The death of Pope Francis silences arguably the most powerful moral voice on the world stage critical of Donald Trump, with the pontiff taking the lead against the US president’s mass deportations of migrants.
When Trump first ran for president in 2016, Francis was unsparing on Trump’s signature promise to build a wall to seal off Mexico, telling reporters, “Anyone, whoever he is, who only wants to build walls and not bridges is not a Christian.”
Trump fired back that the pope was “disgraceful.” After Trump’s stunning election win, most world leaders either embraced or found ways to accommodate him, but the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics refused to hold back.
In a letter to US bishops in February, Francis called Trump’s deportation plans a “calamity” and pleaded for “the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized.”
Top Trump aide Tom Homan responded that the pope should “stick to the Catholic Church and fix that” rather than deal with the border.
“You cannot imagine two more different world leaders than Trump and Francis, in literally every way — ego versus humility, a focus on the poor versus a focus on power, walls not bridges,” said John Carr, founder of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University.
“And it shows in the tepid response of the White House to his death.”
Trump ordered flags at half-staff and, at an Easter egg hunt for children Monday, called Francis “a good man” who “worked hard and loved the world.”
Vice President JD Vance, who had met the ailing pontiff hours before his death at the Vatican on Easter, said his “heart goes out” to Christians.
The reactions were notably less expansive than those of many other world leaders, who paid tribute to the late pope over his values.
But they also showed that flagrant disrespect to the pope would be a step too far even for Trump, who rarely holds back at belittling world leaders who cross him.
– Different Catholic visions –
Catholics form the largest single religious denomination in the United States and Trump won them by up to 20 points in 2024, according to different surveys, a shift in support that helped him carry the election.
But Catholics, earlier a major base for the rival Democratic Party, retain plenty of ideological diversity within their ranks.
Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden is a fervent Catholic who forged a close bond with the pope. He mourned Francis as among “the most consequential leaders of our time.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also devoutly Catholic but previously criticized Francis, the first Latin American pope, for mediating to normalize US relations with communist Cuba.
Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, drawn by traditional views on societal virtue and gender-specific family roles.
Vance would write that reading St. Augustine’s fifth-century AD descriptions of a society based on pleasure over duty were “the best criticism of our modern age I’ve ever read.”
After becoming vice president, Vance justified the cancellation of nearly all US foreign assistance by quoting 12th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas’s concept of “ordo amoris,” or “order of love,” saying it was Christian to put family first.
Francis, in a letter soon afterward to US bishops, said that “true ordo amoris” involved building “a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Carr said it was “extraordinary” for the pope himself to “correct a politician that specifically.”
“Beyond religious freedom and basic freedoms and democracy, probably the thing Pope Francis most admired about our country is our generosity toward poor people and suffering people around the world, and that literally has been sabotaged,” Carr said.
– De-emphasizing culture war –
Francis had sharp differences with Democrats including Biden, notably over their support for legal abortion.
But Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, said Francis also “softened the Church’s stance on the so-called culture-war issues” such as LGBTQ rights — the polar opposite of Trump’s galvanizing approach.
Carr said that the pope’s criticism ultimately had little impact on Trump, who prioritizes transactional deal-making.
“There’s the famous line — how many troops does the pope have? Trump’s version of that would be — how many votes does the pope have?”