left-liberal elite that he was “cool” and “relevant.”
Joe, your poem is amazing and speaks to my heart. I have a long-standing distrust of authority. I am reminded of Lord Acton’s quote about the corruption of power. It is from a letter he wrote to Mandell Creighton, a British historian, Anglican priest and bishop of London.
So, yes, it is absolutely our place to question all earthly authority and you have done it brilliantly.
Earlier Acton had travelled to Rome to lobby against the infallibility doctrine at Vatican I.
Thank you, Mike. I too have a strong anti-authoritarian streak, which is from my Sicilian heritage. What exacerbates it today is the constant, persistent, and unending attempt of left-liberalism to assert its assumed authority in all aspects of human behavior and thought.
Lord Acton was not the only Catholic to argue against the infallibility doctrine. John Henry Newman also believed that the doctrine was “inopportune,” and it was through Newman’s influence that the doctrine is commonly understood to be severely limited to carefully circumscribed issues of faith and morals, and not to any other subjects, and only to come into force when a Pope speaks “ex cathedra” (from the papal throne), and prefaces his declaration with the specifically stated intention to speak infallibly.
It sounds like Newman was in favor of structurally limiting power, like Jefferson was. However, it seems that none of the structural limits on power, whether church or state, work perfectly.
So, at least poetry gives us the means to highlight the shenanigans, at least for now!
Newman was generally sympathetic to old-fashioned 19th-century liberalism in the political realm, and he certainly knew that toleration of other religious creeds was inevitable in a mixed state like Great Britain. But his main concerns were with theology, religious authority, and orthodoxy — not politics.
He disliked the extreme ultramontane party that wanted to read the doctrine of infallibility so as to cover pretty much anything a pope might say on every political, social, and cultural question, and calling it “the Magisterium.”
We have a bona fide ‘Leo’ here in the states, Joe – Franklin Graham is another ‘turn-the-other-cheeker’ who would sooner capitulate to than destroy the big ‘bully’ on the playground. Hand either one of them a shovel and put them in charge of collateral-body-burying in Iran for a day or two and see what they have to spew. As you point out, DJT’s is courageously doing what’s needed done for several decades, and Leo needs to get with the program – for which I’ll not be holding my breath A powerful piece, very well written, and I couldn’t agree more.
Do you mean the Franklin Graham who is the son of the evangelist Billy Graham? He is a big supporter of President Trump and our war against the Iranian regime. At least that’s what I have heard.
A very staunch supporter he is, Joe, but Franklin, son of Billy, would never condone doing what MUST be done to literally put an end, if that’s even possible, to the Iranian regime. He’s a good man, but not the sort you turn to for help in an all out brawl. Imagine how many unanswered prayers have been offered in hopes of achieving peace in Iran and China and North Korea and the like, day after day after day, even Franklin’s. There comes a point…
You are right, Mark. As they used to say in the Old West: Pray in one hand, piss in the other, and see which hand fills up first.
Precisely, C. B. My wife and family have been praying for 30 years that a cure will be found for at least 3 of what I’ve been wrestling with every day for those same 30 with zero success. Say la V –
An additional absurdity: Antipope Leo has just spoken publicly about “the gentle face of God, who always rejects violence.”
Does this guy from Chicago know anything at all about the Old Testament?
As my dad used to say “Never leave yourself open for a roundhouse right.” It’s getting too easy to knock this guy down.
It’s a strange position to take that aircraft should not be used in warfare. Without them, WW2 could not have been won without many more allied casualties.
It may be the immediate source of the idea was our own much despised prime minister Starmer who said on March 2 he didn’t believe in “regime change from the skies”.
In the war with Iran, since last summer, that’s where the US and Israel have had a clear advantage. Seeking to prevent them using it, therefore, is very odd indeed.
Israel has been routinely pilloried over the years with the same kind of argument based on a distortion of the law of proportionality. In that case, the allegation is that Israel’s war effort is illegal as far more terrorists are killed than members of the IDF.
In both cases, the unstated purpose is to hobble the US and Israel with false arguments to cause them to sustain more casualties and prevent them from winning.
Anyway, full of fire, Joe.
Congratulations.
Paul, you are absolutely correct about the unstated purpose. Because the West generally has greater military advantages in technology, material, and expertise, those who hate the West are always trotting out that stupid “proportionality” argument — and of course they fully expect that a large percentage of religionists in the West will reflexively jump in to explore the matter and issue pious warnings about how to wage war properly.