In a rare and pointed intervention into the affairs of nations, the American-born pontiff issued a Sunday sermon that landed in Washington with the subtlety of a cannonball wrapped in papal white.
Pope Leo XIV, the U.S.-born pontiff who spent decades as a missionary in Latin America, also expressed “deep concern,”
Gazing from his window over a world he once knew from a different angle, Pope Leo called not for celebration at the capture of a man accused of monstrous crimes, but for the “sovereignty of the country” and the “rule of law enshrined in its Constitution.”
His words, measured and laden with the gravity of the papal office, served as a stark, diplomatic rebuke to a military operation that has left a world unsettled and a capital in ruins.
The operation, a nighttime raid by U.S. special forces in Caracas that seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, has been hailed by some as a long-overdue act of justice.
The fugitives now face serious charges in a New York courtroom, accused of turning a nation into a criminal enterprise. Yet the cost, as counted by Venezuelan officials, includes at least forty of their countrymen dead.
The Vatican, with deep ties to the suffering of Venezuela, seems to be counting a different cost entirely: that of precedent, of chaos, and of a people who have endured a decade of collapse only to wake to foreign troops in their streets.
One might have expected a different tone from a pope who knows the sting of American headlines and the roar of American power.
Instead, he spoke as a pastor who has fed Venezuelan refugees at soup kitchens in Peru, and as a global figure whose chief diplomat helped him understand the fragile, broken fabric of Venezuelan society.
His call was not for the victory of one strongman over another, but for the “good of the beloved Venezuelan people” to prevail. He invoked justice and peace, yes, but he anchored them firmly to concepts this operation seems to have treated as quaint: national sovereignty and constitutional order.
In a Jan. 3 statement, Rev. Jerry Pillay, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches — whose organization represents more than 580 million Christians in over 120 countries — denounced the strikes and the seizure of Maduro and his wife as “stunningly flagrant violations of international law.”
“These actions set a dangerous precedent and example for others who seek to shrug off all constraints against the use of armed aggression and brute force to achieve political objectives,” said Pillay.
Referencing the contested 2024 elections, which Maduro — the authoritarian successor of socialist strongman Hugo Chavez — claimed to have defeated opposition leaders, O’Connell said that some members of the U.N. Security Council might support U.S. military intervention “if we were committed to putting the popularly elected government in place.”
“There is sympathy for ensuring that elections are honored. There will be no sympathy for the U.S. taking control of Venezuela’s oil and other resources,” Pillay said. “That is a throwback to colonialism, to imperialism. It’s the kind of thing that Russia has in mind in seizing control of Ukraine. And it is unlawful.”
The reaction from the wounded heart of Venezuela has been a stunned silence, punctuated by prayer.
The nation’s bishops, in statements that carefully avoided any endorsement of the raid, begged for serenity and unity, and expressed solidarity with the wounded and the families of the dead.
They urged their people to stay indoors, to avoid the streets, and to distrust the torrent of unverified information. It is the language of a flock in shock, shepherded by men who have long navigated between an oppressive regime and a desperate populace, and who now find themselves navigating the aftermath of an invasion.
From the halls of power to the pews of Petare, the question hangs in the air like smoke over Caracas: what comes next?
The United States has achieved a swift, dramatic military objective. It has not, however, answered the harder questions of what fills the vacuum, who tends the wounds, and what becomes of a nation’s right to determine its own fate, however imperfectly that right has been exercised.
The Vatican, in its ancient wisdom, appears less concerned with the villain captured than with the tragedy unfolding and the precedent now set. It is a reminder that in the arithmetic of geopolitics, subtraction does not always equal a solution, and a nighttime raid, however precise, cannot illuminate the path to a peaceful dawn.
The world now watches, and waits, to see if the aftermath will be governed by the rule of law, or by the law of the jungle dressed in the robes of liberty.
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