When the King and Queen begin their visit to the United States next week, there will be plenty of people thinking that now is not the time for them to be travelling to a nation embroiled in a questionable war.
But the royal tour will have been months in the making. The same goes for papal visits – planned long in advance, with speeches written and rewritten by the Pope’s advisers before he signs them off.
Events have caught up with Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Africa this week – and it’s the same conflict, Donald Trump’s with Iran, that is colouring how his words are being interpreted. When the Pope warned of threats to peace during his African trip, the world inevitably thought about Trump, his conflict in the Middle East – and his attacks on the pontiff in recent days.
Pope Leo and his Vatican diplomats will have known how his words would land. They could have changed them, but they went ahead, with the Pope continuing to preach a message of peace and rebuking leaders who use religious language to justify war.
He had harsh words for those “who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth”.
For American Catholics who voted for Trump, these are dark days indeed. They have witnessed the first-ever American elected Pope being attacked by their President. They have read Trump’s Truth Social denouncements of the pontiff – as “WEAK on Crime and terrible for Foreign Policy” – and Trump’s claims that he had only been chosen as Pope because of Trump himself.
It was a step too far for many of them.
For decades, Catholics in America have been split, between progressive liberals, often descendants of Irish and Italian migrants who have long voted Democrat, and more traditional Catholics, ill at ease with Democratic politicians who are liberal on issues such as abortion. Trump garnered millions of votes from them in 2024, according to the Pew Research Centre, with 62 per cent of white Catholics voting for him over Kamala Harris.
Now Trump has managed the seemingly impossible – uniting Catholics, both liberal and traditional.
Recent comments from Trump’s once staunchest Catholic allies have been striking. There was Bishop Joseph Strickland who, only last year, participated in a prayer event to “consecrate” the President’s Mar-a-Lago home. Strickland fell out with the late Pope Francis over his own partisan support for Trump, but he now says he stands with Pope Leo, and that the war with Iran cannot be justified, while urging Catholics to challenge the President.
Bishop Robert Barron at a National Day of Prayer event in the White House last year. He has said the President ‘owes the Pope an apology’ (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty)Then there is the highly influential Bishop Robert Barron, who serves on Trump’s religious liberty commission and only a few days ago appeared in the Oval Office with evangelical pastors praying for the President. “The statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the Pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” Barron posted on X, saying that Trump “owes the Pope an apology”.
Evangelical leaders have spoken up, too, including Tony Suarez, a long-time adviser to Trump, who said the President needed to apologise to the Pope, who he described as “a man of compassion who loves peace”. Suarez said that Trump’s regrettable post was offensive.
Another evangelical, Pastor Doug Wilson, who says he is a Christian nationalist, said the President was just using typical Trumpian rhetoric aimed at a political opponent. But the Pope is not a political opponent.
This is not the first time that a Pope has become embroiled in a row with politicians over proclaiming the Gospel. Pope Francis did it in his criticism of politicians’ lack of compassion towards migrants. John Paul II criticised the 2003 US war with Iraq and was vociferous in his criticism of communist oppression in his home country of Poland and across Eastern Europe.
Cardinals elect a Pope not to find someone who will wield earthly power but offer spiritual leadership. And yet they do think about the signs of the times and who has the particular skills, experience and spiritual strength to not only lead the Church but be a presence on the world stage.
Those who voted in the 2025 conclave might not have been focusing on an exact counterweight to Trump but they did – in electing Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost, a former missionary in Peru – choose someone who offered an alternative vision of how to be a global leader.
Trump’s idea that Leo knows nothing about Iran is either bluster or ignorance on the President’s part. Talk to people engaged in diplomacy and they often acknowledge the usefulness of knowing Vatican officials, with their strong networks, knowledge and reach. By Pope Leo’s side are astute Vatican diplomats, based in Rome and around the world.
Americans are among those who have benefited in the past from this contact, which is now in jeopardy following Trump’s condemnation of the Pope.
But something else could be at risk, too, for Trump: alienating America’s 53 million Catholic adults, who make up 20 per cent of the country’s voters, just a few months before they vote in November’s midterm elections. The US is a country that sees itself as one nation, under God. It’s not just the nation, but God that matters to many of them.
If you attack the Holy Father, God’s vicar on Earth, you may do so at your own peril.
Catherine Pepinster is a former editor of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly.
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