A supporter has called to EIR’s attention that “a senior Iranian cleric,” according to the National Catholic Reporter, has written a public letter to Pope Leo XIV, calling for the leader of Catholics to intervene with the President, “for peace and respect for international law.” The Iranian religious leader is Ayatollah Seyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad Ahmadabadi, called by the NCR report “a prominent figure within Iran’s Shia clerical establishment.”
“Peace, justice, and the noble virtues of human morality are the will of God in all divine religions, sacred scriptures, and the monotheistic call for peace,” Ayatollah Damad wrote. “Medical, scientific, and research centers were destroyed in violation of international norms and the principle of the immunity of such places.”
“Therefore, we respectfully request that Your Holiness, by reminding him [President Trump] of the teachings of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him), guide him so that he refrains from committing such acts and that no more human blood be shed.”
Damad is a Quran scholar who has risen to become authoritative, the NCR was told by Kourosh Ziabari, a New York-based journalist who provided the English translation to the newspaper. Ziabari described him as a moderate “reformer…. “Through his scholarship and through his sermons, he has tried to call for a national reckoning, for a reconsideration of the dogmatic and inflexible practices that have resulted in the Iranian society being polarized along religious ideological lines.”
Damad’s appeal arrives as Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, has issued her own open letter to Pope Leo XIV, calling on the pontiff to convene an emergency mobilization of religious leaders across all faiths for peace, in the spirit of Nicholas of Cusa’s 1453 dialogue “De Pace Fidei.” Has this senior Iranian Shia cleric reached the same conclusion, that the Pope may be among the few figures with the moral authority to break the impasse?
