The headlines are exasperating, if a bit hyperbolic: Reuters writes, “Pope Says Weapons Manufacturers Can’t Call Themselves Christians” while the Daily Beast puts it, “Pope: Gun Makers Are Not Christians.” In the Pope’s defense, and while I haven’t located a complete transcript of his June 21st speech in Turin, Italy, nowhere in the news pieces cited above does Pope Francis actually use those words. Not precisely. At most, at the rally of thousands of young people following his visit to the city’s famous shroud, Francis called believers who sell weapons “hypocrites.” In calling themselves Christians and yet selling arms, the Pope lamented, they traffic in duplicity: “they say one thing and do another.”
To be fair, the attention-grabbing headlines, however inexact, aren’t conjured whole-cloth. At a few points over the last year, the Pope has described the arms business as an “industry of death” and, correspondingly, those who produce weapons as “merchants of death”. While he may have intended more nuance by utilizing phrases such as “Many powerful people don’t want peace” and “Some powerful people make their living with the production of arms” (emphasis mine), his words have certainly been taken by most observers as a blanket condemnation of all in the arms trade. Moreover, in an address in St. Peter’s Square, he denounced arms traders as being included among those who will have a hard time accounting for their actions before God – grouping them with human traffickers and slavers. Weapons traders, the Pope concludes, “fabricate death” and further cycles of “hate, fratricide, and violence.”
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