Rome: Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday denounced any religious justification for wars raging around the world, saying "there is no such thing as a holy war."

"Only peace is holy," Leo said in a video message to a gathering of religious leaders in the Italian hilltop town of Assisi. The American pope was supposed to have presided over the gathering in person but had to cancel his participation as he recovers from October 13 lung cancer surgery.

Instead, Leo sent a videotaped message broadcast to the delegates, who included the Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally, spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, as well as Muslim, Buddhist, and other Christian leaders.

In his message, the pope denounced the "troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics" and its religious justifications by leaders. "War can never be waged in the name of God. We must rebuild peace everywhere, not prepare for more wars," he said.

Russia's Orthodox Church has justified Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a "holy war," and leaders on all sides of the Iran war have used religion to justify their actions, with US officials, especially Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, invoking their Christian faith to cast the war as a Christian nation trying to vanquish its foes. Leo has consistently rejected such justifications as a perversion of religion itself, most stridently in his first encyclical "Magnificent Humanity," in which he said fighting in the name of religion "means attacking religion itself."

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