The Catholic Church’s first American pope, the former Robert Francis Provost of Chicago, now Pope Leo, has emerged as an increasingly vocal and essential voice of global conscience, advocating for peace in the Middle East, attacking the American abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and calling for an end to the mass deportation of immigrants. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invokes God and Jesus in our illegal war with Iran, Leo has retorted that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” He said Trump’s threat against Iran, that a “whole civilization will die tonight” was “truly unacceptable.” He never mentioned Donald Trump by name in his statements, until today, but we all know who the bad guy is, according to Leo’s moral accounting.
Trump has struck back before, but Sunday night he went berserk. “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the president wrote on Truth Social, as though the pope is a big-city mayor or a Senate candidate. He said he doesn’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.” (There was no landslide.) Oh, and he was really bugged by the pope’s visit with “Obama Sympathizers like David Axelrod” (more on that later). Trump then posted a creepy AI version of himself as Jesus Christ, “healing” a man in an apparent sickbed. Again, it’s a kind of projection: Trump is truly sick and in need of healing. Fast.
“I have no fear neither of the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel,” the pope told reporters on his plane as he headed for a visit to Algeria and several other African countries. They asked about Trump’s comments on Truth Social, and Leo responded: “It’s ironic—the name of the site itself. Say no more.” He added: “I do believe the message of the Gospel—‘blessed are the peacemakers’—is the message that the world needs to hear today.”
Trump’s escalation comes after a shocking report last week by Bari Weiss’s Free Press that senior US military officials called a top Vatican diplomat to the Pentagon in January. Anonymous sources “described it as a bitter lecture warning that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants—and that the Church had better take its side.” Trump’s representatives even reportedly invoked the memory of the Avignon Papacy, a 14th century crisis when, under threat from King Philip IV of France, several popes moved the Holy See to Avignon, France.
Both Pentagon and papal officials deny that any such threats were made, describing the meeting as cordial and respectful. I don’t like Bari Weiss or much Free Press reporting, so I suppose I can’t pick and choose to only believe its writers when their revelations fit my priors. But I don’t exactly disbelieve the Free Press story, either. It has the ring of truth, about the thuggishness of Trump and those around him.
Why are Trump, and others, so fascinated by Axelrod’s visit with the pope? I saw a frankly ludicrous headline in USA Today suggesting it’s because Axelrod and other Democrats see the pope as a possible presidential candidate. Of course, when you read the piece, the only people suggesting this possibility are social-media wags, and even they seem to be joking. Canon law prohibits the pope from running for office, and he’s currently the leader of 1.3 billion Catholics in 193 countries. The presidency is small beer.
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To me, the meeting was not so weird; Axelrod and his family are active Chicago Catholics. If it had any political motivation at all, it might have been to help facilitate a meeting between two sons of Chicago, Barack Obama and Pope Leo. As Obama recently said on a podcast: “Being president, or even being an ex-president, I can kind of meet everybody. So, I’ve met a lot of folks. The person who I have not yet met, and that I’m looking forward to meeting—and I hope I get an opportunity sometime in the future—is the new pope, who’s from Chicago, and a White Sox fan.”
Obama’s presidential library opens in June, but people close to the pope have said he is unlikely to visit during a big election year. He turned down an invitation to Washington from Trump; he might resist one from Obama on the eve of crucial midterms. But I hope he doesn’t. Neither canon law nor American law prohibit a papal visit this year. Americans, especially American Catholics, of which I am one, could use a moral and spiritual boost. In the wake of the Iran war, Trump’s approval rating among Catholics is below 50 percent. Maybe a papal visit could get even more of them to reconsider his presidency. At any rate, Trump has met someone he can’t bully.