Pope Leo XIV condemns tyrants and war, urges peace in Cameroon

Pope Leo XIV used a peace meeting in Bamenda to deliver some of the sharpest language of his papacy, denouncing leaders who spend billions on wars and warning that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants.” The remarks, delivered at Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in Cameroon’s English-speaking northwest, turned a pastoral stop into a pointed political statement about power, violence and the moral cost of strongman rule.

The setting made the message land harder. Bamenda sits in the heart of Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis, where protests that began in 2016 over marginalization and language grievances escalated into armed conflict in 2017. Thousands have died, and humanitarian and rights groups describe the fighting as one of the world’s most neglected conflicts. By speaking there, Leo placed the Vatican’s anti-war message inside a live crisis rather than at a symbolic distance from it.

The pope also used the gathering to press for a broader shift in public life, condemning leaders who invoke religion to justify war and urging what church leaders described as a true conversion away from violence. Local testimony gave the meeting emotional force. A religious sister told the assembly she had been kidnapped by separatists and held in the bush for three days, a reminder of how deeply the conflict has scarred ordinary Catholics and other civilians across the region.

Leo’s words carried extra weight because of who he is and where he was speaking. He is the first U.S. pope, and his Cameroon visit came shortly after Donald Trump attacked him again on social media, adding an unexpected political edge to the trip. That backdrop matters in a church that is already wrestling with democracy, migration and the use of religion in global power struggles, especially as more than a fifth of the world’s Catholics live in Africa.

The Cameroon stop was the second leg of Leo’s 11-day Africa tour, which began on April 13 and also includes Algeria, Angola and Equatorial Guinea. The journey covers nearly 18,000 kilometers and 18 flights across 11 cities and towns, a sign of how central the continent has become to the Catholic Church’s future. Ahead of the visit, a separatist alliance announced a three-day “safe travel passage,” underscoring how even the pope’s movements were shaped by the conflict he had come to confront.