“I have no fear of the Trump administration,” the leader of the Catholic Church said this week, as he became a global rallying point for critics of the US president.
In the past few days, Pope Leo XIV, a low-profile cardinal just a year ago, has traded barbs with Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world. The dispute is more reminiscent of the rivalry between medieval popes and emperors than of the Vatican-White House co-operation that helped win the cold war.
“We are not politicians — we don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective as he might understand it,” the 70-year-old from Chicago said of the 79-year-old from Queens, hours after Trump called on him to “stop catering to the Radical Left and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician”.