In mid-December, 70-year-old Pope Leo XIV criticized US President Donald Trump (79) once again, albeit without naming him. “The remarks that are made about Europe, also in interviews recently, I think, are trying to break apart what I think needs to be a very important alliance, today and in the future,” the pope said. Everybody understood whom he was talking about.
Since May 8, a US citizen has led the Catholic Church for the first time. That means that Trump, who began his second term as US president on January 20, became the first US president to have another American as head of the Vatican to contend with.
The United States is home to about 340 million people. Worldwide there are about 1.4 billion Catholics. In the 2024 presidential election, about 55% of US Catholics voted for Trump.
Observers had long ruled out the idea that a member of the Catholic clergy from the United States might become pope, given the country’s significance as a world power. However, in the weeks that followed the death of Pope Francis on April 21, there were rumors that wealthy reactionary US Catholics had offered massive donations to the continually cash-strapped Vatican, should the next pope be a US citizen.
Trump’s reaction to Leo: ‘What excitement!’
Those donors probably did not have Archbishop Robert Prevost in mind. Prevost was born in Chicago and lived and worked in Peru for many years.
Still, in a post on his Truth Social platform shortly after the pope’s election, Trump wrote that he was looking forward to meeting Leo XIV. “What excitement,” Trump wrote, “and what a Great Honor for our Country.”
They have yet to meet. Trump, who was raised Presbyterian, now calls himself a nondenominational Christian.
Leo has repeatedly and clearly criticized the US government’s treatment of immigrants. Some US bishops joined him early on. Others joined in more gradually following the contionued release of brutal images of masked men dragging people out of vehicles or taking them from hospital corridors and other facilities.
Few had anticipated how strongly the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which includes about 270 bishops and auxiliary bishops, would position itself against Trump’s immigration policies in mid-November. The USCCB lamented a “climate of fear” and the “vilification of immigrants.” The bishops felt compelled to “raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.”
For this statement, the USCCB issued its first “Special Message” in 12 years and began a social media campaign in which many bishops personally spoke out.
Conservative bishops in the United States
As a whole, US bishops tend to be more conservative than their counterparts in Europe. During his tenure from 2013 through his death in April, US bishops often stood in open opposition to Pope Francis. Many are politically aligned with the Republican Party.
They differ with the party, however, when it comes to migration. “The bishops have shown that very strongly,” Benjamin Dahlke, a theologian at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, told DW. “No matter which political orientation the bishops themselves have, there was a very strong consensus from left to right.” Dahlke, who spent time as a guest professor in the United States while researching a book, said it was “totally clear” to the bishops that the current US government’s conduct against immigrants violated the law.
Migration is the issue on which the church has most strongly criticized Trump. Before the vote at the USCCB, there were noticeable signs that the pope was pressing for such a position statement. Several bishops visited him in the weeks before the USCCB convened. The Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, French Archbishop Christophe Pierre, is a cardinal. It is rare for a nuncio to hold such a high position in the Catholic Church. It would likely bolster his authority on the ground.
“Pope Leo began to speak more openly on the topic of migration in September,” Massimo Faggioli, a professor of historical and contemporary Eccles in the Department of Religion at Trinity College Dublin, told DW.
Leo has commented less, however, than Francis had on the state of democracy in the United States and elsewhere. “It is a topic he must engage with sometime,” said Faggioli, an Italian American who was previously a professor at Villanova University in the United States.
Faggioli, who moved with his family to Ireland in 2025, said there were “MAGA Catholics” who support Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda and view Pope Leo critically. However, he said, it does not compare to the massive MAGA criticism of Pope Francis.
The differences between MAGA Catholicism and the Vatican are enormous on many issues. However, there are still “many good vibrations between this Pope and Americans,” Faggioli said, and that will continue until Leo says something more politically divisive than he has up to now.
Pope and President speak a common language
Faggioli noted that US Vice President JD Vance is Catholic. “Vance is always strategic, not naive,” he said. The vice president has so far not openly criticized Pope Leo. Vance has even visited the pope on a joint trip to the Vatican with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Catholic.
In addition to the “latent antagonism” on the issue of immigration between the president and the pope, Dahlke said, there is a “latent cooperation,” with the president and the pope “going much in the same direction” on topics such as their understanding of gender and their definition of family.
The fact that both the pope and president are Americans is “a connection that shouldn’t be underestimated,” Dahlke said. Americans can interact with one another differently than they might with people from other countries: The pope and the president share a native language.
Will Trump and Leo XIV meet in 2026? In early December, upon his return to Rome from Beirut, the pope said his next trip would be to Africa, including a visit to Algeria. Another destination was Latin America, specifically Argentina and Uruguay. He did not mention the United States.
Trump is expected to visit Europe in 2026. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz hinted that the US president wanted to visit his ancestral village of Kallstadt in Rhineland-Palatinate. From there, it is not too far to Rome.
This article was originally written in German.
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