This past Sunday night, President Trump called Pope Leo XIV "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy," told him to "stop catering to the Radical Left," and suggested that the Pope owes his position to Trump himself: "If I wasn't in the White House, Leo wouldn't be in the Vatican." He then posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus Christ, hands glowing as he healed a man in a hospital bed. He later deleted the image, claiming he thought it showed him as a doctor.
What had the Pope done to provoke this? He prayed for peace. During a vigil at St. Peter's Basilica, Leo spoke of a "delusion of omnipotence" fueling war and called on the faithful to reject "the idolatry of self and money" and "the display of power." He named no names. He preached the Gospel.
Catholics are not required to agree with the Pope on every policy judgment. The Church herself teaches that prudential matters — how best to secure peace, how to structure immigration law, how to weigh the costs of military action — admit of legitimate disagreement. But there is a vast difference between thoughtful disagreement and contemptuous dismissal. When the President tells the Vicar of Christ to "get his act together," we are no longer in the territory of policy debate. We are watching political power attempt to subordinate the Church to its authority.
What makes this moment especially instructive for us as Catholics is the silence — and worse, the complicity — of prominent Catholic public officials. Vice President JD Vance, who has written a forthcoming book about his conversion to Catholicism and frequently speaks of the faith that changed his life, was asked directly about the President's attacks on the Pope. His response? The Pope should "stick to matters of morality" and "let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy." He called the AI image of Trump as Jesus "a joke." Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also Catholic, has said nothing at all.
Consider what Vance is actually saying: that when the Pope speaks about war, peace, human dignity, and the destruction of civilizations — which are precisely matters of morality — he is overstepping. That the Gospel's call to be peacemakers is a political opinion, but the President's war is not. This is the inversion the Church has always warned us about. It is not faith shaping politics. It is politics editing faith.
We should be honest with ourselves. The temptation is not unique to one party. Any of us can fall into treating our political commitments as the lens through which we judge the Church, rather than allowing the Church to be the lens through which we judge our politics. But this week offers an unusually clear test: When a political leader publicly mocks the Holy Father, posts an image of himself as Christ, and Catholic officials in his administration defend him rather than defend the faith they profess — something has gone badly wrong.
The question for each of us is simple. If our first instinct when the Pope speaks is to ask whether he is helping or hurting our preferred politician, then our compass has already been recalibrated. Faith that cannot say "no" to our own side is no longer functioning as faith. It is functioning as a jersey.
Archbishop Coakley, president of the U.S. bishops' conference, said it plainly: "Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls."
We do not have to agree with every word. But we are obligated to listen with the seriousness that the Gospel demands — and to notice when we have stopped listening because someone else told us not to. Fr. Matthew Hawkins Pastor, St. Benedict the Moor