Eric J. Lyman, Special to USA TODAY
April 18, 2026, 3:01 a.m. ET
ROME − A priest celebrates a weekday mass for a couple of dozen faithful at the Basilica of St. Augustine, the main Augustinian church in the Italian capital. The congregation’s thin voices echo amid scaffolding for repairs and the shuffling of tourists passing through to photograph the 400-year-old Caravaggio masterpiece “Madonna of Loreto” and Raphael’s 500-year-old fresco “Prophet Isaiah.”
It’s a contrast as old as Augustine himself, the early Catholic saint whose teachings led to the founding of the priestly order Pope Leo XIV belongs to: the tensions of the secular and religious worlds pushing against each other.
Today, Leo, the quiet and scholarly Chicago-born pope and the world’s most famous adherent of Augustine’s teachings that promote charity, truth, humility and unity, is fostering the same contrast in an increasingly heated squabble with a fiercely combative, prideful and outspoken political leader from New York.
But this war of words between the pope and President Donald Trump is about far more than an argument about deep-dish versus thin-crust pizza. It has also sparked strong backlash from religious leaders, as well as Trump’s conservative and Christian MAGA supporters and former allies, potentially worsening an already difficult 2026 election cycle for congressional Republicans, as he risks alienating an important segment of his base.
Leo and Trump − and Trump’s vice president, JD Vance − have taken their differences on war, peace and church doctrine to spectacular new rhetorical heights, Vatican officials and insiders say. Last summer, Francis Rocca, the Vatican editor at EWTN News, a news service with a Catholic perspective, characterized Leo as a “quiet American.”
Rocca said that description is now obsolete.
“He has now come out of his shell,” he said.
As a blunt-speaking pope, Leo has been a vocal critic of Trump’s war in Iran while appearing to take direct aim at the American president and his inner circle, including Vance and Pete Hegseth, his defense secretary. He has alluded to a world being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” and said that anyone who is a disciple of Christ “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” Leo has sharply criticized those whom he said manipulate religion “for their own military, economic or political gain.”
Trump, for his part, has told the head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics that he “should get his act together.” In social media posts, he has called him “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
He has told the pope to focus on being the pope and accused him of wading into politics.
To illustrate this, Trump has posted strange, erratic but also quite literal AI-generated images of himself as a Jesus-like figure. Amid intense backlash from some of his Christian supporters, Trump has said he thought the image was meant to portray him as a doctor. He’s also sought to take the temperature down in recent days by asserting he’s “not fighting with him … The pope can say what he wants, and I want him to say what he wants, but I can disagree.”
Still, the parable of the pope versus the president has also included a warning from Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, to Leo, the supreme official of the Catholic Church. The latter spent almost five decades deeply engaged with the church as a priest, a missionary and a cardinal before being elected pontiff in May last year. Yet Vance told him to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
And on April 6, the Free Press news organization reported that in January, U.S. defense officials summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the former papal ambassador to the United States, to the Pentagon for a “bitter lecture” that essentially amounted to a threat to back the White House amid Leo’s perceived criticism of the Trump administration.
“The narrative offered by some media outlets about this meeting is completely untrue,” the Vatican press office statement said, responding to the report and confirming that a meeting did take place. A Pentagon spokesperson said the story was exaggerated and that the meeting was a “respectful and reasonable discussion. We have nothing but the highest regard and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See.”
Rosario Forlenza, an expert on politics and religion at Rome’s Luiss University, said there’s a long history of suspicion between the Vatican and the United States.
But, he said, “There’s never been anything this adversarial and it’s never involved specific personalities. This is completely new.”
He also noted that Trump’s former chief strategist in his first term, Steve Bannon, predicted after Leo emerged victorious from the conclave that there would “friction” between Leo and Trump.
“It is shocking to me that a guy could be selected to be the Pope that had had the Twitter feed and the statements he’s had against American senior politicians,” Bannon said at the time.
The Vatican and the White House
Historically, the United States showed little interest in the papacy or the Vatican until President Abraham Lincoln recognized during the Civil War that cooperation with the Church could help secure greater Catholic support for the Union and discourage papal recognition of the Confederacy, Forlenza said.
In other words, tension, intrigue and cross-purposes involving the Vatican and the White House are not new.
In fact, the city-state that is the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church and the United States only reestablished diplomatic ties in 1984 after more than 100 years of mutual distrust. Some Americans worried that Catholics maintained allegiance to the church first and American values and institutions second. It was once unthinkable for an American president to be seen with the pope. It was Woodrow Wilson who became, in 1919, the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Vatican when he visited Europe in the aftermath of World War I.
More recently, Pope Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, heavily criticized Trump’s policies on immigration and climate. Pope John Paul II launched a major, though ultimately failed, diplomatic effort to lobby President George W. Bush, urging him to forgo the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. As Pope Leo has said of Trump’s war in Iran, Pope John Paul II said the Iraq war lacked both legal and moral justification.
The verbal ferocity of the ongoing clash between Leo and Trump has reignited the theory that the decision by the Vatican’s College of Cardinals to elevate Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost to Pope Leo XIV in May 2025 − less than six months after Trump’s second-term inauguration − may have been, at least in part, a move aimed at finding a counterweight to Trump’s perceived scattergun and disruptive approach to foreign policy.
Why an American pope?
Six Vatican officials and insiders stressed that there was no easy way to conclude definitively why Leo got the role – and they had no specific information about the May 2025 conclave. There was a generalized perception among some in the Holy See that a powerful American who could stand up to another powerful American was a factor in Leo’s selection. (The vote for the pope that takes place through a series of secret ballots and is effectively between the cardinals and their consciences.) An American pope could more easily navigate how to be a thorn in Trump’s side, is how one Vatican official put it. All spoke on the condition of anonymity.
As did one senior Rome-based western diplomat who agreed with that assessment. The diplomat noted that during the conclave, Trump’s inauguration was at the front of many people’s minds, and he was also never far from the headlines. The diplomat said that it was inconceivable that Trump’s election did not play at least some role in Leo’s selection.
Trump himself appears to believe this theory, saying that Leo was only given the papacy “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.” A representative for the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s assertion and the theory, held by some, of Leo’s selection.
Still, others, including those who know him best, said it was Leo’s character, years of service to the church and Augustinian order that were the more likely explanations for his ascendancy to the papacy.
He is the first-ever American pope and the 267th figure to sit on the throne of St. Peter. Leo was ordained as an Augustinian priest in 1982. He was granted Peruvian citizenship in 2015 after relocating there as a missionary in 1985. During this time in Peru, he built a wide network of international contacts and relationships, which may ultimately have helped boost his visibility at the conclave of cardinals that selected him, experts on the Vatican said.
Leo − Augustinian ‘unifier’
Father Allan Fitzgerald is an Augustinian priest and longtime professor at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia. Leo graduated from Villanova in 1977. Fitzgerald lived in Rome for 12 years and for eight of those years Leo was not only the head of the Augustinian order, he was Fitzgerald’s neighbor.
Fitzgerald said Augustinians are “unifiers” who seek to “pull together big differences into a common project of learning to be respectful and appreciative and to work together.” He said that unlike Jesuits − Francis’ order − who tend to be “very upfront and have the ability to tell people who they are,” Augustinians are typically more reserved and private, but also diverse in how they approach their work.
“There’s a saying: ‘If you’ve met an Augustinian, you’ve met one Augustinian,'” he said.
Fitzgerald added that whereas Jesuits are “groundbreakers,” Augustinians tend to be “more careful at building,” and he viewed Leo in those terms partly because he believes that without a Francis papacy, which regularly addressed the way human dignity was being transgressed by some of the leadership of the world, there would not be a Leo one. He said that if political leaders or others say, “‘You can’t talk about politics.’ Well, that’s nonsense. Politics is part of life. You need to be discreet. You need to be careful about how you talk about issues. But faith is part of all of that.”
He also said Leo is not prone to delaying tactics.
Fitzgerald noted that in late May last year, just weeks after Leo became the new pope, he sent him an email about how he thought it would be useful for him to think about writing an apostolic letter − a formal doctrinal letter issued by the pope − on how St. Augustine was a peacemaker.
It was a Sunday.
Leo wrote back within 12 minutes.
“He tends to go right at it,” Fitzgerald said.
The Vatican plays the long game
Rocca, the Vatican editor at EWTN News, said that in the run-up to the conclave that chose Leo, his Vatican sources kept saying to him, “‘Prevost, Prevost, Prevost.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but he’s an American, right?’ And then they’d say, ‘Yeah, well, but we don’t really think of him as an American.’ Even cardinals were saying he’s not the sort of American they tend to think of in the Vatican. He was a Peruvian bishop. He wasn’t a U.S. bishop.”
Rocca said that if anyone in the conclave was thinking of Leo as a papal candidate who would be useful to have during a second Trump presidency, it was just as likely they were thinking of him as the kind of American who would be good at raising money and managing the church.
However, he doesn’t think that skill set would necessarily have worked in Leo’s favor. He said that “around here” − the Vatican − people tend to think much longer term.
“They think in centuries,” he said. “And probably believe Trump is going to be gone in a flash.”
