Pope Leo, Just War and Artemis II

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COZ152: “Nothing is lost by peace. Everything may be lost by war.” With those words from Pope John XXIII — quoted by Pope Leo XIV in his April 11 Vigil for Peace rosary — the Catholics of Oz open a frank, theologically grounded conversation about unjust war, prayer, and the church’s prophetic voice in a troubled world.

Lindsay Sant, Caroline Knight, and Lino Saubolle work through Pope Leo’s full Vigil reflection: his meditation on idolatry and the delusion of omnipotence, his insistence that prayer is not a refuge from responsibility but a call to conversion, and his stark claim that those who wage unjust war have “turned their backs on the living God.” The crew also takes up the US Bishops’ statement from Bishop James Masser, which affirms that the war in Iran does not meet the church’s criteria for a just war — and unpacks the growing noise around Pope Leo’s supposed “feud” with political leaders. The argument here is not political but prophetic: the Pope is applying a thousand-year-old theological tradition to a present moment.

Then: from the horrors of war to the wonders of space. Caroline walks through the full Artemis II mission — from the history of the Space Launch System and its shuttle-derived RS-25 engines, through the Artemis I uncrewed test mission (featuring phantom mannequins Helga and Zoha measuring radiation exposure), to the April 1, 2026 launch of Artemis II. The historic four-person crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover (first person of color on a lunar mission), Christina Koch (first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit), and Jeremy Hansen (first non-American to reach deep space) — broke the record for farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth, at over 756,000 km.

Along the way they witnessed micrometeorite impacts on the lunar surface in real time, viewed a total solar eclipse from deep space for nearly an hour, and named a newly identified lunar crater Carol in honor of Commander Wiseman’s late wife. Back on Earth, the USS John P. Murtha recovered the crew after a textbook splashdown on April 10.

An episode that moves from unjust war to the wonder of the cosmos — and finds threads of faith running through both.

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This episode of The Catholics of Oz was edited by Patrick McCaffrey of Moon Shadow Studios. To have your own audio professionally edited by Moon Shadow Studios visit them at their web site MoonShadowStudios.biz.

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Catholics of Oz