In mid-April, Pope Leo XIV and United States President Donald Trump had a unprecedented verbal clash. Since the Middle Ages, there has not been a clash of this level “between temporal and spiritual power,” stated the Spanish newspaper. The Country. The center of the dispute was the war in Iran, which has been in question for not having clear objectives and results, in addition to causing a global economic and energy crisis. Before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump had declared that, if he did not allow the passage, he would end Iranian “civilization.”
Given that statement, which impacted world opinion, his countryman Robert Francis Prevost declared the threat from the American president “truly unacceptable.” In response, Trump called the pontiff “weak” and “disastrous” in foreign policy. In addition, on his social networks he published an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ healing the sick, which some religious groups interpreted as blasphemy. While flying on a pastoral trip to Angola, the pope responded calmly but forcefully: “I am not afraid. I will continue speaking out against the war.”
Diego Mauro, a member of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet) of Argentina, considers that while Trump made personal attacks, the pontiff limited himself to answering that he will continue to spread the Gospel. “With that, he left it knockout. It’s like that boxer who goes up, hits many punches and the other only returns one, but on the chin. It seems to me that Trump was quite battered, because he also has a lot of internal tensions in his country.”
The first of them comes, of course, from the important American Catholic community. According to data from the Pew Research Center, the Catholic is one of the largest religious groups in the United States, “outnumbering any Protestant denomination.” In fact, various media figures related to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, led by Trump, began to distance themselves from the president and call him “antichrist.”
In March 2025, Pew published a report according to which 20% of American adults, approximately 53 million, declare themselves Catholic. Of that number, more than 40% were immigrants or children of immigrants. Furthermore, 53% of Catholics registered on the electoral roll identified with the Republican Party, and 43% with the Democratic side.
“The United States has the fourth largest population of Catholics in the world, after Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines,” notes Nicolás Dallorso in an article published in the magazine Borders. He explains that the Catholic Church is “the largest religious confession in the country.” And in some places it is gaining followers. Recently the newspaper The New York Times published that “in dozens of archdioceses throughout the country, bishops observe an intense wave of new followers,” and that “people are joining the Catholic Church in surprising numbers.” He stresses that he does not know the reason, although it does not seem to have to do with Prevost’s papacy.
There is also a strong Catholic presence in the upper echelons of power: six of the nine judges of the Supreme Court are faithful, according to data from catholic.net. There are Catholics in Trump’s own cabinet. This is the case of the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and the Vice President, James D. Vance, a convert since 2019. “In 2024, Donald Trump won the Catholic vote with a margin that no Republican had achieved in decades. Never has a US government had so many Catholic members in its circles of power,” notes Univisión. Therefore, the confrontation with the pope implies strong internal political pressure for Trump.
Mauro finds that the MAGA coalition has been cracking internally, mainly due to the differences between the traditionalist Catholic sectors and the president. “They were already having tensions with Trump over his war in Iran, because they understand that it is driven by Zionist evangelism, that is, by sectors of the evangelical Christian world that are in tune with the State of Israel and that understand that this is part of a very messianic, very apocalyptic reading.” Furthermore, for these sectors, a consolidated State of Israel is essential for the expected second coming of Jesus.
The Trump-Prevost lawsuit also provoked a wave of reactions worldwide about the pontiff’s role in the face of the president’s warlike attacks. The Countryfor example, titled its note “Leo XIV finally becomes the anti-Trump pope.” The “finally” draws attention, as if the pope had fallen short of expectations at the time of his election on May 8, 2025.
Indeed, when the Conclave chose him as their best option to lead the future of the Church, many thought that he would provide a strong counterweight to Trump’s belligerent speech. But the pontiff chose almost silence. But Trump “finally brought him into the ring,” Mauro thinks. Furthermore, he believes that this “push” will allow Prevost to maintain religious cohesion, “because behind him all the Catholics closed ranks.” Thus, “Trump did the Pope a favor in terms of strengthening him as a symbol of unity and because, furthermore, Prevost did not exaggerate when responding to him,” he concludes.
And that push did not hurt him at all, because Leo XIV has among his missions to integrate the Catholic Church. It faces a “cultural break,” as Jesús Enciso González, an academic at the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo, says. That is, “a radical separation between the values of the church and those of the contemporary world,” which is not resolved. For example, the absence of a particular factor. “There is talk about transparency everywhere, except in the Church,” he points out. Another aspect is the ecclesial hierarchical pyramidal structure, which “leaves out the great diversities,” he told CONNECT.
As Domínguez writes, we also see “the appropriation of religious discourse and Christian values by the extreme right to give a veneer of moral legitimacy to their arguments.” And the pope himself had already warned “the Spanish bishops in November of the risk of the far-right manipulating the Christian message,” the journalist continues.
Prevost’s voice has a specific weight in the United States political scene, but there is no unanimity regarding its importance. “Because Catholics are not the majority there, they never were, they are not going to be. Because Catholicism is the religion of migrants and because the United States is a country of enormous religious plurality,” questions Ernesto Bohoslavsky, researcher at the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique in France.
In fact, Professor Enciso hopes that, in the coming years, Prevost will continue to show himself as a defender of peace and against the military initiatives of the United States, “because that is the letter of introduction of the Church. This position of the Church in the face of wars has always seemed very credible to me.” At the time, Pope Francis described the war in Ukraine as a “shame” and called for “dialogue instead of weapons.”
In this first year, Prevost took some relevant steps in his own project. One of them was to propose the apostolic exhortation Dilexi you (I have loved you), with the central idea of not seeing the poorest as “mere objects of compassion, but teachers of the Gospel. It is not about ‘bringing them to God’, but rather finding Him among them,” the document reads.
Mauro thinks that this exhortation “reinforces the line of the social doctrine of the Church that Francis had proposed,” but with a more conservative position. “He is still in the left quadrant, in ideological terms, but he is more moderate, more conservative, in terms of morals and doctrine.”
Francis’ papacy was “very successful in international terms,” reflects Mauro. Remember that when he came to the throne of Saint Peter in 2013, “the church was in a very deep crisis,” mainly due to cases of sexual abuse and corruption. “Francis understands that he has to generate a small kind of revolution, at least in terms of communication, and he achieves it. He builds international prestige. He becomes a relevant voice on many issues.” For the same reason, it was not easy for Leo XIV to be pope after Francis, “because of his charisma, his constant presence and spontaneity.”
Beyond the doctrinal aspects, for the Church of Rome, the choice of Prevost was essential, due to his dual American and Peruvian nationality. It promised continuity to Francisco’s line, but less radical. As Mauro explained to CONNECTis “an Augustinian missionary, accustomed to living on the peripheries, but at the same time knows the heart of the empire up close.” This reveals, on the one hand, the need for a counterdiscourse that is above the messianic leader. And on the other hand, it reinforces that Latin America continues to be one of the places with the largest number of Catholic faithful, despite the strong expansion of the evangelical world.
Experts agree that Leo XIV has many challenges. The first, stop the decline of Catholicism at a global level. Although Mauro finds that there is “a small revival“, because many young people are seeking to be baptized, especially in the United States, France and Argentina. Even so, he thinks that “Catholicism is retreating in relative terms compared to Islam and the evangelical world. In Latin America that is quite evident.”
The Catholic Church must also end corruption and pedophile scandals, as well as stop being a patriarchal institution and place more women in relevant positions, such as when Francis appointed one of them as head of state at the Vatican. However, he failed to modify “the priestly sacrament in theological terms,” criticizes Mauro.
Currently, Bohoslavsky warns, “many of the right-wing forces do not have the sympathy of the Catholic Church and instead have more affinity with the neo-Pentecostal churches.” In these, the researcher points out, a theology of prosperity is installed, which “supposes that social differentiation is not only an inevitable and desirable result of the market,” but a grace from God.
By choosing Prevost, the Church also recognized the geopolitical relevance of Latin America, especially compared to other parts of the world “where Catholicism is an old or minority religion. However, the most alive Catholic Church is the Latin American one,” Bohoslavsky explains.
Thus, when confronting Trump, Leo XIV left great expectations regarding the pontiff’s actions in the future. It remains to be seen if the pope will be interested in raising the tone regarding wars or will remain discursive in discretion, while trying to improve the reputation, openness to new social values and unity that this religious institution sorely lacks.
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