Trump v Pope Leo

Earlier this week, Trump decided to remove from Truth Social an image he had forwarded of himself wearing a white robe, with a glowing hand on the forehead of a sick man, which critics said was similar to religious paintings showing Jesus healing the infirm.

The background of the images included the Statue of Liberty, a large US flag fluttering, fighter jets and an eagle, as well as a nurse, a woman praying and what appeared to be a soldier in uniform.

Speaking to reporters several hours after it was removed, Trump said he believed the image depicted him as a doctor next to a Red Cross worker.

In previous weeks Trump had decided to pick a fight with Pope Leo, the head of 1.4 billion Catholics in the world.

In March the Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth led a prayer calling for overwhelming violence against enemies. Hegseth is responsible for bombing Iran over 6 weeks.

Pope Leo addressed this head on in his homily at Easter, which is the annual set piece of the entire Catholic church. He said that Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war. This was immediately picked up in the media, as it should have been, as a condemnation of the US-Israeli war with Iran. But he was more pointed than that.

He said that God rejected the prayers of leaders who started wars and had “hands full of blood”.

On April 8^th, Trump posted the infamous diatribe threatening Iran like so:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

In response, the Pope put out the message that “Today we all know there was this threat against all the people of Iran. This is truly unacceptable.”He urged the people to contact their political leaders and congressional representatives and to remind them that attacks on civilian infrastructure are “against international law” and a “sign of hatred, the division, the destruction human beings are capable of, and we all want to work for peace.”

Nor has Pope Leo stopped.

Speaking in Cameroon this week , the Pope criticised leaders who “turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education and restoration are nowhere to be found”.

Woe to 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. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon https://t.co/bKteFZ3iWE

— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) April 16, 2026

“The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild,” he said on Thursday.

The Pope also condemned “an endless cycle of destabilisation and death” in a “bloodstained” region of Cameroon that has been gripped by insurgency for nearly a decade.

“Those who rob your land of its resources generally invest much of the profit in weapons, thus perpetuating an endless cycle of destabilisation and death,” he told those gathered at a cathedral in the north-western city of Bamenda – the centre of the violence that has left at least 6,000 people dead and displaced many more.

“Peace is not something we must invent: it is something we must embrace by accepting our neighbour as a brother and as our sister,” the Pope said.

Following Leo’s address, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, said that she stood with the Pope in his “courageous call for a kingdom of peace”.

Pope Leo is most definitely not afraid of Trump or indeed any other tyrant waging war, commenting this week that “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do.” 

His comments have defined him as the most visible international counterweight to Trump and set up an unprecedented clash between the first American pope and a US president who has launched repeated attacks against him.

Pope Leo is an Augustinian who has devoted his life to work among the poor in Peru, inside vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. It is not in his nature to be combative, as we have seen from the start of his papacy just a few months after Trump’s re-election. But he is clearly asserting the gospel of Christ as a peacemaker. 

Pope Leo will not of course defeat Trump by himself and nor is that his job. But it will be harder for Trump’s legacy to live on if his Vice President JD Vance has less and less Christian support to draw on.

Both Trump and Vance are getting damaged by the late night comedians about it.

Occasionally, soft power has real power, and Pope Leo is clear about his role: “We are not politicians, we don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective (as) he might understand it. But I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker.”

Who knows, perhaps Pope Leo’s stand will give courage to other world leaders to defeat the evil of Trump’s war, just as Pope John Paul was chosen to play a crucial role in the fall of the Communist regime in Eastern Europe in the early 1980s.