Leo XIV aboard the return flight: defending life is not politics

On the way back from his journey to France, Pope Leo XIV held the customary press conference aboard the plane on Monday 28 September 2026. He first spoke of the sexual abuse committed by clergy, recalling his meeting the day before, at Lourdes, with a group of victims, and the Church's "particular responsibility" to accompany them toward healing. He then rejected the charge of having violated French laïcité by criticising the recently adopted euthanasia law.

"When the Church speaks of the defence of life and takes up questions bearing on social doctrine, she does not enter into politics: she applies the Gospel to the lives of persons," he said. And further: "If that is politics, then yes, I have done politics. But my intention was not to intervene in French politics: it was to teach what the Church truly believes."

On war, the tone was firm. He said he again hears leaders speaking of nuclear weapons and of ever more destructive conflicts, and he denounced the arms race: "To keep arming, to keep spending enormous sums on this gigantic military industry. Few people grow immensely rich from an industry that promotes war." He urged the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, among others, to sit down at a table and talk. On artificial intelligence, he set aside "panic" while judging the experts' concerns serious, calling for ethical "guardrails" so that the machine does not "destroy humanity" nor push man out of decisions; he called himself "relatively optimistic." Asked about the rise of a far-right party in Germany, he expressed the hope that the Church would help men of good will choose the common good rather than "extremist ideas."

At the close of the Mass celebrated the day before on the meadow of the Lourdes sanctuary, before the Angelus, he is also reported to have invited all the faithful to pray the Rosary throughout the month of October for the end of wars and the restoration of peace, recalling that the Virgin appeared to Saint Bernadette with the beads in her hand.

Here is the fixed point. The fifth commandment forbids the killing of the innocent; euthanasia, which puts the sick to death, is a homicide and not a care. In recalling this, the Church does not step into the arena of the parties: she teaches the law God has engraved in every heart. On this point, the word heard aboard the plane rejoins the perennial doctrine.

But "laïcité" itself is not a Catholic principle. The constant doctrine teaches that the State, like man, owes God a public worship, and that it is bound to recognise and protect the true religion. The separation of Church and State, set up as a rule, was condemned, and the French law of 1905 by name. To ask that a "boundary" be respected already concedes too much: it is not a boundary that the city owes to God, it is submission.

On war, the tradition knows not pacifism but the just war: the prince may take up arms for a just cause, with a right intention, as a last resort. The denunciation of the greed that fattens itself on the blood of peoples belongs, for its part, to every century. And if the call to pray the Rosary in October was indeed made, it only takes up again a practice the Church has always held to be a weapon: it is by the help of Heaven, not by the industries of the earth, that wars are quieted.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment; Leo XIII, encyclical Immortale Dei (1885) on the Christian constitution of States; Pius X, encyclical Vehementer Nos (1906) against the separation of Church and State; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 40, on war; Leo XIII, encyclical Supremi Apostolatus Officio (1883) on the Rosary.