Pope Leo XIV on Sunday called for an end to the “spiral of violence” in the Middle East, after the United States and Israel began an attack on Iran that prompted retaliatory strikes.
“Faced with the possibility of a tragedy of enormous proportions, I appeal to the parties involved to assume the moral responsibility to stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable chasm,” the pontiff told a crowd in St Peter’s Square.
“Stability and peace are not built through mutual threats or with weapons, which sow destruction, pain, and death, but only through reasonable, genuine, and responsible dialogue,” the first US-born leader said during his weekly Angelus prayer.
“May diplomacy recover its role and may the good of peoples be promoted,” he added.
The head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics also called for an “urgent return to dialogue” between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which have clashed in recent days.
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was dead, after Israel and the United States launched an attack of unprecedented scale against the country.
“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Trump said on his Truth Social network.
The strikes prompted Tehran to fire off a missile barrage that sent people running for cover in cities across the Middle East.
Iranian authorities urged residents to evacuate the capital, a city of 10 million, while the country’s Red Crescent society said that at least 201 people had been killed in the strikes and more than 700 wounded.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday slammed the United States and Israel’s killing of the Iranian leader as a “cynical violation” of morality and law.
Tehran has stood by as one of Russia’s closest allies throughout Moscow’s Ukraine offensive, and the Kremlin had earlier called for restraint in the run-up to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
On Sunday, the Kremlin published a message that Putin sent to Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian in which the Russian leader expressed his “deepest condolences for the assassination of” Khamenei.
