Cardinal Blase J. Cupich has joined a growing chorus of Catholic leaders speaking out against President Donald Trump’s foreign policy actions.

Cupich, who has served as archbishop of Chicago since 2014, criticized the Trump administration’s insensitive messaging about the Iran war after the White House posted a video on social media with clips from “Gladiator” and “The Matrix” and other films combined with real footage of Iran’s attack last week.

“A real war with real death and real suffering treated as if it were a video game: it is disgusting,” he wrote Saturday in a statement titled “A Call to Conscience.” “Hundreds of people have died, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including dozens of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day. Six American soldiers have died. They are also disgraced by that social media post.”

“This horrifying portrait demonstrates that we now live in an era in which the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced,” he continued.

The Trump administration has made a series of surprising attempts on social media to get Americans excited about the war since the conflict, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, broke out on February 28.

As Cupich hinted, the White House drew an analogy between war and video games when it shared a post that compiled real-life clips of attacks on Iran with scenes from the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Elsewhere in his statement, Cupich urged lawmakers to stop further “gamifying” war, calling such efforts a “profound moral failure” that “strips humanity from real people.”

“Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it were just another piece of content we can scroll through while waiting in line at the supermarket,” he wrote. “But in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military.”

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich urged lawmakers to stop further “gamification” of war, calling such efforts a “profound moral failure” that “strips humanity from real people.”
Cardinal Blase J. Cupich urged lawmakers to stop further “gamification” of war, calling such efforts a “profound moral failure” that “strips humanity from real people.”

Scott Olson via Getty Images

“I know the American people are better than this,” he concluded. “We have the good sense to know that what is happening is not entertainment but war, and that Iran is a nation of people, not a video game that others play to entertain us.”

Cupich, of course, was not the only public figure to denounce the Trump administration’s social media post. On Friday, actor and director Ben Stiller asked the White House to remove scenes from his 2008 film “Tropic Thunder” from video, writing in part: “War is not a movie.”

Cupich’s comments come just over a month after a New Jersey-based Catholic leader and prominent ally of Pope Leo XIV issued a strong condemnation of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.

In an online prayer service on Jan. 25, Cardinal Joseph Tobin urged Congress to “vote against renewing funding for such an illegal organization,” referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“We cry for a world, a country that allows 5-year-old children to be legally kidnapped and protesters massacred,” he said.