Trump's tirade against Pope Leo XIV
For the first time in history, a US president has verbally attacked the pope. In a lengthy social media post Donald Trump said the pontiff was "terrible for foreign policy" and was damaging the Catholic Church. Leo XIV has repeatedly criticised Trump's policies, albeit indirectly, from migration policy to the war in Iran. In response to Trump's tirade, the pope said he was proclaiming the message of the Gospel.
Demigod versus Pontiff
For La Stampa, Trump has yet again overshot the mark:
“He failed to consider that the Vatican is not a room full of cheering fans. Before him stands an institution that has existed for millennia in a space where power is subject to scrutiny. In the words of Pope Leo, the Church's position is not the product of a 'debate', but the expression of an ethical and moral judgement on reality. And yet we should remember that the flamboyant president now believes himself to be the lord of earth and heaven, so accustomed is he to being treated like a demigod by the fanatical evangelical preachers with whom he regularly surrounds himself.”
Obvious cognitive deficit
Avvenire is outraged:
“The vulgar attack by the American president is not just an unrestrained political act: above all, it reveals a cognitive deficit. An inability to understand the Pope's words when he reminds us that 'the future belongs to men and women of peace' or repeats that 'violence will never have the last word.' Leo is not proposing strategies, he does not go into details of foreign policy. ... Over the past ten days from Easter until yesterday, Pope Leo has done nothing but repeat that too many people are dying. Too many children, too many innocents. Which is why we must 'end the war'. This is not an alternative political programme. It is not a countervailing force, it is a moral and spiritual discourse; it is purely about humanity.”
Head of the Church is misrepresenting the facts
The Pope should stop criticising the Iran war, The Times protests:
“Presenting this as a war of unjustified aggression is nothing less than moral inversion. The Pope has chosen to ignore totally the deliberate and mass shedding of innocent blood by the Iranian regime, which earlier this year murdered around 40,000 innocent protesters and has spent the past 47 years waging war on America and the West through murderous terrorist atrocities. According to both the US and Israel, it was also within a few months or perhaps weeks of getting the nuclear bomb. It is one of the world's most evil regimes and a direct and acute threat to the innocent.”