Pope Leo doesn’t mess around

(RNS) — Last week, Vatican Media published an article by editorial director Andrea Tornielli that began, “Even when he speaks about war and peace, migration or how to remain human in the age of artificial intelligence, the Successor of Peter remains, above all, a spiritual leader.”

You might be tempted to say, “Well, duh.” But not, it seems, if you happen to be Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, Burch sought to minimize Pope Leo’s criticism of the U.S. war with Iran by claiming that the pontiff was speaking not as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church or the Vicar of Christ but as just another secular head of state. “When the pope acts as the sovereign leader of the Holy See, he is coequal with world leaders,” he said.

To which Tornielli responded by quoting from Pope Paul VI’s 1965 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, in which the pontiff described himself as “your brother, and even one of the least among you who represent sovereign States, since he possesses—if you choose to consider us from this point of view—only a tiny and practically symbolic temporal sovereignty: the minimum needed in…