Of all the Catholic rituals of Holy Week—the Palm Sunday procession; the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, on Holy Thursday; the Way of the Cross, on Good Friday—surely the most striking is the washing of the feet. Partway through the Holy Thursday Mass, twelve people take seats near the altar and remove their shoes and socks. A priest, in flowing vestments, kneels, washes their feet with a cloth, and kisses them. All this echoes the Gospel episode in which Jesus, at the Last Supper, washes the feet of the disciples, saying, “If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet”—setting an example of leadership through humble service to others.

Pope Francis made the washing of the feet one of the most distinctive rituals of his pontificate. Throughout his papacy, on Holy Thursday, he would go to prisons in Rome and wash the feet of people incarcerated there. It left an indelible image of his own humility and of his determination to take his message to the outer margins of the Church. Francis died on Easter Monday last year. This year, the ritual was performed by his successor, Leo XIV, the first American Pope. Pope Leo didn’t go to a prison; he went to the Basilica of St. John Lateran, in Rome’s historic center, where he washed and kissed the feet of twelve priests, eleven of whom had been ordained last year by Leo himself, who, at the time, was Cardinal Robert Prevost, a Vatican official.

The contrast suggests the temperamental difference between the ebullient, freestyling Argentine Francis and his focussed, outwardly serene Chicago-born successor. Leo, who studied canon law, has spent much of his first eleven months in office assessing the Vatican internally, like a new chief executive getting to know a firm’s culture before initiating strategies for optimal performance. He has made some key appointments, notably of Ronald Hicks as the Archbishop of New York; met with various and sundry dignitaries and visitors; released his first major document (built on one of Francis’s), on the need to share in the suffering of others; and kept Francis’s commitment to visit Turkey, adding a side trip to Lebanon.

The new Pope’s reign had lacked outward drama, but the Trump Administration’s wars and threats of wars have placed Leo in a truly new and dramatic situation. The first American Pope is also a wartime Pope. Whereas Francis characterized the multiple wars at the end of his pontificate (notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023) as “a Third World War in pieces,” the war in Iran has been a war of choice launched by an American President, in coördination with the Israeli Prime Minister. Donald Trump’s twelve-day war on Iran last summer, the January strike on Venezuela (and the capture of its President, Nicolás Maduro), and his threats to annex Greenland and to “take” Cuba have compounded the situation. No matter what Trump said about avoiding foreign wars on the campaign trail or during his first term, he has always been a loudmouthed American who appears to like nothing better than to pick a fight.

On Tuesday, the Pope publicly mentioned Trump by name for the first time. As Leo left Castel Gandolfo, the papal palace, CNN’s Vatican correspondent, Christopher Lamb, asked him if he had any message for the leaders of the United States and Israel. Leo replied, in English, “I’m told that President Trump recently stated that he would like to end the war. Hopefully, he’s looking for an off-ramp. Hopefully, he’s looking for a way to decrease the amount of violence, of bombing, which would be a significant contribution to removing the hatred that’s being created. And it’s increasing constantly in the Middle East and elsewhere.” He then addressed world leaders generally, saying, “Come back to the table, to dialogue.” The remarks were far from confrontational, but, as an instance of a Pope engaging directly with his home country’s President, they were significant.

Vatican convention holds that the Pope should be neutral in international conflicts and should speak opaquely, but Leo has firm grounds from which to address the U.S.’s present military actions. When he was the Bishop of Chiclayo, in northern Peru, he led Church efforts to welcome many thousands of Venezuelan refugees who came there after Hugo Chávez’s regime collapsed, in 2017. Leo’s ancestry includes four generations of Cubans on his mother’s side. And, during the conclave that elected him Pope, he deepened an acquaintance with Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who is the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the most prominent Catholic leader in the Middle East; the two men had been made cardinals on the same day in 2023.

Pizzaballa has been critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, as has Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, who decried Hamas’s “inhuman and indefensible” October 7th “massacre,” but also noted that Israel’s subsequent campaign against Hamas in Gaza “has brought about disastrous and inhuman consequences,” and that “it is unacceptable and unjustifiable to reduce human beings to mere ‘collateral damage.’ ” After the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See denounced Parolin’s statements as an unfair “moral equivalence,” Leo defended him, saying that the cardinal had “very clearly expressed the opinion of the Holy See.” Last Sunday—Palm Sunday—Israeli police, citing safety issues, stopped Pizzaballa from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Leo’s visit, in December, to Lebanon, which is home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, dating back to the time of the apostles Peter and Paul, now looks adroitly timed. During a Mass on Beirut’s waterfront, the Pope spoke of the need for “small shoots” of hope in the “arid garden of this moment in history.” He also spoke of “disarming our hearts” and described Lebanon, where communities of Christians, Muslims, and Druze live alongside one another, as “a prophetic sign of justice and peace for the whole of the Levant.”

Earlier this week, I spoke with Father Daniel Corrou, an American priest living in Beirut, where he is the regional director of the Jesuit Refugee Service for the Middle East and North Africa, about the Pope’s visit. “He chose to come to Lebanon,” Corrou said, “and by doing so he signalled that the Church is looking at the Middle East through the lens of Lebanon—that it should be possible to live in a multireligious, multiethnic state governed by the rule of law, and that this is the goal the Church and the leaders in the region ought to be working toward.”

The worldly evidence is that the Pope’s words and presence had no direct effect. Hezbollah resumed firing rockets from Lebanon into Israel, and Israel has sent troops into Lebanon, urging residents of whole neighborhoods of Beirut to evacuate. “A million people turned out of their homes, with no end in sight,” Corrou told me. Since the start of the Iran war, Tehran has retaliated against Israel and ten other countries. Nevertheless, the Pope seems determined to continue calling for peace in strong, plain terms, as he has done since his first address as Pope, on May 8th last year. This Palm Sunday, at St. Peter’s, Leo said, “Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’ ” The quotation is from the Book of Isaiah, which is recognized as Scripture by Christians and Jews. It stood in pointed contrast to the Crusader-ish rhetoric of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, an evangelical Protestant, who, during a prayer service he convened at the Pentagon, four days earlier, had read out a prayer that he said had been shared with him by the commander of the U.S. strike against Venezuela. Looking skyward and addressing “Almighty God,” Hegseth recited, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” and then asked God to grant U.S. forces “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Those are fighting words, and, in the coming days, the Pope can counter them as much through symbolic acts as through words of peace. On Friday evening, the Way of the Cross was held at the Colosseum, which was spotlit and surrounded by a huge crowd. The Pope usually takes the role of Jesus, carrying a wooden cross, but, last year, Francis, who was gravely ill, sent an aide in his stead. This year, Leo carried the cross through the fourteen stations that mark Jesus’ suffering and death. The siting of the rites at the Colosseum—where it has been held since 1964, echoing a practice from the eighteenth century—means that the Pope enacts Jesus’ final hours not in a Baroque basilica but against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, which exercised power through violence. This year, as the first American Pope symbolically follows in Christ’s footsteps, the backdrop is also the war-torn present. ♦