Pope Leo XIV is one of the world’s most powerful critics of the US war with Iran. In recent days, he has condemned the worship of mortals and money, the pitfalls of arrogance, and the “absurd and inhuman violence” unleashed by fighting that has further destabilised the Middle East.
His many admonishments over the past week appear to have reached president Donald Trump, who responded to those calls for peace by lambasting the first American-born pontiff on social media and then taking personal credit for Leo’s ascension to the papacy.
“Leo should be thankful because, as everyone knows, he was a shocking surprise,” Trump wrote in a lengthy social media post Sunday night. “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.”
When he sent the post, the president was fresh off a weekend of attending an MMA fight in Miami and spending time with supporters at his golf club after negotiations with Iran had failed.
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He criticised Leo as “weak on crime” – an insult he usually reserves for Democratic mayors – and “terrible for foreign policy.” He said that he much preferred the pope’s brother Louis because of his support for the Maga movement – “He gets it!” Trump wrote. The president also accused the pope of “catering to the radical left” and then offered a piece of advice, to “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician”.
The antagonistic post showed that there were really no boundaries when it comes to people Trump might target – the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics is apparently fair game.
Shortly after sending his post Sunday evening, Trump disembarked from Air Force One and answered questions from reporters. When asked why he sent the post, the president said that he did not think the pope was doing a good job and suggested that Leo “likes crime, I guess.” He accused the pope of supporting nuclear weapons and called him a “very liberal person”.
Trump’s angry counterpunch to the soft-spoken Leo, who was born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, illustrated how differently two of the world’s most powerful Americans handle conflict. One pleads for resolution, while the other reflexively increases the temperature.
In his first year as pontiff, Leo has avoided overt criticism from a mercurial president and quietly dodged an early invitation from Trump to visit Washington.
But tension had been building in recent weeks as the war in Iran continued, and as Trump administration officials began invoking theology to justify a war that Trump ordered without the authorisation of Congress, support from Americans or buy-in from many US allies.
In March, defence secretary Pete Hegseth called on Americans to pray for victory in battle and the safety of their troops “in the name of Jesus Christ.” The pope soon after warned against invoking the name of Jesus for battle, saying that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
In a homily during a Mass before Easter last week, Leo said that the Christian mission had been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”
Then, on Easter Sunday, he renewed his call for peace. “On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars,” Leo told tens of thousands of faithful gathered in St Peter’s Square.
Last week, reports also circulated that a Trump administration official had met cardinal Christophe Pierre, the former papal ambassador to the United States, to complain about the pope’s criticism of administration policies. Both the administration and the Vatican publicly denied the reports. Vice-president JD Vance, who is Catholic and is releasing a memoir about his faith, was asked about the meeting. He initially did not seem to know who Pierre was.
On Tuesday, Trump’s threat to wipe out the Iranian civilisation if Tehran did not agree to open the Strait of Hormuz, a key global oil route, prompted a rare direct rebuke from Leo. The pope called the threat “truly unacceptable” in remarks to reporters, and added that Trump’s threats to blow up bridges and power plants went “against international law”.
He called those threats a “sign of the hatred, the division, the destruction human beings are capable of, and we all want to work for peace.” (In an interview with a Fox News host Sunday morning, the president defended his threat, saying he was “fine with it”.)
On Sunday evening, prominent Catholics came to the pope’s defence.
“I doubt Pope Leo XIV will lose any sleep over this, before he begins his pilgrimage to Africa tomorrow,” James Joseph Martin Jr, an American Jesuit priest and writer, wrote on the social platform X. “But the rest of us should. Because it is unhinged, uncharitable and unchristian. Is there no bottom to this moral squalor?”
Last May, just after Leo’s ascension, the pope’s other brother, John Prevost, told the New York Times in an interview that he did not think his brother would stay silent if he disagreed with Trump’s policies.
“I know he’s not happy with what’s going on with immigration,” he said. “I know that for a fact. How far he’ll go with it is only one’s guess, but he won’t just sit back. I don’t think he’ll be the silent one.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
