Pope Leo XIV used his first papal press conference to call for an end to the kind of aggressive and divisive rhetoric favored by President Donald Trump and his administration.
“We do not need loud, forceful communication, but rather communication that is capable of listening and of gathering the voices of the weak who have no voice,” the pontiff told about 1,000 international journalists gathered at the Vatican.
Speaking in Italian, he invited the audience to “disarm communication of all prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred.”
“Let us free it from aggression,” the 69-year-old continued.
The newly elected pontiff didn’t mention Trump or the U.S. government, but his words were deeply relevant to the administration’s communication style.
The president is famous for demeaning nicknames and late-night tirades packed full of insults against people with whom he disagrees, while his surrogates regularly appear on TV to threaten and insult anyone who challenges their boss.
The night before Leo’s speech, Trump wrote on social media that the “Crooked Democrats” were “World Class Losers!!!” after lawmakers expressed concerns about the president’s plan to accept a $400 million Boeing jet as a gift from Qatar.
Top administration officials such as Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have also attacked the president’s perceived adversaries.
After federal judges nationwide—including the Supreme Court—issued rulings upholding due process for migrants, Bondi called the judges “deranged” and threatened to arrest them. Miller ranted that a cabal of “communist judges” were trying to “shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus.”
Before he was chosen as Pope Francis’ successor on Thursday, Leo had criticized both Trump’s rhetoric and his immigration policies.
Last month, he shared a social media post calling out Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele for laughing together in the Oval Office over El Salvador’s agreement to house U.S. immigration detainees in Bukele’s notorious CECOT mega prison.
In February, the then-Cardinal Robert Prevost shared an op-ed from the National Catholic Reporter titled, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
He also shared a Washington Post editorial in 2015 arguing that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was “problematic.”
Making his first speech from the Vatican balcony last week, Leo told an ecstatic crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square, “We must seek together to be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges, dialogue.”
The speech was deeply reminiscent of Francis’ famous insistence that society needs to “build bridges, not walls.” When Trump announced his plans for a southern border wall during his first term, Francis said that anyone who thought of only building walls and not bridges “is not Christian.”
During Monday’s papal audience, Leo blasted “loveless languages that are often ideological or partisan” and called for communication that “does not use aggressive words, does not follow the culture of competition.”
“Peace begins with each one of us: in the way we look at others, listen to others and speak about others,” he said. “We must say ‘no’ to the war of words and images. We must reject the paradigm of war.”
Trump, for his part, can’t wait to meet the new pope.
“It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope,” he wrote last week in a Truth Social post “What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!”
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