Pope Francis, who’s been espousing pro-life positions in all senses of the term, took a moment on Sunday to inform those involved in weapons manufacturing that they’re not really Christians. “If you trust only men you have lost,” he told thousands of young people during a rally in the Italian city of Turin. “It makes me think of … people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” The crowd applauded and he went on to criticize those who invest in weapons industries, saying, “Duplicity is the currency of today … they say one thing and do another.”
This is arguably Pope Francis’s harshest condemnation of the weapons industry, but it’s not the first time he’s denounced the world’s real-life Tony Starks. A year ago, he called them “merchants of death,” and last month he said they perpetuate war to make money, declaring that the devil “enters through our wallets.”
He also discussed the “the great tragedy of Armenia” — carefully avoiding the word genocide, which led to Turkey recalling its ambassador to the Vatican earlier this year. He made up for it by criticizing the Allies for failing to stop the “tragedy” of the Holocaust. “The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?” he said. Pope Francis made similar remarks last year while defending Pope Pius XII’s failure to publicly condemn the Holocaust during the war.
