VATICAN CITY — Mild-mannered and measured no longer: United States President Donald Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s centuries-old civilization was the red line that prompted Pope Leo XIV to show his colors, analysts say.
The first US-born pope, elected on May 8, 2025, had been largely leaving criticism of the Trump administration — from its warmongering to its crackdown on immigrants — to US bishops.
“From the very start, he absolutely did not want to appear as the international anti-Trump personality,” Vatican expert Marco Politi told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Pontiffs traditionally do not interfere in politics.
Leo was also wary of worsening a rift between conservative and reform-minded Catholics that dogged his predecessor Francis.
But the spat may actually help reunite the divided factions, as the Catholic Church rallies to defend Chicago-born Leo from Trump’s attacks.
Though Leo has pushed for peace from day one, the row has given the head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics “a greater platform,” US Vatican expert Elise Ann Allen told AFP.
“This has been Leo all along, but the world is finally waking up to who he is,” she said.
Politi said the turning point was Trump’s apocalyptic threats of destruction in Iran, after US-Israeli strikes launched a conflagration in the Middle East that has shaken the global economy.
Trump’s threats sparked speculation that nuclear weapons could be deployed.
“The risk of dropping an atomic bomb — Prevost had to step up, and from that moment on he has been increasingly tough,” Politi said, referring to the pope by his birth surname.
Leo declared Trump’s threat “unacceptable” and urged Americans to demand their congressional representatives to “work for peace,” prompting a scathing criticism from the US president, who slammed the pontiff as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
‘Found his voice’
It was “a medieval attack; never in modern times have we seen a head of state attack the Rome papacy so directly,” Politi said.
The clash has “given Leo a chance to show his colors in a way that he has not before,” Allen said.
A defiant Leo said he had “no fear” of the Trump administration.
Disoriented Catholics, shocked by Trump — including his posting of an artificial intelligence-generated social media image of himself as Jesus — have rallied around the pope, the analysts said.
After US Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, urged the Vatican to “stick to matters of morality,” Leo on Thursday said the world was “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants,” and renewed criticism of those who use religion to justify war.
Before this, Leo was seen as “a very sensitive, highly cultured pope, but he wasn’t considered as charismatic as Francis or John Paul II,” Politi said.
Now he has “become a point of reference for global public opinion ... for the majority of nations,” which “don’t want a policy of brutality like the one pursued by Trump,” he said.
Allen thinks that support for Leo, the voice of morality in a world struggling, with a “crisis of conscience,” will only grow.
“He’s found his footing in the papacy and he has found his voice,” she said. “And I don’t think he’s going to back down.”
