The world has been shocked, but I would venture hardly surprised, by the contretemps between the blustery American president and the steadfast American-born pope over Iran that absorbed much of last week. President Donald J. Trump, incensed over Pope Leo XIV’s antiwar stance, accused him of being weak on crime, terrible at foreign policy and ungrateful for his in effect making him pope. (Apparently, even Trump subscribes to the belief that an American pope serving as a counterweight to an American president was what the College of Cardinals had in mind when they elected Cardinal Robert Prevost pope.) For his part, Leo doubled down on his message of peace, grounded in the Gospels.
But this isn’t the whole story or the only one. It really began earlier this month, when The Free Press reported on a January meeting between the Pentagon and then papal nuncio Christiophe Pierre that threatened the pope if he didn’t get on board with the United States’ military might. Whether or not the Avignon papacy was invoked, as The Free Press reported and I discussed in a previous post, the meeting was “contentious,” building up to the blowup. Let’s connect the dots further, shall we? The Free Press is edited by founder Bari Weiss, also the editor in chief of CBS News, whose “60 Minutes” did a rather flattering story on the rise of Roman Catholic conversions April 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urhyDUUqGCY
Weiss, a self-described “radical centrist,” is pro Israel, which like the United States, is at odds with the pope over the Iran War. She killed a December “60 Minutes” story on the Trump Administration’s harsh treatment of Venezuelan migrants on the grounds that it lacked imput from the administration. So why do not one but two stories that make the pope and the church look good and one in which the Trump Administration looked bad? Journalistic balance or was it also coincidentally a portent of how bad last week would go for Trump?
Reposting AI images of himself as Jesus – or Dr. Jesus – and then with Jesus didn’t help. Nor did Vice President and Catholic newbie JD Vance’s comments on the need for the pope to “be careful” about his remarks on theology. Given the pope’s own brilliant Augustinian training and career, Vance’s misreading of St. Augustine’s “just war theory” – which basically amounts to self-defense and avoidance of collateral damage – came across as smug and sophomoric at best and thuggish and hubristic at worst.
By today – Sunday, April 19 -- Trump had moved on to participating in a marathon Bible reading, the pope had said it was not his intention to get into a war of words with Trump – the woe to tyrants speech he gave in Cameroon subsequent to the faceoff had been written two weeks earlier, he said – and Vance had expressed gratitude over a de-escalation of the tensions between the world’s two most high-profiled Americans.
Well Vance might. Like the Iran War itself, a conflict with the pope is not one he and Trump can win. Leo neither needs nor wants anything from Trump, though the president and his supporters can make life miserable for those the pope holds dear. The Trump Administration has canceled nearly $11 million in federal funding for Catholic Charities USA’s migrant children relief efforts in Miami. And the pope’s brother John Prevost, with whom he reportedly plays Wordle every day via internet, was the subject of an unsubstantiated bomb threat April 15.
But not the pope’s brother Louis, whom Trump went out of his way last week to praise as true MAGA. This is in keeping with narcissistic passive-aggressive triangulation, in which the narcissist pits one person against another to sow chaos and exert control. Maybe Trump thought Leo would be jealous. Trump certainly seemed jealous that David Axelrod, who was senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, met with Leo. Trump mentioned Axelrod in his tirade against Leo. I predict that if Obama meets Leo, two Chi-town guys getting together, Trump will explode.)
There may, however, not be enough MAGA brothers to undo the damage that’s been done. Catholics are the largest swing group in the United States and support among them for Trump has been eroding, with only 48% approving, a 24% decline. Trump can’t afford to lose this key demographic with the Democrats poised to retake the House and possibly the Senate in the midterms.
Yet in another sense, it’s already too late. The world has found a new American leader, one who has chosen to look beyond its narcissism as a way to work through it. In last week’s conflict between an angry president and a gentle pope, the contrast between ineffective and effective leadership couldn’t have been starker. There was Trump locked in his usual cage match with the press. And there was the pope acting like a fatherly tour guide aboard Shepherd One as he traveled to four African nations, listening to, and being listened to, by the press corps that follows him.
At the end of his remarks, he told reporters, “thank you for your service.” Imagine that.
No, Your Holiness, thank you for yours.