Pope vs. President: How Leo Became Trump's Fearless Opponent

"I have no fear of the Trump administration," said the head of the Catholic Church this week, who has increasingly emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the American president.

In recent days, Pope Leo XIV, a cardinal who was relatively unknown a year ago, has been exchanging sharp messages with Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world. The conflict is more reminiscent of the medieval rivalry between popes and emperors than of the Vatican-White House cooperation that helped win the Cold War.

“We’re not politicians, we don’t do foreign policy from the same perspective that he does,” the 70-year-old from Chicago said of the 79-year-old from Queens, just hours after Trump urged him to “stop pandering to the radical left and focus on being a great pope, not a politician.”

Yet, in seeking to mobilize his compatriots to stop what he calls an “unjust war” against Iran, Pope Leo has become heavily involved in the politics of his homeland.

At a time when there is no unified voice of resistance to Trump either at home or abroad, the first US-born pope's attacks on the administration's policies could have electoral consequences in his homeland, but also carry political risk for the president.

“Trump doesn’t really understand that he’s up against a theological tradition that’s more than 1.500 years old — a set of moral teachings about war and violence,” says Robert Jones, founder of the Institute for the Study of Public Religion, an independent think tank. “It might not be the smartest thing to do to get into a fight with the pope.”

The head of the Roman Catholic Church, born Robert Prevost, engaged in a debate with Trump in a way that his predecessor, Pope Francis, who spoke poor English, never could.

As his statement suggests, the pope differs from other leaders who may have more reason to fear the economic and military power of the United States, which just a few months ago was used to pressure NATO allies over Greenland.

“Donald Trump is used to cajoling world leaders, who are mostly too afraid of his retaliation to stand up to him,” says Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Trump cannot use his usual pressure tools, such as tariffs and waivers of security obligations, against the Vatican.”

There is a clear clash of civilizations between very different forms of Christianity. Pope Leo is the face of resistance to the militarization of religion, Faggioli said.

The president's criticism of the pope has struck a chord even among some of Trump's allies. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called his attack on the Pope "unacceptable."

In the United States itself, the pope's popularity appears to far surpass Trump's.

Fundamentally, Vatican officials say, the Lion's concerns about Trump reflect a deepening ideological gap between Washington and the Church over the future of the global order and the legitimacy of using violence as a means of resolving disputes.

“The lion is not attacking the president,” says Father Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary of the Vatican’s Department of Culture and Education. “The conflict is a visible symptom of a much deeper clash between two incompatible systems by which the world functions.”

The Holy See is troubled by an increasingly pronounced theological politics, Spadaro adds, in which "God is called upon to bless the powerful."

Low also joined critics who say the Trump administration's approach to immigration policy is cruel and unjust. "Someone who says, 'I'm against abortion, but I agree with the inhumane treatment of immigrants in the United States,' I don't know if that's really a pro-life position," he said last year.

Catholic priests in strongholds of Trump's Maga movement have made even harsher assessments. Bishop Anthony Taylor of Little Rock, Arkansas, spoke in January of the "obvious parallels" between Germany in the 1930s and raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But this week the conflict has reached a new level. On Monday, Trump told reporters that he saw no need to apologize to the pope, whom he blamed for the recent exchange of harsh words. “He went public,” the president said. “I’m just responding.”

Hours later, Trump told CBS News that the pope was "making a mistake," adding: "I don't think he should be getting involved in politics."

Fears of a Catholic pope trying to influence American politics have been present in the United States since the founding of the country by strict Protestants.

The issue became so sensitive that during a visit to the Holy See in 1963, John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States, refused to kneel and kiss the pope's ring.

This specter of papal influence has long been largely illusory - but now, perhaps, it is no longer.

Last week, Love set a precedent and appealed to American citizens to contact their representatives in Congress and oppose Trump's attacks on Iran.

“When the pope calls on people to address their political representatives, the implicit message is: 'this is a government that does not represent the interests of the people,'” says Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology and history of religion at Trinity College Dublin.

“One of the conditions for accepting Catholics into the American political project was that the Vatican would not interfere in American democracy,” Fagioli adds. “What the pope has done crosses that line... He is clearly trying to influence voters in America.”

Leo, a successor to a progressive Catholic tradition dedicated to social justice, sees himself as a defender of the ideals of the multilateral order that the United States promoted after World War II, according to Holy See officials.

This is in line with the Vatican's contemporary understanding of Catholicism as a universalist, humane and compassionate faith that should stand by the weak and peacefully coexist with other religions and beliefs.

In contrast, Trump sometimes seems to anticipate a new world order in which major military powers like the US, China and Russia have their own spheres of influence. In Washington, top officials are now using Christian rhetoric to try to legitimize such an approach – such as US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, an evangelical Christian who has been widely criticized for praying for “superior violence” and “just targets” in a war with Iran.

“There is a clear clash of civilizations between very different forms of Christianity,” Faggioli says. “Pope Leo is the face of resistance to the militarization of religion.”

This dispute is particularly unpleasant for Vice President J.D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and is soon to publish a new book about his conversion to the faith.

Vance said this week that he was “frustrated” that some Catholic priests had “unrelentingly attacked the Trump administration on immigration,” given his controversial view that dangerous criminals have exploited weak controls to enter the U.S. “How is it humane to allow drug dealers and human traffickers to bring young children across the southern border?” he asked.

The vice president insists the administration “respects” the pope. Speaking to Fox News, he said it was “a good thing” that Love “stands up for what he cares about,” saying it was “reasonable” that Washington and the Catholic Church “disagree on fundamental issues from time to time.”

Still, he urged the Vatican to “stick to issues of morality.” On Wednesday, he added: “Just as it is important for me, as vice president of the United States, to be careful when I speak on issues of public policy, I think it is very, very important for the pope to be careful when he speaks on issues of theology.”

Responding to Vance's comments, the Vatican's Spadaro said: "The question of war and peace is a moral question and an integral part of the Church's teaching."

The ideological conflict between the pope and the president represents a struggle for the affections of the approximately 53 million Catholics in the United States, who make up about 20 percent of the country's population.

As Trump's Republican Party struggles to retain control of both houses of Congress in the midterm elections in November, this dispute could have electoral consequences.

The latest polls show that Trump's support among Catholic voters began to decline even before the war with Iran, due to a broader public backlash against his administration's immigration policies and a cost-of-living crisis fueled by high fuel prices and heavy import tariffs.

"With all due respect, we think President Trump is wrong to try to say that Pope Leo shouldn't talk about (war with Iran)," said John Yep, founder of Catholics for Catholics, a conservative group that campaigned for Trump.

“That is exactly what he is supposed to do as the Vicar of Christ. He is not a political figure, but a spiritual father to millions of people around the world.”

For most of the 20th century, Catholic voters were closer to the Democratic Party. However, in the 1980s, they shifted to the right, when Republican Ronald Reagan supported the anti-abortion, or “pro-life,” movement and established diplomatic relations with the Holy See.

Washington and the Vatican also cooperated in the fight against communism, bound by a shared commitment to religious freedom. John Paul II worked closely with Reagan, particularly in supporting the Solidarity movement in the pope's native Poland.

Despite tensions over the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq during the pontificate of John Paul II, his successor, the conservative Pope Benedict XVI, found common ground with Republicans on the influence of radical Islam and the secularization of the West.

The discourse within American Catholicism has also shifted to the right in recent years, with influential laypeople investing significant resources in conservative institutes, media outlets, and conferences.

But tensions between Washington and the Vatican have increased under Pope Francis, an Argentine populist with a pronounced anti-Americanism, who has shifted the Church's focus from issues like abortion to topics such as climate change and developing country debt.

“He was seen as a pope biased against Americans, against ‘gringos,’” says Massimo Franco, author of the new book “Popes, Dollars, and Wars: American Power in the Vatican from the Taboos of the Past to Pope Leo XIV.” “It was easy to caricature his approach to the United States.”

Such attacks are much harder to target Love, a White Sox baseball and pizza fan from Chicago's South Side.

Despite his lack of religiosity, which led him to joke last year that he "won't make it to heaven," Trump has won praise from many Catholics for appointing conservative judges, including three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling, which guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion.

The president himself was raised as a Presbyterian, but has more recently declared himself a nondenominational Christian, and has filled the top positions in his administration with committed evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

But many in the Holy See believe that the Church in the United States has become too closely aligned with the Republican Party in recent years. Prominent conservative priests, such as Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of New York, have publicly renounced Democrats like former President Joe Biden, and Catholicism itself, while simultaneously embracing Trump and the Maga movement.

Leo, like Francis before him, has indicated that he would like the Church in the U.S. to move away from such overt partisanship and inflammatory topics of culture wars, and to focus on broader issues such as economic inequality.

Spadaro of the Vatican speaks of “the possibility for American Catholicism to rediscover itself as a Church rather than a tribe, less as a cultural identity in the culture wars and more as a community of moral reasoning.”

The pope's power and influence over American Catholics "confounds" Trump, says Christopher Hale, who worked on President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. "He completely reverses Donald Trump's understanding of power, because he derives it not from force, but from moral authority."

Many Christians were also taken aback by Trump's use of profanity in a social media post about Iran on Easter, as well as his posting of an image over the weekend that appeared to show him as Jesus laying a healing hand on a man in a hospital bed.

John Kenneth White, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America, believes that Trump's attack on the pope will likely end badly for him.

“It's politically stupid. It makes absolutely no sense,” he says. “Trump's political coalition is under a lot of pressure, and Catholics are not immune to that. They are a more vacillating electorate than Trump perhaps realizes.

“The Pope is now the most important American on the world stage,” White adds. “Trump just can’t stand it.”

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