Pope Leo XIV suggested on Monday that aerial bombing campaigns should have been “banned forever” following the atrocities committed from the sky during the 20th century, as he continues pushing an antiwar message following the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran.
“Airplanes should always be carriers of peace, never of war,” Leo said while hosting executives and staff from ITA Airways, Italy’s national airline, and the Lufthansa Group, according to Vatican News. “No one should be afraid that threats of death and destruction might come from the sky.”
The Vatican News report said the US-born pope recalled the bombing campaigns of the World Wars and other conflicts. “After the tragic experiences of the twentieth century, aerial bombings should have been banned forever,” he said. “Instead, they still exist, and technological development, positive in itself, is being placed at the service of war. This is not progress; it is regression.”
Since World War I, the Vatican has been highly critical of modern war. “The combatants are the greatest and wealthiest nations of the earth; what wonder, then, if, well provided with the most awful weapons modern military science has devised, they strive to destroy one another with refinements of horror,” Pope Benedict XV said in an encyclical in November 1914, a few months after the outbreak of the First World War.
“There is no limit to the measure of ruin and of slaughter; day by day the earth is drenched with newly-shed blood, and is covered with the bodies of the wounded and of the slain,” Benedict added.
Pope Pius XII, who led the Catholic Church during World War II, was outspoken about the impact that the strategic bombing campaigns and the war in general had on civilians. “We have had to witness the harrowing scene of death leaping from the skies and stalking pitilessly through unsuspecting homes, striking down women and children,” Pius said in a 1943 letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt after US warplanes bombed Rome.
The Second Vatican Council’s 1965 document Gaudium et Spes strongly denounced strategic bombing campaigns aimed at destroying cities, saying: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.”
Leo has made opposing war a major theme of his pontificate since his election as pope on May 8, 2025. Since the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran, he has repeatedly called for an end to the conflict and suggested Christian leaders involved in starting wars should examine their conscience and go to confession, remarks seen as aimed at the Trump administration since Leo is American.
