Trump Wanted an American Pope. He got one.
Trump has managed to unite the U.S. Catholic Bishops — against him
One of my occasional pieces about Catholic politics. You can take the reporter out of the Vatican, but you can’t take the love of Catholic politics out of the reporter. This news was hard to ignore and even though so much excellent work has been done by Letters from Leo, The Free Press, and Susie Bright, I couldn’t help my Catholic self but to digest it.
Remember that old bumper sticker? “Jesus is coming back, and boy is he pissed.”
“I’m not afraid of the Trump administration,” Pope Leo XIV told reporters as he boarded his flight from Rome to Algiers April 13 for a papal visit to Africa. “I am not a politician and I have no intention of entering into a debate with him. I will continue to speak out loudly against the war… The message of the Church is the message of the Gospel: Blessed are the peacemakers.”
Now, the pope isn’t Jesus, he’s just the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Roman Catholics, including the 72 million in the United States where Pope Leo was born Robert Prevost in Chicago in 1955. But it’s clear he’s not happy about the suffering inflicted by President Trump’s war in Iran, his actions against migrants, and his belligerent moves against Venezuela, Greenland, and Cuba.
The fact that Leo has called Trump out by name is extraordinary. Popes are usually extremely careful and vague in their language. It is rare for a nation or a politician to be named or an event referred to explicitly enough as to be recognizable. The chief role of the Vaticanista, or experienced Vatican reporter, has always been to decipher the possible messages buried in a papal comment, gesture, or document. I know, I covered the Vatican for Newsweek in the early ‘90s and am a lifetime observer of Catholic politics.
But there’s been no need for insider insight on the war of words between Rome and Washington.
On Easter Sunday, the first American Pope spoke his message Urbi et Orbi:
“Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death. A world of brothers and sisters with one heavenly Father vanishes, as in a nightmare, giving way to a reality populated by enemies. We are met by threats, rather than the invitation to listen and to come together. Brothers and sisters, those who pray are aware of their own limitations; they do not kill or threaten with death. Instead, death enslaves those who have turned their backs on the living God, turning themselves and their own power into a mute, blind and deaf idol (cf. Ps 115:4–8), to which they sacrifice every value, demanding that the whole world bend its knee.”
Afterwards in remarks to reporters, Pope Leo urged people to contact their political representatives to demand an end to the war in Iran.
A week later, the American President attacked the pope on social media calling him “WEAK on crime, and terrible for foreign policy” and taking credit for his election as pope.
And the next day he posted an image of him as a savior, possibly The Savior, outraging religious conservatives. It was taken down a day later, but the tirade against Pope Leo remained despite Catholics demanding he apologize.
What I find most remarkable about Leo’s increasing fearlessness to call out Trump’s actions is that some of it seems to have rubbed off on the U.S. bishops.
For half a century, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has allowed abortion, gay marriage, and other culture war issues to dominate its political identity in ways that aligned it with conservative evangelicals and the Republican party, even when their broader social justice teachings on immigration, poverty, and charity didn’t.
Trump’s first term delivered for conservative Catholics and evangelicals on a lot of shared goals, including overturning Roe v. Wade. But Trump’s second term has unexpectedly hit the American Catholic Church right where it hurts: in the pews, in the sanctuary, and in the pocketbook.
Parishioners in immigrant communities have been too afraid to go to mass or school; R-1 visas for foreign priests, nuns and religious workers have been swept up in the immigration crackdown; and the administration abruptly cancelled its contracts with the USCCB for the resettlement of refugees, leaving Catholic nonprofits with millions in unpaid bills, causing hundreds of layoffs, and cutting off rent and food for migrant families. On April 7, the USCCB announced that cooperative agreements with the federal government would not be renewed related to children’s services and refugee support, one of its hallmark missions since its founding.
Trump managed to unite the U.S. Catholic bishops — against him
Bishops across America have seen the terror of ICE first hand. As Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, told 60 Minutes in an unprecedented joint interview with Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago and Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington D.C., Tobin said “...when they have to hide their identities to terrorize people, when they can actually violate other guarantees of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, well I think somebody’s got to call that out and I’m not the only one.”
In November, the USCCB issued a rare rebuke to a sitting administration denouncing “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” President Barack Obama had been the object of their last “Special Message” nearly 13 years prior to protest the Obamacare employer mandate on providing birth control.
Cardinal Cupich summed it up for 60 Minutes: “We really didn’t vote for this.”
It’s one thing for cardinals Cupich, Tobin and McElroy to speak publicly against Trump. Already in January 2026 the three had issued a joint statement condemning the military actions of the administration. They were all elevated by Pope Francis and considered to be on the liberal side of the big Catholic tent.
But after Trump threatened the destruction of Iranian civilization, even USCCB President Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City, considered a conservative for his ties to the Napa Institute and the now-excommunicated archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, joined Pope Leo in condemning his words.
“The threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified,” said Coakley.
After Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure healing a sick man, even Bishop Robert Barron (nicknamed the MAGA bishop because he’s so often in the White House), called on Trump to apologize to the pope. Barron, who sits on the Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission, founded the Word on Fire ministries, which has more than 2.5 million YouTube subscribers.
The last time the left and the right wings of the U.S. Catholic Church were so united against a president it was during Ronald Reagan’s Cold War. In 1983, the USCCB issued A Pastoral Letter on War and Peace, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, to protest Reagan’s buildup of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union.
Buckle Up Your Rosaries, It’s Gonna Be a Bumpy Ride
“There’s nothing to apologize for. He’s wrong,” Trump said of the pope when asked about Bishop Barron and others calling for him to step back his remarks.
Back in November 2025, Pope Leo turned down an invitation from vice president J.D. Vance to spend this July 4th, America’s 250th birthday, with him and Donald Trump in Philadelphia. Instead, Leo will visit Lampedusa to highlight the plight of the thousands of migrants who die off the coast of Italy’s southernmost island each year.
He’s following in the footsteps of Pope Francis, who made Prevost a cardinal in 2023 making him eligible to be elected pope after Francis’ death in 2025. Lampedusa was Pope Francis’ first visit outside of Rome after he was elected pope in March 2013. In October 2013, 368 migrants were killed when a fishing boat carrying more than 500 people caught fire and sank just 800 meters from shore.
Just on Easter Sunday, more than 70 people were missing and presumed drowned from a boat with 100 people capsized off Lampedusa. Survivors were found clinging to the overturned hull. According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, the Mediterranean has already recorded more than 600 migrant deaths so far in 2026.
When I visited Lampedusa back in 1985, the small Italian island of sun-baked rock was known only for its crystal clear Mediterranean waters, its fishing industry, and off-the-beaten-path tourism.
My Italian boyfriend Niccolò and I rented a little boat, explored sea caves and beaches, snorkeled with sea turtles, spearfished octopus and amberjack, explored the town of 6,000 inhabitants, and visited the church of the Madonna del Porto Salvo (Our Lady of Safe Harbor), its patron saint.
Leo’s decision to decline an invitation to attend America’s 250th birthday celebrations in Philadelphia with Trump and Vance to instead bring attention to the plight of migrants in Lampedusa is exactly what it seems like: a theological statement about what should be important to Catholics, and Christians everywhere: to welcome the stranger.
Trump has provoked something unprecedented as far as I can tell, which is to cause not one, but two popes to point their moral authority directly at him and his administration. In March 2025, I wrote about how Pope Francis gave JD Vance’s interpretation of Saint Augustine’s Ordo Amoris a thrashing in his February 2025 letter to the U.S. Bishops exhorting them to speak out against American policies that hurt the marginalized. And they did. And now they are following Pope Leo’s example and getting louder.
Trump being a transactional man, I’m sure he figured that an American pope would be his guy. After all, hadn’t he stacked the Supreme Court with Catholics? Hadn’t he killed Roe? The Vatican should be grateful to him. Why is Leo not on his side? What the hell business does the pope and these U.S. bishops and cardinals have saying his war with Iran is “unjust” and “immoral?”
But as the first American pope, Leo has the dual role of delivering the gospel and balancing the power of America and the Trump presidency in the world. The pope is one of the last moral authorities in the world. And moral authority is the one thing that Trump can’t buy or bully.
There is a structural realignment happening within the U.S. Church. Of course there are bishops who still support Trump, and the war in Iran, that are trying quieter ways to deal with the immigration question, but overall, the bishops are surprisingly united and outspoken in their opposition and the administration’s deportation program and warpath.
At dinner with some Irish-American Catholic friends the other night, one remarked that the Holy Spirit knew what it was doing when it elevated “Father Bob,” as he’s known in Chicago, out of obscurity. Just as Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 450 years, fought a spiritual battle against communism in eastern Europe starting with his native Poland that ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Union, Pope Leo is here to reset the balance of American power.
Historically, American Catholics were accused of not being loyal because of their supposed fealty to the pope over their president. Anti-popery and nativism were a hallmark of American Protestant culture from colonial times through the early 20th century. The tidal wave of Irish and German Catholic immigration in the 1840s fueled anti-Catholic hysteria and the creation of the Know-Nothing party which sought to keep Catholics from voting. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president, in 1960. The only other was Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump and his Catholic vice-president (who is about to release a book about his 2019 conversion) could usher in America’s next anti-Catholic era. By cancelling the USCCB contracts, a backbone of social services for migrants and the poor throughout the country, Trump has begun dismantling America’s historic Catholic social infrastructure.
Leo is the first American-born pope and the first of the Order of Saint Augustine in the history of the Catholic Church. But the moment he stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on May 8, 2025, he ceased to be an American, he became a global spiritual leader, the Holy Father and Vicar of Christ to Catholics, whose job it is to speak out on matters of faith, conscience, human dignity, care for creation, and peace.
The Pope has no plans to visit America in 2026 and who can blame him if he never visits at all during Trump’s term. But maybe he can save his home country and the world in the process. If Trump’s actions can unite the institutional Catholic Church of the U.S., which has been as bitterly divided as the rest of the country, then maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. As Pope Leo reminded us: Blessed are the peacemakers.
My hear is full of hope. Wonderful article Pia! Love Pope Leo!
Thank you for the insight into the situation. If you have not already found him, I highly recommend Gene Thomas Gomulka, here on substack, who courageously calls out serious issues within the Catholic Church, primarily, sexual abuse.