Cardinals call for ‘genuinely moral’ national foreign policy

By Gina Christian

(OSV News) – Three U.S. cardinals have issued a joint statement urging the creation of a “genuinely moral foreign policy for our nation,” as the U.S. faces “the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War.”
Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of Washington and Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, released the statement Jan. 19, focusing on the “enduring ethical compass” for foreign policy that Pope Leo XIV provided in his Jan. 9 address to members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See.
In their statement, the cardinals pointed to “events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland” that “have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace.”
The U.S. recently staged a military intervention in Venezuela during which President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured and brought to the U.S. to face federal narcotrafficking and weapons charges. President Donald Trump declared the U.S. would “run” Venezuela, although the administration has since been working with Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez.
In recent weeks, Trump has also vowed to acquire Greenland – a semiautonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark – either through purchase or military force, and has threatened to levy tariffs on several European nations, including Denmark itself, that have opposed the plan.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, continues attacks initiated in 2014, and has been classified as a genocide in two joint reports from the New Lines Institute and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
“The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination appear all too fragile in a world of ever greater conflagrations,” said the cardinals in their statement. “The balancing of national interest with the common good is being framed within starkly polarized terms.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told BBC Radio 4 on Jan. 18 that current U.S. foreign policy showed “a clear conviction that multilateral solutions are not relevant and that what matters is the exercise of the power and the influence of the United States and sometimes in this respect by the norms of international law.”
The three cardinals stressed that “our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world, sustaining the right to life and human dignity, and supporting religious liberty are all under examination.”
They continued: “The building of just and sustainable peace, so crucial to humanity’s well-being now and in the future, is being reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.”
Amid the fraying post-World War II order – under which the U.N. Charter recognizes the equal sovereignty of nations, while prohibiting “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” – the cardinals called for a recalibration according to the “truly moral foundation for international relations” Pope Leo provided earlier in January.
Chieko Noguchi, spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told OSV News that the conference “was consulted on the statement.”
She added that USCCB president Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City “supports the emphasis placed by the cardinals on Pope Leo’s teaching in these times.”
The cardinals quoted from Pope Leo’s Jan. 9 address to diplomats, in which he had warned that “diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.”
“War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading,” Pope Leo said in his address, adding that the postwar principle prohibiting nations from violating each other’s borders by force “has been completely undermined.”
The cardinals also noted that Pope Leo reiterated Catholic teaching that “‘the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation for every other human right’ and that abortion and euthanasia are destructive of that right.”
They also underscored the pope’s emphasis on “the need for international aid to safeguard the most central elements of human dignity, which are under assault because of the movement by wealthy nations to reduce or eliminate their contributions to humanitarian foreign assistance programs” and the concern he expressed over “the increasing violations of conscience and religious freedom in the name of an ideological or religious purity that crushes freedom itself.”
“As pastors and citizens, we embrace this vision for the establishment of a genuinely moral foreign policy for our nation,” said the cardinals. “We seek to build a truly just and lasting peace, that peace which Jesus proclaimed in the Gospel.”
In so doing, they said, “We renounce war as an instrument for narrow national interests and proclaim that military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy. We seek a foreign policy that respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world, especially through economic assistance.”
They lamented that “our nation’s debate on the moral foundation for American policy is beset by polarization, partisanship, and narrow economic and social interests.”
Yet “Pope Leo has given us the prism through which to raise it to a much higher level,” they said. “We will preach, teach, and advocate in the coming months to make that higher level possible.”
In a press release accompanying their statement, the three cardinals each shared additional comments about their position.
“As pastors entrusted with the teaching of our people, we cannot stand by while decisions are made that condemn millions to lives trapped permanently at the edge of existence,” said Cardinal Cupich.
Cardinal McElroy said that Catholic social teaching – which draws on papal, conciliar and Church documents to articulate the means of building a just society and living out holiness in modern life – “testifies that when national interest narrowly conceived excludes the moral imperative of solidarity among nations and the dignity of the human person, it brings immense suffering to the world and a catastrophic assault on the just peace that benefits every nation and is the will of God.”
Cardinal Tobin said that “the need to underscore the vision of Pope Leo for just and peaceful relations among nations” was more critical than ever amid recent events, including the extraordinary consistory called by the pope.
“Otherwise,” said Cardinal Tobin, “escalating threats and armed conflict risk destroying international relations and plunging the world into incalculable suffering.”
The cardinals’ statement came a day after Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services said in a BBC interview that U.S. soldiers who are Catholic could in good conscience disobey orders to participate in an invasion of Greenland.