President Donald Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV on Sunday, calling the first American-born pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” then minutes later posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure performing a miracle. The attacks marked one of the most direct confrontations between a sitting US president and the leader of the Catholic Church in modern history.
Flying back to Washington from Florida, Trump launched the broadside in a lengthy Truth Social post, then continued on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews before reporters. “I don’t think he’s doing a very good job. He likes crime, I guess,” Trump said. “I am not a fan of Pope Leo.”
Trump escalated beyond the Iran war, targeting Leo on Venezuela, immigration, and COVID-era church closures — and suggested the pope owed his papacy to Trump’s presence in the White House. “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” Trump wrote.
Shortly after, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself in biblical robes, laying hands on a bedridden man as light emanated from his fingers, with eagles, an American flag, and soldiers gazing on in reverence.
On April 12, during a prayer vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica — the same day US and Iranian negotiators met in Islamabad — Leo warned against a “delusion of omnipotence” fueling the war. “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!” he wrote on X. “True strength is shown in serving life.” None of his remarks named Trump directly, but the target was unmistakable.
Earlier in Holy Week, Leo called Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in Iran “truly unacceptable,” adding that strikes on civilian infrastructure violated international law. In his April 5 Easter message, the pope urged world leaders to lay down weapons and choose peace “not imposed by force, but through dialogue.”
Hours before Trump’s attack, three of Leo’s top American cardinals gave their first joint television interview on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, condemning the Iran war, criticizing ICE enforcement, and revealing that Spanish-language Mass attendance had dropped 30% due to fear among immigrant communities. They confirmed that Leo’s decision to spend America’s 250th birthday on Lampedusa — a primary Mediterranean landing point for migrants — rather than his home country was a deliberate statement.
In January, Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby summoned the Vatican’s then-US ambassador, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting. According to The Free Press, Colby told Pierre, “the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
Read: The Pentagon Tried to Intimidate the Pope—and It Backfired: Here’s What We Know
A separate official reportedly invoked the “Avignon papacy” — when the French monarchy forced the Church out of Rome — a parallel Vatican officials read as a veiled threat. The DoD called the characterizations “highly exaggerated and distorted,” and Pierre himself later told the US Ambassador to the Holy See that the accounts were “fabrications.”
Asked about the meeting while campaigning for Orbán in Budapest last week, Vance said: “I don’t know who Cardinal Christophe Pierre is.”
The attacks drew swift condemnation across religious and political lines. The three most-senior cardinals leading US archdioceses issued a joint statement Monday saying recent policies had thrown America’s “moral role in confronting evil” into question. Archbishop Broglio of the US Archdiocese for the Military Services questioned whether the Iran war met the Catholic threshold for just war, saying he was concerned the US had acted to counter a threat “before the threat is actually realized.”
Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he was “disheartened” by Trump’s comments. “Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel,” Coakley said.
Leo responded on Monday as he boarded his flight to Algeria at the start of an 11-day tour of four African nations. “I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do,” he told reporters on the papal plane.
“We are not politicians, we don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the gospel, as a peacemaker.” He added, declining to engage Trump directly. “I don’t want to get into a debate with him,” he said.
Trump won 55% of Catholic voters in 2024, but a Fox News poll from late March found his approval among Catholics had slipped to 48%, with 52% disapproving. A March NBC News poll found voters viewed Leo more favorably than Trump — Leo at a net positive of 34 points, Trump at a net negative of 12 points.
The Vatican has indefinitely postponed the pope’s planned 2026 US visit.
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