Do the President and Pope Hate Each Other?

Do the President and Pope Hate Each Other?

This One Chart Explains Much About Donald Trump, Pope Leo XIV and the Church

Do the Pope and President Trump hate each other? No, but all relationships are complicated. One key chart helps explain. Illustration by the author using Gemini.

Do Pope Leo XIV and Donald Trump don’t hate each other? No, but think about disagreements within your own family.

Newsweek reports that “Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Rises With Catholics After Bashing Pope Leo.” How? One chart (below) explains but it’s also worth noting that Trump has united Catholic voters more than any other president since John F. Kennedy.

How can U.S. Catholics love their pope and their president? By recognizing that the president, who turns 80 in June, and the pope, 70, have very different roles, and outlooks.

“There is a way past the absurd and deeply divisive ‘war’ between the President and the Pope, which has been enthusiastically ginned up by the press,” Bishop Robert Barron, wrote last week. “If we understand that the Pope and the President have qualitatively different roles to play in the determination of moral action in regard to war, we can, I hope, extricate ourselves from the completely unhelpful narrative of “Pope vs. President.”

Barron’s perspective is unique since he’s worked with both men who both talk a lot about “peace” but in vastly different ways.

“The role of the Church,” Barron said, “is to call for peace and to urge that any conflict be strictly circumscribed by the moral constraints of the just war criteria. But it is not the role of the Church to evaluate whether a particular war is just or unjust. That appraisal belongs to the civil authorities, who, one presumes, have requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground.”

Disagreements between “social justice” progressive Catholics and Catholic traditionalists remain real. Both can find a home within the bigger universal Church.

“The Pope has said, on numerous occasions, that he is not a politician and that his role is not the determination of any nation’s foreign policy. But he has just as clearly said that he will continue to speak for peace and for moral constraint,” Barron writes.

When he was named last May, Pope Leo’s first words were “Peace be with you all” and he’s returned to “peace” repeatedly just as Trump calls himself the “peace president” while invading both Venezuela and Iran in recent months.

Think of a mother and father sharing very different perspectives and approaches but common goals. Then remember the Church is the Bride of Christ while Trump beamed when the NATO leader called him “Daddy.”

“So, is the war in question truly the last resort? Is there really a balance between the good to be attained and the destruction caused by the war?” Barron asked. “The posing of those questions — indeed the insistence upon their moral relevance — belongs rightly to the Church, but the answering of them belongs to the civil authorities.”

Both the pope and the president’s administration appeared to quickly move on beyond the tensions.

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“The pope’s gonna do his thing, that’s fine,” War Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday. “We know what our mission is, we know what authority we have. We’re very clear about that, we follow that — the orders of the president.”

Most media, lacking a biblical worldview, views confrontations from a political perspective but religion means “binding relationship” and the first American pope and the American president are part of the same generation (Baby Boomers) but run vastly different cultures.

Trump is constantly fighting and trying to change the political culture. But the Church is also changing with every generation. Look at this one chart to see how generational outlook alters perspectives.

The One Chart That Speaks Volumes About Political Perspectives Within the Universal Church

Catholics have spent a half century moving back toward tradition after the 1960s progressive push brought on by Vatican II.

Recent research shows 68% of the priests ordained in the mid-1960s (right after Vatican II) described their theology as progressive while just 16% said said thet were conservative.

Those numbers are diametrically different from the overwhelming conservative approach of every succeeding class.

Pope Leo is 70, ordained a priest in 1982. He is slightly older than the average U.S. bishop and slightly younger than the average Catholic cardinal.

Among priests ordained in 1980–84, a plurality, 44% percent describe themselves as theologically progressive while 34% consider themselves middle of the road and just 22% consider themselves conservative.

The chart below shows today’s bishops and cardinals are less progressive than the generation of priests ordained immediately after Vatican II in 1965–69 when 68% were progressive and just 16% conservative.

For every subsequent generation of Catholics, those proportions change drastically in one direction:

• Priests ordained 30 years ago (1995–1999): 18% called themelves progressive, 35% called themselves middle of the road, and a plurarity of 47% called themselves conservative.
• Priests ordained 20 years ago (2005–2009): 13% called themselves progressive, 31% said they were middle of the road, and 56% called themselves conservative.
• Priests ordained within the last 10 years (2015–2019): 8% called themselves progressive, 24% called themselves middle of the road, and 68% called themselves conservatives.
• Priests ordained since the 2020 pandemic: just 2% called themselves progressive, 14% said middle of the road, and an overwhelming 84% called themselves conservative.

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