ROME — After white smoke in the rafters of the Sistine Chapel signaled the rise of a new pope last May, President Donald Trump heralded the first U.S.-born leader of the Catholic Church by declaring the choice “a Great Honor for our Country.”
But now the two most influential Americans on the world stage — Trump, the leader of 340 million Americans, and Pope Leo XIV, with a global flock of 1.4 billion Catholics — are locked in a struggle for hearts and minds that harbors risks for both men.
After a pair of Trump posts Sunday on Truth Social — one, a rambling attack against Leo, and the other, a Christ-like depiction of the president — Leo responded Monday onboard a papal flight to Algeria, telling journalists he had “no fear of the Trump administration.”
“I don’t want to get into a debate with him” the pope said before appearing to do just that by adding: “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing.” Later, reflecting on one of Trump’s missives on Truth Social, he said: “It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.”
Veteran observers of the Catholic Church say an open war of words between a pope and a U.S. president is unprecedented.
“You have to jump back to the Middle Ages when kings and emperors were shouting against the pope in Rome and calling him false,” said Marco Politi, a longtime Vatican watcher and author. “There is just no other recent example like this.”
The risk of a direct confrontation with a sitting pope, observers say, is perhaps greater for Trump — who is taking on not only the first pope born in the United States, but a spiritual touchstone for an important, core group of Republican voters: conservative White Catholics. And he is doing so in a midterm congressional election year.
Trump is also no longer facing Pope Francis, the Argentine-born pontiff whom many conservatives viewed as having the instinctive anti-American bias of the Global South. Rather, Trump is taking aim at a White Sox-loving, South-Side-of-Chicago boy made good who is delivering his critiques with the quiet and unassuming presence of a small-town parish priest, and who now speaks with the moral authority of a pope.
“When political power turns against a moral voice, it is often because it cannot contain it,” the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, wrote on X. He added, “In this sense, [Trump’s] attack is a declaration of impotence.”
Leo, for his part, is taking on a president who handily won the Catholic vote in 2024, and he now risks being painted as something he has sought to avoid: a political partisan.
In recent weeks, Leo and some of his surrogates have leveled clear criticism and disapproval of U.S. military action, with strong messages of peace delivered by the pope on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, as Trump ordered bombs to rain down on Iran and at one point threatened that a “whole civilization” would die.
Leo’s critiques have also felt all the more stinging precisely because he and others in the Vatican have framed them as anything but the toxic spin so common in the U.S. news cycle.
The pope is not anti-Trump, Vatican officials say, but rather a moral leader who is defining the teachings of Jesus. It is those teachings, not the pope, that are in conflict with an administration that has cloaked itself in religiosity. And it is the administration’s claims of divine support for its war that clearly violate those teachings.
“Pope Leo is speaking, as loudly as he can, for the countless victims of the many absurd wars underway,” Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Vatican’s top human rights official, told The Washington Post.
In Leo, Trump also faces a figure who is objectively more popular than almost anyone Trump typically criticizes. In a March NBC poll, Leo was found to have a 34 percent net-positive rating in the United States, compared to what was then a negative 12 percent rating for the president.
“Donald Trump is clearly feeling the heat from Leo’s recent public condemnations of the Iran war and the need to promote peace over conflict,” said Elise Ann Allen, author of “Pope Leo XIV: The Biography.” “He is realizing that Leo is emerging as a stronger global figure, and he’s trying to remind moderate Catholics why they voted for him. But outbursts like this could backfire as they could further alienate the moderate Catholics on the fence about him. If he’s trying to win back Catholic voters, this will only help Leo’s cause, not his.”
One thing is clear: After attempts by the Vatican and the administration to deny a rift following revelations of an unusual meeting of the Vatican’s top representative in the United States at the Pentagon in January, Trump’s social media broadside on Sunday stripped away all pretense.
“I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do. … If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican. Unfortunately, Leo’s Weak on Crime, Weak on Nuclear Weapons,” Trump wrote on Social Truth.
Until relatively recently, Leo had been more cautious with his words about Trump than many liberals would prefer. His rebuke of the administration’s immigration crackdown last year also felt off to some conservative Catholics who appeared more willing, at least before the events in Minneapolis in January, to give the administration’s hard-line policy a chance.
“Some [Catholics] are complacent and not only because they are silent but because somehow, they are celebrating what Trump is doing,” the Rev. Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, auxiliary bishop of Washington, told The Post last year.
But Leo’s admonishments have felt more on point amid an unpopular war that has driven up gasoline prices and other costs for Americans, dragged down the stock market and left even staunch conservatives criticizing the White House.
Leo’s tone has also shifted, as a pope previously accused by some liberals of being too quiet on foreign affairs compared to Francis. Leo has seemed to find his voice through a series of pounding critiques on the Iran war unlike any he had made since ascending the throne of St. Peter. At the same time, Leo’s top lieutenants in the United States are issuing new and remarkable calls for American Catholics to resist the war.
God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” Leo said on Palm Sunday. He quoted Isaiah 1:15, saying “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen — your hands are full of blood.”
It is a risky endeavor for a president to take on the spiritual leader of the largest Christian faith, and liberals have been quick to take advantage — turning Leo into their new cause célèbre on social media and vowing to “ride at dawn” should Trump touch “one hair” on the pope’s head.
In another Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump depicted himself as a Jesus-like figure alongside the American flag, drawing recriminations reminiscent of his post ahead of last year’s conclave in which he portrayed himself as pope.
“Total and complete blasphemy,” Joshua Charles, a speechwriter for former vice president Mike Pence, wrote on X.
Trump’s attack put an uncomfortable spotlight on prominent Catholics in his administration, including Vice President JD Vance, a recent Catholic convert, to publicly respond.
“Where is newly minted Catholic Vice President JD Vance?” said Denise Murphy McGraw, national co-chair of Catholics Vote Common Good. “At a moment when the Holy Father is being attacked and the dignity of the Church is being undermined, silence is not neutrality. It is complicity.”
Trump’s predecessors purposely avoided tangling with popes. In 2004, when John Paul II seemed to reference the then-fresh Abu Ghraib prison scandal by calling out “deplorable events” in the presence of then President George W. Bush, the American leader still had only praise for the pope.
Yet Trump has long shown more gumption to tangle with a pontiff. After Francis seemed to describe Trump as “not Christian” for campaigning in favor of a border wall with Mexico in 2016, Trump, then a candidate for president, called the remark “disgraceful” while also portraying the pope as Mexico’s “pawn.”
Trump’s supporters and operatives for years have believed their man could go where no other president could by attacking the Vatican.
Just after Trump called out Francis for his “not Christian,” comment, his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told The Post: “I’m Catholic and my initial reaction is, we might not want to fight the pope. … But Mr. Trump has such a unique way and a gut feeling and an instinct on things. … He fundamentally understood the situation better than I ever could.”
“I was amazed,” Lewandowski said at the time about Trump’s decision to confront the pope, “because it is the exact opposite reaction of what every other person who has run for office would do.”
Leo, however, is a far different pope than Francis. His selection by the conclave last year appears to have been prescient of the Vatican’s need for a counterweight to Trump on the world stage, one who could not be dismissed as easily as Francis was by conservative foes in United States.
At the same time, Leo is poking a bear known to lash out, and who enjoyed strong Catholic support in his last election.
Exit polls showed Catholic voters favored Trump by a record 20 points after backing Joe Biden by five points in 2020. A Pew Research Center survey showed a smaller but still significant shift, favoring Trump by 12 points in 2024 while splitting about evenly in 2020.
After months in which he appeared to avoid the wrath of ultraconservatives that Francis faced, Leo — who said near the outset of his papacy that he would seek to avoid partisan politics — is now presenting himself as a more open target.
But observers also note that Leo is already enjoying more support in the U.S. Catholic Church hierarchy than Francis did — and Trump’s attacks may fortify that trend.
“I would say there is, at this moment, no risk from this for the pope,” Politi said.
The post Lambasting Pope Leo, Trump risks rare feud with the Catholic Church appeared first on Washington Post.
