How a War of Words With Donald Trump Has Been the Making of Pope Leo XIV (C1)

When Pope Leo XIV stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s in May 2025, the moment felt unusually restrained. A scholar-administrator from Chicago, he appeared in the red mozzetta and moved into the Apostolic Palace with the careful air of continuity rather than rupture. In the early weeks, the sense inside and outside the Vatican was that this would be a quieter papacy than Francis’s—measured, stabilizing, almost restorative.

But he was stepping into a church already in long retreat.

Weekly Mass attendance among American Catholics had fallen from around 55 percent in 1970 to roughly 29 percent, and the ranks of the clergy had thinned in lockstep —from 59,000 priests a half-century ago to around 33,000, alongside an aging corps of 33,000 nuns. Roughly 30 million Americans had left Catholicism outright; for every adult convert the church welcomed each year, about eight walked out the door.

The financial toll had been staggering. Over the past two decades, Catholic dioceses and religious orders have paid more than $5 billion to settle clergy sexual abuse claims, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Parish schools have also closed by the hundreds, with the Diocese of Brooklyn announcing earlier this year that it would shutter seven more.

Above it all, Francis had left behind a fractured church—celebrated by liberals who rarely filled a pew while clashing with a conservative wing that still longed for the moral clarity of Pope John Paul II’s Cold War church. When Leo emerged on the balcony of St. Peter’s, the expectation hardened: a careful course correction, a quiet pope, a steady pope, a figure who would tend to the wreckage without making waves.

That assumption would not last long.

On a Sunday morning in mid-April, Donald Trump picked a fight with him—and found that the quiet pope was not so quiet after all. Leo was clearer than Francis had ever been, and growing more assured by the week.

In a 330-word post on Truth Social, Trump called Pope Leo XIV „WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” adding: „I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States.” The post continued, „If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

The President didn’t stop there. Less than an hour later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself in biblical robes as a Christ-like figure, healing a sick man. He deleted it the following morning, claiming he thought it depicted him „as a doctor.”

The response from the American Church was swift. Within hours of Trump’s post attacking the pope, Bishop Robert Barron issued a statement calling Trump’s remarks „entirely inappropriate and disrespectful” and said the president owed the pope an apology. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, released his own statement: „I am disheartened …[by the] disparaging words about the Holy Father.”

As Trump’s attacks escalated, so did the range of voices defending Leo, including figures who would not typically align with the Vatican on faith or geopolitics. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian condemned the AI-generated image as a ” desecration of Jesus,” saying such an insult „is not acceptable to any free person.”

In Europe, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni—one of Trump’s closest allies—called his remarks about the pope „unacceptable,” triggering a public rupture. Opposition leader Elly Schlein echoed the criticism, denouncing Trump’s „serious lack of respect” in a rare moment of cross-partisan unity in Rome.

Even Bishop Joseph Strickland, the former bishop of Tyler, Texas, who was removed by Pope Francis in 2023 after years of tension with the Vatican over doctrinal and political disputes, framed the issue in institutional terms rather than partisan ones when speaking to Newsweek.

On the papal plane to Algeria, Pope Leo XIV responded with a stillness that seemed to unsettle Trump further. „I have no fear of neither the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, ” he told reporters.

No sitting American president has publicly attacked a pope in such explicit personal terms. No American leader in the republic’s history has so directly portrayed papal authority as subordinate to presidential power. Trump’s assault on Pope Leo was something genuinely new in American politics: a Republican president openly confronting the moral authority of the Catholic Church itself.

The Collision Began in January

In late January, senior Pentagon officials met privately with the Vatican’s U.S. envoy. The meeting was later confirmed by both the Vatican and the Pentagon, though at the time it attracted little attention outside diplomatic circles.

It would not stay quiet for long.

By early April, reporting from The Free Press described the exchange as unusually contentious, a characterization both institutions rejected. But within Vatican circles, the encounter had already taken on a different meaning. What was said in that room became a point of growing disagreement—less about tone than about intent.

Christopher Hale, editor of the Letters from Leo newsletter, had noticed the shift even before the confrontation with Trump. „The idea of the ‘quiet Pope Leo’ is a 2025 story. The 2026 Pope Leo is altogether different. He is speaking out, more comfortable in his own skin. He’s more comfortable saying the word Trump. He said it twice in the past week.”

According to Hale’s Vatican sources, officials in Rome came away from the January meeting believing something more consequential had been communicated: that the United States was signaling potential future military action and seeking, in effect, Vatican alignment. One account described the Vatican’s interpretation as „an attempt to preemptively secure moral backing for war.”

The report alleged that one Pentagon official had even referenced the Avignon Papacy, a 14th century period when the French Crown imposed its will on the Catholic Church, as a cautionary tale of what could happen if the Vatican did not cooperate.

Speaking outside the Oval Office on April 13, the president refused to apologize for his criticism of Pope Leo XIV.

In Rome, however, the interpretation had already hardened. The feud, Vatican officials suggested, did not begin in April. It began three months earlier, when they believed the Trump administration was asking something it had never been asked before: not simply political alignment, but moral endorsement of war.

The Trump administration rejected that framing outright. A Pentagon spokesperson told Newsweek: „The meeting between Pentagon and Vatican officials was a respectful and reasonable discussion. We have nothing but the highest regard and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See. ”

Still, the disagreement did not remain contained within diplomatic channels. It surfaced publicly in early April, when three U.S. cardinals appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes and declared the proposed Iran war „not a just war” under Catholic teaching. Cardinal Robert McElroy explained that the conflict failed to meet the Church’s longstanding criteria for legitimate military action, including a clear aim of restoring justice and peace.

Within hours of the broadcast, Trump posted his Truth Social attack.

Later that same day, Vice President JD Vance was asked about the cardinals’ remarks while campaigning in Budapest alongside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—an effort that would collapse days later when Orbán was voted out after 16 years in power. Speaking on behalf of the administration, Vance drew a sharper line.

„I certainly think that in some cases, it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on in the Catholic Church and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

But for Sam Sawyer, S.J., editor-in-chief of America magazine, the exchange revealed something deeper than disagreement. It revealed a category error. „Vice President Vance said the pope should stick to matters of morality,” Sawyer told Newsweek. „But the pope is sticking to matters of morality.”

„The justice of war and the question of whether the use of military force is justified and moral—that’s precisely a matter of morality. That’s why he’s speaking out about it,” he added.

A Catholic Collapse

What began as a clash with the Vatican was becoming something else entirely: a rupture with American Catholics. Catholics make up roughly one-fifth of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center, and are among the country’s most politically consequential religious blocs, with about half identifying as Republicans or Republican-leaning. That was especially evident in 2024: Trump won Catholics decisively, 59 percent to Harris’ 39 percent, a stunning reversal from 2020, when he lost the group to Joe Biden, 52 percent to 47 percent, per ABC News. The most dramatic gains came among Hispanic Catholics, the fastest-growing segment of the church in the U.S.

But those gains now appear to be slipping. By April, signs of erosion were already clear.

A March poll found that 48 percent of Catholic voters approved of Trump’s job performance, while 52 percent disapproved. On the Iran conflict, support dropped further: only 40 percent approved of his handling, while 60 percent disapproved. On the broader question of military force, a majority, 55 percent, opposed it. Notably, these numbers came before the public clash with the Pope.

„The Catholic vote is not monolithic. There’s no one clear political destiny in American Catholicism,” Wilson said, explaining that the moment Trump began invoking Jesus to justify war, „the coalition fractured.”

Now, even some of Trump’s Catholic allies are raising concerns.

Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of CatholicVote, an organization that spent more than $10 million mobilizing Catholic voters for Trump in 2024, said the president’s post had „crossed, again, a line of decorum ” and called for an apology. „You really don’t want to make unforced errors like this,” she added.

Others within the movement struck a more personal tone. John Yep, president of Catholics for Catholics, said he was „saddened and disheartened” by Trump’s rhetoric. „Catholics worked very hard to elect President Trump as we believed he was the candidate most in line with Catholic teaching,” Yep said.

For some observers, the implications go beyond a single controversy. The divide highlights a strategic problem for Republicans. Trump’s earlier campaigns had drawn a larger share of Hispanic voters than any modern Republican, especially working-class men in Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Florida. But the coalition was never especially stable.

CNN analyst Harry Enten offered a blunt assessment: „I believe the president is making a humongous mistake going after the most popular guy in America.”

An Evangelical-Catholic Civil War

For much of American history, American political life was shaped by suspicion of Catholic allegiance. The Know-Nothings of the 1850s, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Protestant opponents of John F. Kennedy in 1960 all drew on the same fear: that Catholics posed a threat to American sovereignty because their ultimate loyalty lay with Rome.

But the terms of that old anxiety no longer quite fit. Trump was not confronting a distant European hierarchy or a foreign-born clergy. The pope he was attacking was born in Chicago, raised in the Midwest and already deeply embedded in American life. When Trump attacked him, he attacked a fellow citizen, one who was far more popular than the man making the attack.

But the collision between Trump and Pope Leo was not simply a personality clash or a policy disagreement. It revealed something deeper: a fracture within the Trump movement itself, between two branches of American Christianity that had allied to elect him but were now at odds over its soul.

Michele Dillon, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, has spent decades studying the tension between Catholicism and American Protestantism. She noted that what was happening in the Trump administration was not new; it was a regression to older patterns.

„Mainline Protestantism used to be the default for American power,” Dillon explained. „That dominance has evaporated. Now you have these two intense fronts of Christianity at play. And what you’re seeing in the Trump administration is a coalition where evangelical fervor provides the populist energy, even as Catholic traditionalism shapes much of the policy leadership.”

The White House contains a concentration of Christian power. The Pentagon is run by Pete Hegseth, an evangelical Protestant with deep ties to the religious right. The secretary of state is Marco Rubio, a Catholic. The vice president is JD Vance, a recent Catholic convert.

Yet when the administration publicly attacked the Pope and published the Christ-like meme, only the latter was deleted, a decision that, for Letters from Leo editor Hale, revealed how the MAGA movement views its coalition.

„The tweet where he makes himself Jesus Christ strikes me as more offensive to evangelicals than Catholics. Catholics are more offended by the Pope tweet, but that was the one that didn’t get deleted,” he said.

The exchange also revealed a deep theological divide. Modern Catholic teaching on war, shaped by just war doctrine and reinforced since Vatican II, holds that it is extremely difficult to justify war morally. As Sawyer, the Jesuit priest and editor, put it, „In modern Catholic teaching, it’s nearly impossible for a war to be considered just. ”

But for figures like Catholic Vance; Hegseth, whose spiritual adviser is Pastor Doug Wilson, who has said he would bar public Marian processions in a Christian society; and Speaker Mike Johnson, a devout Southern Baptist tied to Christian nationalist movements, war operates in a different moral universe.

On Palm Sunday, March 29, Pope Leo had said something that seemed to respond directly to a prayer Hegseth had delivered that same week: „Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war but rejects them.”

On April 15, Johnson said he was ” taken aback ” by Pope Leo’s remarks. He invoked what he called „the just war doctrine,” the centuries-old Christian teaching that some wars can be morally justified. „It’s a very well-settled matter of Christian theology,” he argued, suggesting that Trump and Vance’s remarks reflected „their deep understanding” of the stakes in the Iran conflict.

But that appeal to ” settled doctrine ” rests on an older assumption: that Catholic teaching is still anchored in a Western theological tradition that no longer defines the church as a whole. The reality is that the church’s center of gravity has shifted. Today, roughly 41 percent of Catholics live in Central and South America, with Africa accounting for just over 20 percent, roughly on par with Europe. The United States and Canada together make up only about 6.6 percent.

Yet even as its Western share has declined, the church remains globally influential—something Trump has discovered.

Leo’s Quiet Revolution

What scholars are seeing after the first year of Pope Leo’s papacy is not a revolution but a clarification. Leo is articulating long-standing church teachings on war, migrants and the common good—but doing so with the authority of an American pope whose voice cannot easily be dismissed as foreign.

„The Pope isn’t speaking to be political. He’s not expressing personal views,” the University of New Hampshire’s Dillon said. „He’s speaking as a man of God, articulating what the church considers the objectively moral course in any situation.”

Emma McDonald Kennedy, a scholar of Catholic ethics at Villanova University, where Leo earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics nearly 50 years earlier, said Trump’s attacks ultimately missed their target.

„Leo has an unusual position in American public life. He doesn’t have the same political aspirations or incentives as other leaders. That gives him a unique ability to weigh in morally and prophetically in a way that seems to bother Donald Trump, because he can’t really compete with that,” she said.

But that moral authority does not sit outside politics—it is beginning to shape it. For Republicans, the strategic implications remain unclear. The party’s 2024 coalition relied on working-class voters, including many Hispanic Catholics in battleground states, a delicate balance of economic messaging and cultural conservatism. Catholics also make up a sizable share of voters in several competitive 2026 races, meaning even small shifts could have outsized effects.

Early indicators suggest that shift may already be underway. Democrats are currently favored to win the House in 2026, according to prediction markets. Among Latinos, President Trump’s standing has slid: a March 2026 national survey by Florida International University’s Latino Public Opinion Forum found 30.7 percent approval and 66.7 percent disapproval—a notable reversal for a group that shifted toward the GOP in 2024.

„The openly anti-Catholic aggression by the Trump administration will be remembered for a long time,” Latino strategist Mike Madrid told Newsweek.

And as the political stakes sharpen, so too does the sense that the conflict is no longer contained to elite discourse. The timing could hardly be worse for Republicans, Madrid notes. As tensions escalate with an increasingly popular Pope, the party faces a choice: continue the feud or attempt to contain the political damage among Catholic voters ahead of November.

„Whether it’s Irish or Latino or whatever it is, those sensibilities have been shaken to the core… this one really does feel very different because Leo is so beloved,” Madrid said.

Trump, who rarely retracts statements, has shown no signs of backing down. He has continued posting provocative imagery on social media, including a meme of Jesus embracing him. Republican officials have kept the feud alive, with Vance, Johnson and others doubling down on criticism of the pope.

Still, the asymmetry in the conflict remains striking. The pope himself remains undiminished. What the Trump administration had not anticipated was that it was picking a fight with an institution that had just found, at its helm, another American who could not be intimidated.

„The church will outlast this presidency,” Dillon said. „It has a long history of diplomacy, working behind the scenes with the U.S. and maintaining relationships with countries around the world. It’s truly a global institution.”