However, the Elders antagonized the rest of the Church for quite some time prior to the current conflict, which is what lead to the break.
This is false. The player of Leopold returned to the game specifically to try and take down SA. The entire war was set up specifically to meet the player's OOC objective: War against SA. As such, Leopold took specific actions intended to Start the war. Everything else was window dressing.
I'm not saying that having such an OOC objective/plan for your character is bad. Everyone has to set up some background/motivation for their characters. All I'm saying is that this war would have happened one way or another. The only thing that would have changed was the wording on the declaration of war.