Pope Leo XIV leaves after presiding over a Prayer Vigil and Rosary for Peace, in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on April 11.Remo Casilli/Reuters
American presidents have cringed privately at popes’ high-minded rhetoric (Richard Nixon, a Quaker), objected to their views on issues such as abortion (Joe Biden, a fellow Catholic) and absorbed criticism for their foreign policies (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both Protestants), but they have always held the leader of the world’s Catholics in high regard as a deeply spiritual and moral figure.
Until now.
Donald Trump’s extraordinary attack on Pope Leo XIV − he accused him of being “WEAK on Crime,” said he was “catering to the radical left,” argued he owed his papacy to him and urged him “to “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician” − was the President’s latest, and perhaps most astonishing, departure from presidential precedence.
“This is troubling and disappointing,” said Raymond Flynn, a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See who knows the pontiff, in an interview. “When the Pope speaks, he has an impact. He has one of the few strong messages in the world today.”
Mr. Trump’s predecessors spoke publicly of popes with great respect − particularly in the case of John Paul II, who played a leading role in undermining communism in the Soviet bloc. They did so because of the deep faith and, not incidentally, political power of American Catholics, who comprise one-fifth of the country’s population and are a vital voting group in important swing states such as Pennsylvania and Nevada.
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“This is new territory for the President and for all presidents,” said David Campbell, a Notre Dame University political scientist and co-author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. “There’s been backchannel criticisms of popes but never anything this public and this personal. The question is whether this shakes some Catholics away from Trump, because with such small margins in our politics, even tiny shifts are significant.”
Without Catholics, Mr. Trump might not be in the White House. Catholics accounted for about 22 per cent of his supporters in the 2024 election, giving him a 12-point margin over Kamala Harris, according to the Pew Research Center. Registered Catholic voters favour the Republican Party over the Democrats by a 53-per-cent to 43-per-cent margin, even though about two out of five are immigrants or the children of immigrants.
This is a major change from the 19th century, when the Democratic Party was a congenial home to immigrants, and over the past century, when the party first nominated a Catholic (Al Smith) for president and added three more in later decades (John F. Kennedy, John Kerry and Mr. Biden).
Trump speaks outside the Oval Office of the White House on Monday.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
Generally American presidents, cognizant of tradition and of the power of the Catholic vote, have courted the Vatican and sought its counsel. Lyndon Johnson − who once corrected West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard by saying he hadn’t been born in a log cabin but in a manger − even presented a pope with a bust of himself.
The sparring between the Pope and the President began late last week when Leo − who characterized Mr. Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” as “truly unacceptable” − criticized the administration’s use of religious language in its conduct of the war in Iran.
“God does not bless any conflict,” the Pope, like Mr. Trump an artful user of social media, wrote on X. “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” A day later, in a jibe with an unmistakable object, he inserted this in a prayer vigil: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money. Enough of the display of power. Enough of war.”
Unlike previous popes, who besides opposing abortion and contraception generally avoided U.S. domestic politics, the American pontiff − a onetime altar boy at Saint Mary of the Assumption Church in deeply political Chicagoland − has sought to mobilize Catholics to lobby their congressional representatives to end the Iran conflict.
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Mr. Trump’s attack on the Pope returned the President to one of his fondest themes: the demand for appreciation of his favours. In the early days of his second term, he and Vice-President JD Vance pilloried Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not displaying sufficient thanks for the U.S. contribution to his war against Russia. He reprised this in his excoriation of the pontiff.
“Leo should be thankful because, as everyone knows, he was a shocking surprise,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”