|
The White House cannot stop fighting with the pope.
On Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance — who converted to Catholicism in 2019 — accused Pope Leo XIV of not understanding the Church’s stance on war, saying it was “very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Later the evening, President Donald Trump continued to berate the pope for not supporting his strikes on Iran.
In Leo, though, they’ve found a feistier opponent than they might have expected. He calmly held his ground, hit back with some jabs of his own — he called the name of the Trump-owned platform Truth Social’s name “ironic” — and, perhaps most importantly, has brought support to bear from prominent right-leaning Catholics in the US. The top Senate Republican sounds unnerved. Trump, who is used to quickly cowing nonpartisan public figures into a more conciliatory stance, is not winning this time.
This isn’t the White House’s first run-in with a pope. Trump, and sometimes Vance, were in a long-running conflict with Pope Francis going all the way back to the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when Francis indirectly suggested that Trump “was not a Christian,” because of his focus on “building walls…and not bridges.” Back then, even Trump’s fellow GOP primary contenders, including Catholics like then-Sen. Marco Rubio, backed him up.
As a result, Trump might be surprised by how much stronger the backlash is this time. Even before he doubled down on his initial Truth Social attacks and posted a controversial (and sacrilegious) AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, many of his usual allies, including conservative Catholics, were calling him out.
“The statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the Pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” the Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission who is popular with conservative Catholics, said on X — a statement emblematic of right-leaning Catholics’ responses.
https://www.vox.com/politics/485838/donald-trump-pope-leo-jd-vance-catholic-fight-feud-francis-traditionalist-liberal-iran-war-vatican
|
From earlier: Donald Trump messed with the wrong pope 
1