Why the pope’s authority is confounding and maddening for Trump

(RNS) — The conflict between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV — whom many consider the two most powerful Americans — has been covered nearly incessantly in recent weeks. While this is more like a collision between two radically different forms of authority, U.S. presidents have had other clashes with popes over political and moral issues throughout history.

This nation was founded as a Protestant-majority country, and the great waves of European immigrants in the 19th century, many of them Catholic, led to both anti-Catholic and nativist sentiments. The very long papacy of Pius IX (1846-1878) did not do much to quell American fears that the Catholic Church was incompatible with democracy. In his 1864 “Syllabus of Errors,” the pope stated that freedom of religion was among these “errors” — one that would seem to be in direct conflict with the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, the U.S. was not released from its status as mission territory by Rome until 1908, a very late recognition by the Vatican of American sovereign legitimacy. And in 1870, the U.S. severed a short-lived period of diplomatic relations with the papal states amid long-standing anti-Catholic suspicion and anxiety about papal temporal power. 

By the early 20th century, tensions were still high. In 1910, President Theodore Roosevelt politely canceled a planned 1910 visit with Pope Pius X after Vatican officials requested that he not meet with American Methodist missionaries in Rome who were distributing anti-Catholic pamphlets there.

President Woodrow Wilson, a staunch Presbyterian who was often accused of anti-Catholicism, was the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a pope. In 1919, he visited Pope Benedict XV at the Vatican to discuss post-World War I peace agreements after the pope had been excluded from formal peace talks at Versailles. According to accounts of the meeting, there was an awkward moment when, because he was uncomfortable with receiving a papal blessing, Wilson remained standing while the Catholic members of his presidential entourage kneeled. It would be the last meeting between a pope and a president for decades.

In the early 2000s, Pope John Paul II strongly opposed the Iraq War because he believed it was preemptive. He argued that war as a tool for solving global conflicts must be rejected in the modern world — except in clear cases of self-defense — and sent an apostolic nuncio, Cardinal Pio Laghi, to meet with President George W. Bush to try to persuade him that the war would have disastrous consequences. Bush did not take the pope’s advice.

Most past disagreements between popes and presidents have happened during times when anti-Catholicism and suspicions regarding the Catholic Church and the pope were much higher than they are today. But in each case, there is a difference from what we are seeing now. While these examples involved deep disputes about war and peace, there always remained a recognition that the papacy’s authority occupied a distinct sphere from that of American geopolitical power. Each side could meet politely and through normal diplomatic channels, present their arguments and, sometimes awkwardly, accept blessings and exchange greetings of goodwill. 

Trump seems unable to understand the idea that there are separate lanes for his authority and that of the pope. For him, power means the ability to command, punish, reward, dominate, compel loyalty and bend institutions, from universities to law firms to sovereign countries like Denmark, to his own will. Within that framework, all opposition must be defeated, neutralized or humiliated.

This is what he attempted to do with his Truth Social post on April 12, when he called the pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible on foreign policy” and then claimed responsibility for the pope’s election, writing “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” In Catholic teaching, the selection of the pope at the conclave is the work not of men, but of the Holy Spirit, meaning Trump’s claim to have been responsible for it went beyond his everyday hubris.

Popes and American presidents, even when they disagree, are not rivals in the usual sense because they are speaking different languages. When a pope criticizes war, defends migrants or laborers and insists on the dignity of the poor, he is not acting as a politician.

For a leader like Trump who only understands transactional power, the pope’s authority must be both confounding and maddening. Trump has very little, if any, leverage over the pope, which is why every attempt he has made to silence, dominate or humiliate him has succeeded only in making Trump look foolish and inept. 

The papacy has always operated in a different register than a presidency. A modern pope commands no army. He controls no political party, no stock exchange and no federal bureaucracy. Instead, his authority rests on historical continuity, potent ritual and symbolism, and most importantly in our time, his moral witness.

The Catholic Church has often failed to live up to its own moral and ethical standards, and papal moral credibility is not a given. But the office still represents a source of judgment not reducible to the types of power that Trump understands. The present clash, then, is not primarily about personalities or politics. It is about whether there remains any authority on earth capable of standing outside the machinery of modern power and calmly saying no. 

Trump can defeat opponents in elections. He can pressure legislators, dominate news cycles and punish dissenters. But the pope represents something harder to conquer: the claim that power itself must answer to something higher. It’s why this conflict matters to so many people around the world who otherwise have no connection to the Catholic Church, and why Trump is not going to be able to defeat this pope.

(Karen E. Park, a former professor of theology and religious studies at St. Norbert College, is co-editor of “American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of US Catholicism.” She writes on Substack at Ex Voto. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)