THE CALUMNY REPEATS ITSELF

President Trump has done it again. On the May 5 broadcast of The Hugh Hewitt Show — and on the eve of Secretary Rubio's scheduled visit to the Vatican — he told a national radio audience this:

"The pope would rather talk about the fact that it's OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. I don't think that's very good. I think he's endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people, but I guess if it's up to the pope, he thinks it's just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

Let us state plainly what this is: a calumny. A lie. A slander against the Vicar of Christ broadcast to millions.

Pope Leo XIV has never said, suggested, hinted, or implied that Iran should possess a nuclear weapon. The notion is absurd on its face. The Holy Father's position — and the unbroken position of the Holy See across pontificates — is that no nation should possess such weapons. Pope Francis declared the very possession of nuclear arms immoral. Pope Leo has reaffirmed that teaching from the first weeks of his pontificate. His March 5 message was unambiguous: "May the nuclear threat never again dictate the future of humanity."

The Holy Father responded yesterday from Castel Gandolfo with the patience of a pastor and the clarity of a teacher: "If anyone wishes to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, let them do so with the truth."

There it is. With the truth.

This is no longer a policy disagreement. It is no longer even ordinary political demagoguery, ugly as that has become. The President knows the Pope has not said what he claims the Pope has said. He has been corrected — by bishops, by journalists, by his own Secretary of State, who pointedly set the pope aside yesterday rather than defend the falsehood. And yet he repeats it. Again. And again. And again.

This is pathology. The compulsion to defame a man who has done him no injury — to invent words the Pope has never spoken and broadcast them as fact — is not the conduct of a statesman engaged with his conscience. It is the conduct of a man whose interior disorder is now visible to anyone with eyes to see. Each repetition of the lie deepens the diagnosis.

There is something almost pitiable in it, were the consequences not so grave. The President of the United States, on the public airwaves, accusing the Bishop of Rome — the first American Pope — of endangering Catholics. The inversion is so total it would be comic if it were not blasphemous.

Pope Leo will not be moved. He told the world weeks ago, "I have no fear of the Trump administration." He has not flinched. He will not flinch. The Gospel he preaches is older than any presidency and will outlast this one.

The rest of us, however, owe him something. We owe him the courage to say, in our own voices and from our own pulpits and platforms, what the President will not say and apparently cannot say: The Holy Father has spoken the truth. The President has not.

That is the whole of it.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.

Retired rector, Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano