USCMO Commends Pope Leo XIV’s Stand for Peace
Leo’s Call Comes After Pentagon Met with Pope’s Amb. in Run Up to War
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 4/18/2026) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), America’s umbrella group of Muslim associations, commends Pope Leo XIV’s recent just stand for peace amid the U.S.-Israeli wars of choice and brutal aggression against not only the countries of Iran and Lebanon but against 100 million innocent civilians and the vital life infrastructures they depend on.
The Pope quite literally addressed the leaders of all nations in a rarely called public prayer vigil for peace in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City on April 11.
“Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!
“To them we cry out: Stop! It is time for peace! Sit at the table of dialogue and mediation, not at the table where rearmament is planned and deadly actions are decided!” he said.
USCMO Secretary General Oussama Jammal said in a statement:
“Pope Leo XIV is loudly and fearlessly calling out world leaders on behalf of the ‘millions and billions of men and women, young and old, who today choose to believe in peace, caring for the wounds and repairing the damage left behind by the madness of war.’
“Leo is saying and doing exactly what the religious leaders of humanity’s major faiths should also find the courage and faith to say and do now, vociferously and publicly.
“The Pope is reminding humanity that God has made innocent life inviolably precious and that this unprovoked U.S.-Israeli joint aggression – that has already taken the innocent lives of thousands, wounded hundreds of thousands, and displaced 4 million in Lebanon and Iran – is without divine moral justification.
“It is an ‘unjust war’ according to many, in the language of Catholic doctrine, as Pope Leo pointed out to reporters on April 7. The injustice of this war on Iran and Lebanon is utterly obvious.”
Despite the recent bizarre intimidations to support the U.S.-Israeli war of choice that President Donald Trump has repeatedly directed at Pope Leo publicly, and which even more strangely Vice President J.D. Vance and self-dubbed U.S. Secretary of War Peter Hegseth have echoed, the Pope has not let up.
Moreover, these public broadsides from Trump and his administration minions against the Pope follow on a recently revealed (and truly odd) meeting between the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S. and Pentagon officials, at the Pentagon, in January, seemingly to push Pope Leo and the Catholic Church to support the planned February U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
It didn’t work. Indeed, since Trump’s attacks on Leo, the Pope has issued even more trenchant, theologically tinged warnings to war’s global power elite perpetrators and profiteers.
“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” read the statement the Pope issued from his official X account on April 16.
At the Prayer Vigil, the Pope inveighed against those who would invoke God in prayer for their unjust violence.
“Even the holy name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death,” Leo said at the vigil. “Those who pray are aware of their own limitations. They do not kill or threaten with death.”
He condemned the sacrilege of war’s mongers, the power possessed who use religion as a cloak for mass killing.
“Instead, death enslaves those who have turned their backs on the living God, turning themselves and their own power into a mute, blind and deaf idol, to which they sacrifice every value, demanding that the whole world bend its knee,” he said.
In the end, Pope Leo XIV is calling on people in a time of unjust, rampant, avaricious war not to lose hope in the possibility of human harmony and mutual goodwill on earth.
“We want to say to the whole world that it is possible to build peace, a new peace, that it is possible to live together, all people, of all religions, of all races…united as brothers and sisters, all united in a world of peace,” he said
The US Council of Muslim Organizations strongly concurs with this moral vision in the face of this immoral war. We wholeheartedly endorse the Pope’s call for the peace of nations, religions, and races – and we do so in the Name of the One God of us all.
###
