COMMENTARY Pope Leo XIV has every right to criticize President Trump's Iran war and immigration policies. But that doesn't mean, as so many are asserting, that no one has the right to criticize the Pope.
The verbal attacks that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance are firing at Pope Leo XIV this week — not to mention Trump’s meme of himself as Jesus (or Dumbledore or a Warhammer 40,000 blood angel, who knows) — are unequivocally boorish.
Trump — who last year pardoned 1,500 felons who violently tried to overthrow the Constitution on Jan. 6, 2021 — called Leo “weak on crime” because the Roman Catholic Pontiff is criticizing the U.S. President for his reckless Iran war and his xenophobic immigration policies.
Vance, a recent Catholic convert, warned Leo to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology” related to the conduct of war and the treatment of immigrants — just as, you know, I routinely remind my heart doctor he knows squat about cardiology.
Their retaliation turned from boorish to brutish when the Trump administration canceled an $11 million contract with the nonprofit Catholic Charities in Miami to aid unaccompanied migrant children.
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Yep, there’s no smarter way to recapture the moral high ground in a dispute with the Holy Father than to yank lunch money from 6-year-old refugees.
I hear Trump’s next move is to have the Justice Department prosecute nuns for convent mortgage fraud — right after he removes Bing Crosby's name from the Smithsonian Institution.
So yes, backing Leo against the White House has been as easy as spreading mustard (no ketchup!) on a hotdog in his native Chicago.
Trump and Vance could have done the diplomatic thing and respectfully disagreed with the Bishop of Rome. They instead did the MAGA thing — only to hear even their MAGA base, including right-wing Catholics, rebuke them for dissing the Vicar of Christ.
As a Catholic, I agree Trump deserves the backlash.
And yet, as a Catholic — especially a Catholic in America and the Americas — I find a part of that blowback as troubling as the Trump bullying that brought it on.
As a Catholic, I find it troubling when defense of the Pope morphs into deification of the Pope — as troubling as Trump's Pope-bullying itself.
That’s the part where defense of the Pope has morphed into deification of the Pope.
Don’t get me wrong: I consider the Pope, like the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders, an especially important moral counterforce to political leaders. We need them pricking the consciences of the Trumps.
Blasphemous insult
But in commentary after commentary this week, I’m reading and hearing a more questionable assertion: that criticizing the Pope is out of bounds, that challenging his conscience is a blasphemous insult to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.
It’s not.
Particularly not when it comes to the first American pope — Leo XIV — who hails from a New World ethos that’s supposed to reject the Old World notion of royal infallibility, secular or spiritual.
I derive a great deal of hope from my Catholic faith. But, especially after the horrific clerical sexual abuse scandals, I’ve learned to compartmentalize the faith from the church — and the myth that the latter is a divinely errorless institution.
The church does remarkable good in the world, too, especially Catholic Charities. I've taken part in ministries like St. Vincent de Paul that help the poor.
Still, if it was certainly arrogant of Vance to question the Pope’s theological acumen, it’s just as high-handed when the Catholic hierarchy scolds the Catholic laity for exercising our own theological muscles.
That was true 500 years ago when Catholics like Copernicus claimed it was theologically acceptable, not heretical, to say the earth circles the sun — and today, when pro-choice Catholics break with Rome on abortion.
Just last month, a Pew Research Center survey found 57% of U.S. Catholics support legal abortion rights.
In other words, most American Catholics disagree, theologically, with the Pope.
And that disagreement can rise to criticism of the Pope — of the Vatican’s refusal to ditch retro doctrine that demonizes homosexuals, for example, or shuts women out of the priesthood.
That’s why I find the hands-off-our-Pope bandwagon of the moment embarrassingly hypocritical among liberals.
They seem to be all for kissing the papal ring when more progressive popes like Leo or his predecessor, Francis, point it at Republicans like Trump — but recoil from it when right-wing pontiffs like Benedict XVI reproach Democrats like former President Joe Biden.
No pope himself is above reproach.
So I’m just going to say it, Your Holiness: I put ketchup on my hot dogs.
