An American cardinal has issued “a call to conscience,” while deploring efforts to “gamify” the U.S.-Israel war with Iran — particularly on the part of the Trump administration.
“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening,” wrote Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago in a March 7 statement published to that archdiocese’s website.
The cardinal pointed to a 42-second video posted March 5 on the White House X account, which showed a mashup of action clips, interspersed with unclassified video from U.S. Central Command showing U.S. missile strikes on Iran and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
The clip, captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” included film, video game and television scenes, such as from “Iron Man,” “Top Gun,” “Halo,” “Superman,” and “Breaking Bad,” with a voiceover at the end declaring, “Flawless victory.”
The war, launched by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28, has so far killed more than 1,200 in Iran, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior officials. At least 165, including a number of children, died at a school adjacent to an Iran Revolutionary Guard Base in Minab, Iran. Emerging footage indicates that strike appears to have been initiated by the U.S.
With the war engulfing multiple nations in the Middle East, and sending global economic shockwaves, another 400 people have been reported killed in Lebanon, and 11 in Israel.
Seven U.S. soldiers have so far been killed amid the war.
“Hundreds of people are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day,” said Cardinal Cupich in his statement.
He added, “Hundreds of thousands displaced, and many millions more are terrified across the Middle East.”
Cardinal Cupich said the fallen U.S. soldiers — who at the time his statement was released numbered six — “are also dishonored” by the White House’s social media post.
The cardinal stressed that the post was symptomatic of an even greater threat.
“This horrifying portrayal demonstrates that we now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced,” he said. “The moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game.”
Cardinal Cupich observed that Kalshi — a prediction exchange market that allows participants to trade on the outcome of future events — faced a lawsuit from users unhappy with the company’s decision to invoke a “death carveout” and not pay out $54 million users had “wagered on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ouster after his was killed.”
The cardinal described the “gamifying” of war as “a profound moral failure” that “strips away the humanity of real people.”
“Let’s not forget, a ‘hit’ isn’t putting points on the board; it’s a grieving family whose suffering we ignore when we prioritize entertainment, and profit, over empathy,” he said.
“Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store,” Cardinal Cupich said.
He warned, “In the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the ‘spectacle’ of explosions. And the price of this habit is almost unnoticeable, as we become desensitized to the true costs of war.”
But, said Cardinal Cupich, “the longer we remain blind to the terrible consequences of war, the more we are risking the most precious gift God gave us: our humanity.”
“I know that the American people are better than this,” he said. “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 others play to entertain us.”
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