The Pope v the President: How Leo became Trump’s fearless foe

“I have no fear of the Trump administration,” the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church said this week, as he became a global rallying point for critics of the US President.

In the past few days, Pope Leo XIV, a low-profile cardinal just a year ago, has traded barbs with Mr Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world. The dispute is more reminiscent of the rivalry between mediaeval popes and emperors than of the Vatican-White House cooperation that helped win the Cold War.

“We are not politicians – we don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective as he might understand it,” the 70-year-old from Chicago said of the 79-year-old from Queens, hours after Mr Trump called on him to “stop catering to the Radical Left and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician”.

But by seeking to mobilise his compatriots to stop what he dubs an “unjust war” on Iran, Pope Leo has waded deep into the politics of his homeland all the same.

At a time when there is no single voice of opposition to Mr Trump at home or abroad, the first US-born pope’s attack on the administration’s policies could have electoral consequences in his native country, while risking political peril for the President.

“Trump does not really understand that he has run into a more than 1,500-year-old theological tradition – a set of moral teachings about war and violence,” says Dr Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, an independent think-tank. “It is perhaps not the smartest thing to be picking a fight with the Pope.”

The pontiff, born Robert Prevost, has taken the debate to Mr Trump in a way that his predecessor Pope Francis, who spoke little English, never could.

As his own remark suggested, the Pope also differs from other leaders who may have more to fear from the US’ economic and military power that was used to threaten Nato allies over Greenland just a few months ago.

“Donald Trump is used to sycophancy from world leaders who are generally too terrified of his reprisals to oppose him,” says Dr Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Trump can’t use his normal tools of intimidation, like tariffs and abandoning security commitments, against the Vatican.”

The President’s criticism of the Pope has hit a nerve even among some of Mr Trump’s allies. Ms Giorgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister, has called his attack on Pope Leo “unacceptable”.

Within the US, the Pope’s popularity appears to far outstrip Mr Trump’s. An NBC News poll in March gave him a 34-point net favourability rating, compared to a minus 12 rating for the President in the same survey.

Collision of world views

At root, Vatican officials say, Pope Leo’s concern about Mr Trump reflects a widening ideological divide between Washington and the Church over the future of the global order and the legitimacy of violence as a means of resolving disputes.

“Leo is not attacking a president,” says Reverend Antonio Spadaro, under-secretary of the Vatican’s culture and education department. “The conflict is the visible symptom of a much deeper collision between two incompatible operating systems of the world.”

The Holy See is alarmed at a more theological politics, Father Spadaro adds, in which “God is enlisted to bless the strong”.

Pope Leo has also joined critics who say the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement is cruel and unjust. “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the US,’ I don’t know if that’s really pro-life,” he said in 2025.

Catholic clergy deep in the heartlands of Mr Trump’s Maga movement have made even stronger statements. Bishop Anthony Taylor of Little Rock, Arkansas, spoke in January of “obvious parallels” between 1930s Germany and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.

But this week the confrontation has hit new heights. On Monday, Mr Trump told reporters he saw no need to apologise to the Pope, whom he blamed for the current war of words. “He went public,” the President said. “I’m just responding.”

Hours later, Mr Trump told CBS News the Pope was “wrong on the issues”, adding: “I don’t think he should be getting into politics.”

Fears of a Catholic pope seeking to influence American politics have loomed over the US all the way back to the country’s founding by strict Protestants. So sensitive did the issue become that on a 1963 trip to the Holy See, Mr John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president, declined to kneel and kiss the papal ring.

That spectre of papal influence had been largely illusory – but now, perhaps, no longer. Last week, Pope Leo made an unprecedented appeal to American citizens to call their congressional representatives to come out against Mr Trump’s attacks on Iran.

“When a pope invites people to contact their political representatives, the implicit message is, ‘this is a government that is not pursuing the interests of the people’,” says Dr Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious history at Trinity College Dublin.

“One of the conditions of the acceptability of Catholics in the American political project was that the Vatican would not interfere with American democracy,” Dr Faggioli adds. “The Pope doing what he did crossed that line... He is clearly trying to influence voters in America.”

Pope Leo – heir to a progressive Catholic tradition committed to social justice – sees himself as a defender of the ideals of the multilateral order promoted by the US after World War II, according to officials in the Holy See.

That is in line with the modern Vatican’s view of Catholicism as a universalist, humane and compassionate faith that should side with the weak and coexist peacefully with other religions and beliefs.

By contrast, Mr Trump sometimes appears to anticipate a new world order in which strong military powers – such as the US, China and Russia – each have spheres of influence. In Washington, top officials now deploy Christian rhetoric to try to sanctify that approach – such as US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, an evangelical Christian widely criticised for praying for “overwhelming violence” and “righteous targets” in the war with Iran.

“There is a clear clash of civilisations between very different types of Christianity,” Dr Faggioli says. “Pope Leo is the face of the resistance against the militarisation” of the faith.

The dispute is deeply uncomfortable for Vice-President J.D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. Mr Vance insists the administration “respects” the Pope. Speaking to Fox News, he said it was a “good thing” that Pope Leo was “advocating for things that he cares about”, calling it “reasonable” for Washington and the Catholic Church “to disagree on substantive questions from time to time”. But he has also called on the Vatican to “stick to matters of morality”.

Responding to Mr Vance’s comments, Father Spadaro of the Vatican says: “The question of war and peace is a moral issue and an integral part of the Church’s doctrine.”

The ideological clash between pontiff and president represents a battle for the hearts and minds of the US’ estimated 53 million Catholics, who represent around 20 per cent of the country’s population. With Mr Trump’s Republican Party fighting to keep hold of both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm races, the dispute could also have electoral reverberations.

Dr Jones at the Public Religion Research Institute says white, non-Hispanic Catholics have been “very critical to (Mr Trump’s) electoral success” in Midwestern battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Recent polling suggests that Mr Trump’s standing among Catholic voters had already been slipping ahead of the Iran war, amid a wider backlash against the administration’s immigration tactics and a cost-of-living crisis. A CBS News/YouGov survey in April, before Mr Trump’s outburst at the Pope, found 54 per cent of American Catholics disapprove of the job Mr Trump is doing as president, compared with 46 per cent who approve. A majority disapproved of the US military action against Iran.

But Mr Trump’s Iran comments have rocked even his Catholic base.

“With all due respect, we believe that President Trump is in the wrong to try to say that Pope Leo should not be speaking up about (the Iran war),” says Mr John Yep, founder of Catholics for Catholics, a conservative group that has campaigned for Mr Trump. “That is most certainly what he should be doing as the vicar of Christ. He is not a political figure, but he is a spiritual father for millions of people around the world.”

Church and State ties

For much of the 20th century, Catholic voters were more aligned with the Democratic Party. But they shifted to the right in the 1980s, as the Republican Ronald Reagan endorsed the anti-abortion or “right to life” movement and established diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Washington and the Vatican worked together in the battle against communism, bound by a shared commitment to religious freedom. The conservative Pope Benedict XVI found common ground with Republicans about the impact of radical Islam and the secularisation of the West.

But tensions opened up under Pope Francis, an Argentine populist who shifted the Church’s primary focus from issues such as abortion to topics such as climate change and developing country debt. “He was considered a biased pope against Yankees, against gringos,” says Massimo Franco, author of the new book Popes, Dollars And Wars: The Power Of America In The Vatican From Past Taboos To Pope Leo XIV.

Such attacks are much harder to deploy against the White Sox-loving, pizza-eating Pope Leo from the South Side of Chicago.

Despite a lack of religiosity that led him to joke in 2025 that he would not “make heaven”, Mr Trump has earned plaudits from many Catholics for his appointment of conservative judges, including three Supreme Court justices who helped to overturn Roe v Wade, which guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion.

The President himself was raised as a Presbyterian, but more recently has self-identified as a non-denominational Christian and filled the top ranks of his administration with devout evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

But many in the Holy See believe the US Church has allied itself too closely with the Republican Party in recent years. Pope Leo, like Pope Francis before him, has indicated he would like to see the US Church move away from such explicit partisanship and the hot-button issues of the culture war to focus on broader issues such as economic inequality.

Father Spadaro of the Vatican talks of “the possibility that American Catholicism rediscovers itself as a Church rather than as a tribe, less a cultural identity in the culture wars, more a community of moral discernment”.

The Pope’s power and influence over American Catholics is “confusing” to Mr Trump, says Mr Christopher Hale, who helped lead Catholic outreach for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. “He completely overturns how Donald Trump conceives of power because he gets it not by force, but by moral authority.”

Dr John Kenneth White, professor emeritus of politics at the Catholic University of America, argues that Mr Trump’s attack on the Pope is likely to backfire badly. “It is politically dumb. It makes absolutely no sense,” he says. “Trump’s political coalition is under a great deal of tension, and Catholics are not immune to that. It is more of a swing vote and more shakeable than perhaps Trump realises.” Financial Times