AMERICA/UNITED STATES - Cardinal Cupich: The war on Iran portrayed as a "video game" represents the failure of our humanity

Chicago (Agenzia Fides) - "More than a thousand" Iranian men, women, and children "lie dead after days of US and Israeli missile strikes." Meanwhile, "the official White House X account posted a video Thursday evening of scenes from popular action movies spliced with actual strike footage from their war on Iran." A video clip where "a real war with real death and real suffering" is treated "like it’s a video game." This is how US Cardinal Blaise J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, describes in compelling terms the video released in recent days by the White House, in which images of US and Israeli bombings on Iranian cities are shown against the backdrop of the song "Macarena". The American Cardinal called this "disgusting" in a statement titled "A Call to Conscience," released while Cupich was presiding over the International Meeting for Peace and Reconciliation in Chicago, organized by Loyola University in collaboration with the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

"Hundreds of people," the American Cardinal recalled, "are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day. Six U.S. soldiers have been killed. They are also dishonored by that social media post. Hundreds of thousands displaced, and many millions more are terrified across the Middle East." And the "horrific" video glorifying the US-Israeli attack on Iran "demonstrates that we now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced."

Even war—Cardinal Cupich insists—"has become a spectator sport or strategy game." The Archbishop of Chicago reports the symptomatic case of the online betting platform that had to compensate more than $2.2 million settlement related to users who were unhappy with how the company paid out the $55 million wagered on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's ouster after his was killed.
"Journalists," the Cardinal reports, "now use the term “gamifying” the war to describe this dynamic." And this is "a profound moral failure, for gamifying strips away the humanity of real people."

According to Cardinal Cupich, the video released by the White House demonstrates that the US 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." A spiral in which all humanity is dissipating, while "we are electrified 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." "I know that the American people," concludes Cardinal Cupich, "are better than this. 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." (GV) (Agenzia Fides, 8/3/2026)

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