"No, God did not anoint Trump to nuke North Korea," Fr. Whitfield responded in the title of his opinion piece for The Dallas Morning News.
Catholic leaders, including the U.S. bishops and Pope Francis, have been outspoken about the need to eliminate all nuclear weapons in the pursuit of peace, particularly at this time of escalating tensions. Numerous other Catholic leaders in the recent past, including Pope Benedict XVI, Pope John Paul II, Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, all opposed the development of nuclear weapons.
In Gaudium Et Spes, a Vatican II document released by Pope Paul VI in 1965, the authority of the Church reiterated its opposition to the arms race, calling it "an utterly treacherous trap for humanity, and one which ensnares the poor to an intolerable degree. It is much to be feared that if this race persists, it will eventually spawn all the lethal ruin whose path it is now making ready."
The idea that God has given political powers such as President Donald Trump authority to "take out" evil authorities such as North Korea's Kim Jong-Un often stems from a misreading of Chapter 13 of St. Paul's letter to the Romans, Fr. Whitfield noted.
"Particularly, it's based upon those verses that call upon Christians to subject themselves to governing authorities because they serve the Lord as an 'avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer,'" he said.
But it's important to understand the context under which St. Paul was writing, he added. St. Paul was writing to people living under "arbitrary and often anti-Semitic pagan rule, offering fellow believers a moral strategy for survival, on how to abide by Jesus' ethic of love until his coming again in glory."