Pontiff’s Battle With President Trump Splits Catholics Over Justness of War With Iran

As President Trump attempts to quash Iran’s long-festering hatred of what it calls the Little and Big Satans — Israel and the United States — another war, albeit of words, is breaking out between Mr. Trump and Pope Leo XIV, triggering a schism among American Catholics. The battle between the two leaders — one secular, one religious — heated up Monday with His Holiness’ combative response to a Sunday evening rhetorical broadside from Mr. Trump. While claiming that he is not a political figure, the pope made it clear that he has a low opinion of the president and America’s 6-week-old war on Iran. “I am not afraid of the Trump administration. … I will continue to speak out loudly against war, to try to promote peace, multilateral dialogue between states in order to seek the right solution to problems,” the pope said while traveling to Algeria, his first stop on a 10-day tour of the African continent.“We are not politicians, we don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective [as] he might understand it,” he added. “But I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker.”The night before, the president — who was raised as a Presbyterian but has described himself as a nondenominational Christian since 2020 — blasted the pope on his social media platform Truth Social, for stepping into the political ring.“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the president wrote in a long lament followed by a repost — which was later deleted — of a February meme of himself dressed as Jesus and laying his hand on the head of an anthropomorphized ailing American nation.“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do,” the president wrote. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” the president added.It’s not the first time His Holiness, the first U.S.-born pope, has shared his objections to the war with Iran. On Easter Sunday, he stood before tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square and called on “those who have the power to unleash wars” to choose peace. Days later, the pontiff urged world leaders to lay down their weapons and described the commander-in-chief’s threat to end Iran’s “whole civilization” as “truly unacceptable.” On Saturday, during a peace vigil at St. Peter’s basilica, the pope, without naming names, jumped squarely into the political arena, calling on adherents to follow the Gospel rather than any human authority, “especially when the inherent dignity of other human beings is threatened by continuous violations of international law.”People can help “break the demonic cycle of evil” and “believe once again in love, moderation, and good politics,” he continued.On Monday, he once more shared his position. “The future belongs to men and women of peace. Justice will always triumph over injustice in the end, just as violence will never have the last word, despite all appearances,” he said.Popes long before His Holiness have offered their opinions on war and other global events. Pope Francis spoke against war in Ukraine and attacked Israel for operations against terrorists in Gaza and Lebanon, saying war is “always a defeat.” Pope John Paul II, in a January 2003 address to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, rejected America’s entry into a war in Iraq, though he did not say war is forbidden.St. Augustine first broached the issue of a “just war” in the fourth century, saying that sometimes one has to go to war in order to attain peace.The pope’s criticism of Mr. Trump’s policies preceded the war in Iran, just as his 2025 election to the top of the church concerned the MAGA elite. At the time, political pundit and former Trump ally Steve Bannon called Leo’s ascendance “an anti-Trump vote by the globalists of the Curia” and declared him “the worst choice for MAGA Catholics.”The president’s sometime adviser Laura Loomer also fired off, calling the pope “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis” before dismissing him as “just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”Whether His Holiness is expressing more than just an aversion to war, or his overall dislike for the president and MAGA, in general, American Catholics are finding themselves stuck between political alliances and church authority, with only their political opinions and the lens of the catechism to guide them. The catechism, the guide to Church doctrine promulgated by John Paul II in 1992, states that all citizens and governments are “obliged to work for the avoidance of war.” However, it also states that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.” The doctrine offers strict conditions for the use of military force, including moral legitimacy, a limitation to the excessive use of force, and the order to “not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”For Catholics, who make up 22 percent of America’s electorate and voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in 2024, where they kneel depends on where they stand politically. “No, pacifism is not moral,” the head of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, posted in a statement on Sunday. “Pacificism means that self-defense and the defense of one’s nation is immoral. However pure the intent, pacifism holds that it is better to permit innocents to die than it is to use force to stop the aggressors. Now that is immoral.”On Monday, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, whose organization has also spoken out loudly against the war, criticized the president’s response to the pontiff. “I am disheartened that the President chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father. Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls,” he said.While the disagreement between the pontiff and the president goes global, several of Mr. Trump’s opponents are reveling in the dispute, and the rift is sure to be exploited for partisan gain. Data consistently show party loyalty outweighs church teaching when it comes to the ballot box. “With the degree of political polarization in the United States today, Americans prioritize their partisanship. Their faith has long given way to their political positions,” the director of Data for Political Research at Denison University, Paul Djupe, told The New York Sun.Nonetheless, just as Catholics debate the teachings of the church, they also part on whether the war with Iran is “just.”“Regardless of what happens in Iran, MAGA Catholics are going to have to come to grips with the moral consequences of their loyalty to Trump,” a distinguished professor of American history at Messiah University, Professor John Fea, told the Sun. “Only time will tell how much the Catholic spiritual witness in the world will be damaged as a result of their support of this president’s policies.”The New York Sun’s Hollie McKay contributed to this report.

Pontiff’s Battle With President Trump Splits Catholics Over Justness of War With Iran

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