The Pope’s First Anniversary Is Marked by More Sparring from the White House
On June 2, 1979, Pope John Paul II set out from Rome on an apostolic journey, as papal trips away from the Vatican are called. In the eight months since his election, the former Karol Wojtyła had become a figure of fascination: he was the first Polish Pope, and the first non-Italian Pope in more than four hundred years; a youthful man (he was fifty-nine) who skied in the Alps; a charismatic speaker, whose journey to Mexico earlier in the year had drawn several millions of people. He was both a moral authority and a global celebrity. Even so, the trip that June took things to another level. It was to Poland, then still a satellite of the Soviet Union. There, the new Pope stepped into history. His public events drew six million people, in a country of thirty-five million. He didn’t denounce the Soviet regime directly but proposed a social order in which the state “wishes to express the full sovereignty of the nation,” and declared that “Christ will never approve” of a view of a human being “merely as a means of production.” Though oblique, John Paul’s message was a clear rebuke of state Communism. The Pope, the Times observed, had “made himself a totally novel and incalculable element in future East-West relations.”
Pope Leo XIV’s first year as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church has, to the surprise of many, gone something like that. Since his election, on May 8, 2025, the former Robert Prevost has become a figure of fascination: the first American Pope, Chicago-born, and a citizen of Peru besides; an Augustinian friar whose efforts as a missionary and as the head of the order were little known even to experts; a still relatively young Pope, at the age of seventy, who is at ease with e-mail and Duolingo and WhatsApp, and likes to play tennis at a Vatican palace in Castel Gandolfo, in the hills southeast of Rome. He looks comfortable in both papal white and a White Sox cap. As he settled into the office, he was recognized as both a moral authority and a celebrity.
Then, this February, President Donald Trump launched his war of choice against Iran, and Pope Leo, in public remarks on that action, stepped into history. His involvement is such that, on Thursday, the Vatican granted an audience to Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State. Announcing the audience, a State Department press release noted laconically that “Secretary Rubio will meet with Holy See leadership to discuss the situation in the Middle East and mutual interests in the Western Hemisphere.” Advance reports suggested that it would involve a discussion of Cuba, an ancestral country for the Secretary (his parents) and for the Pope (on his mother’s side), and one which, Trump said last Friday, “We will be taking over almost immediately.” The audience was likely an effort to shore up the Republican Party’s stature with Catholics prior to the midterm elections, and perhaps one to stoke rivalry between Rubio and Vice-President J. D. Vance, both of whom are Catholics and prospective Presidential candidates. One could have hoped that it would reveal whether the Trump Administration would really double down on the war in Iran or is willing to step back. Afterward, however, an anodyne State Department readout indicated only that the audience “underscored the strong relationship between the United States and the Holy See and their shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity.” Like Trump’s meeting with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, at St. Peter’s Basilica, just before the funeral Mass for Pope Francis last April 26th, the audience appears to have been an attempt on the Administration’s part to upstage a Pope—this time, by drawing headlines on the first anniversary of Leo’s election.
The Pope has responded to the war in Iran in stages, since answering a reporter’s question on March 31st, by saying about the President, “Hopefully, he’s looking for an off-ramp.” An eleven-day trip to Africa in April seemed destined to be a low-key affair (the Italian daily La Repubblica declined to send its Vatican correspondent), but a day before it started Trump posted a diatribe against Leo on Truth Social, calling him “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” An in-flight press briefing offered the Pope a chance to reply. He took it, saying, “I have no fear, of either the Trump Administration, nor speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel.” His remarks brought to mind those of Pope Francis, who, during a flight from Rio to Rome, in 2013, answered a question about a supposed “gay lobby” at the Vatican by asking, “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” They also recalled the exhortation with which John Paul II began his pontificate, in 1978: “Be not afraid!”
In the media, the battle was joined: the President versus the Pope, and the White House has fed the narrative. Trump has continued to denounce the Pope; on Monday, three days before Rubio’s scheduled audience, the President told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, “I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people,” adding, “He thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Vance, for his part, challenged Leo’s right to speak on political matters and implied that he didn’t grasp the Catholic principles of what constitutes a just war. Leo, meanwhile, said in Africa, “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” while noting that “the world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants.” Toward the end of the trip, Leo told reporters that he had no interest in “trying to debate” the President, saying that his comments had been drafted weeks earlier. But, like John Paul’s words in Poland in 1979, Leo’s words in 2026 have addressed a global conflict squarely if obliquely.
Leo’s willingness to confront Trump is striking in several respects. For one thing, the American Pope’s words seemed to consolidate the opposition to the war on the part of European countries that Trump had spooked, in January, with his claim that the U.S. was going to “take” Greenland from Denmark. Spain opposed the war in Iran from the beginning; Great Britain, Germany, and Italy offered limited support—the last by refusing to allow U.S. warplanes to stop at an airbase in Sicily (saying that the request had come too late). Now a coalition of the unwilling has firmed up. And the Pope, who might have made the Vatican a locus of U.S. interests, is instead making the Church a counterweight to U.S. wealth and power.
In any event, denunciations of war have been a constant in Leo’s ministry (and in that of recent Popes). A photo from 1983 shows Prevost in a group of other young priests in Rome, one of whom is holding a sign that reads “AGOSTINIANI PER LA PACE.” The occasion was a protest against the Reagan Administration’s plan, as part of an arms buildup in Europe, to station cruise missiles in Sicily. At age twenty-eight, then, the future American Pope was a public critic of U.S. military might. On Tuesday evening, speaking to reporters as he left Castel Gandolfo to return to the Vatican, he dismissed Trump’s claim that he supports Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon on simple historical grounds. “If someone wants to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, let them do so truthfully,” he said. “For years, the Church has spoken against all nuclear weapons, so there is no doubt there.”
Recent opinion polls suggest that Trump’s vitriol toward Leo—and his weird posting of an image of himself as a Jesus-like healer—have displeased Catholics of all political dispositions, including MAGA ones. Leo, by contrast, has been making efforts to engage with conservative and traditionalist Catholics for much of his first year as Pope. Last Saturday, in Rome, for example, he had an audience with members of the Papal Foundation, a U.S.-based group of wealthy benefactors who support Vatican initiatives in developing countries. When the group met in Rome last spring, just prior to the conclave, Christopher Lamb of CNN notes in a new book about Leo, one donor said that “this room could raise a billion to help the Church, so long as we have the right Pope.” The chair of the foundation’s board is Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop emeritus of New York, who has made much of his friendship with President Trump, and its lay membership includes many tradition-minded Catholics of the type that Trump and the G.O.P. have assiduously courted—and yet they showed up to support the Pontiff. (The foundation approved fifteen-million dollars in grants for 2026, a record for the group.) In brief remarks, Leo stayed on message: “Christ desires that his disciples be instruments of peace,” he said. MAGA pundits have been trying to drive a wedge between Leo and conservative Catholics, and the encounter suggested that they have not succeeded—and that Trump’s media barrage against the Pope has turned out to be a spectacular act of self-sabotage.
Leo is beginning his second year as Pope with a Mass in Pompeii and a prayer service in Naples; he’ll travel to Spain in June and likely to France in September. His relative youth and apparent good health mean that many in Rome expect a long pontificate. What, then, can be expected of him in the coming years? This first American Pope is also the first whose advanced education (at the Catholic Theological Union, in Chicago) was pursued under female professors, as well as male professors (so it seems fair to assume that he is at ease promoting and collaborating with women at the Vatican); the first modern Pope to have done sustained work with migrants and refugees (which surely will bolster the Church’s already robust support for them); the first Pope to have visited China, when he led the Augustinians (and so has a directly informed perspective on relations with that nation); and the first to be adept in digital culture and social media (which could influence the Church’s approach to artificial intelligence). But, in the near term, maintaining a firm stand against war and against those who wage it may be achievement enough. ♦