US President Donald Trump on Sunday told reporters that he is “not a big fan” of Pope Leo XIV, after the global leader of Catholics made a plea for peace amid the conflict in the Middle East.
The 70-year-old American pope on Saturday publicly implored leaders to end the violence, telling worshipers at St Peter’s Basilica: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money. Enough of the display of power. Enough of war.”
“I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo. He’s a very liberal person, and he’s a man that doesn’t believe in stopping crime,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
Photo: Reuters
He accused the pontiff of “toying with a country that wants a nuclear weapon.”
Trump later doubled down on his comments to reporters with a post on social media.
“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” he wrote. “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
Trump added that Leo had only been elected “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
Trump later posted an artificial intelligence-generated image seemingly depicting himself as Jesus Christ. In the image, the president appears dressed in red and white robes as he cures a man with his healing hand. The US flag is shown over his shoulder.
Washington and the Vatican have rejected reports of a rift.
A Vatican official on Friday last week denied reports that a top Pentagon official gave the church’s envoy to the US a “bitter lecture” over Pope Leo’s criticisms of the Trump administration.
The story — which the Pentagon had already dismissed as “distorted” — said that Cardinal Christophe Pierre was summoned in January to the Pentagon, where he was given a dressing-down by US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby.
The military official reportedly told the cardinal that the US “has the military power to do whatever it wants — and that the church had better take its side.”
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni in a statement said that “the account presented by certain media outlets regarding this meeting does not correspond to the truth in any way.”
While both parties insist the meeting was cordial, the Holy See and the White House have openly been at odds over the Trump administration’s hardline mass deportation campaign — which the pope has called “inhuman” — and the use of military force in the Middle East and Venezuela. When Trump on Tuesday last week made genocidal threats against Iran — “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” — the pontiff slammed the “truly unacceptable” statement and urged parties to “come back to the table” for negotiations.
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