Pope Leo is taking on Trump’s God complex – I’m riveted

I’ve never been religious.

It’s an interesting thing to acknowledge to myself as I write from Belfast, a city that still carries the scars of religious division.

Peace walls stand taller than the Berlin Wall ever did, some gates still close at dusk, and kerbstones can be found painted red, white and blue.

And it’s not just here.

Religion has plenty of blood on its hands.

It has started wars, burned witches, and shielded abusers.

I find the rituals strange, the hierarchies stranger, and the idea that any one man on Earth could have a hotline to the Almighty a stretch at the best of times.

And yet – even with all of that taken into account – I find myself here, on a rainy Monday, praising the Pope.

Donald Trump has a remarkable gift for doing this to people.

He can turn committed republicans into royalists, BBC sceptics into staunch defenders, and lifelong atheists into reluctant supporters, if not quite believers.

He is a one-man recruitment drive for whatever he’s currently attacking.

And this weekend, he turned his focus to Pope Leo XIV.

In a 334-word meltdown on Truth Social, the US president called the first American pope ‘WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy’, complained that Leo ‘talks about fear of the Trump Administration’, and added, bafflingly, that he preferred the Pope’s brother Louis, because Louis is ‘all MAGA’.

Then, just in case we didn’t get it, he followed the tirade up with an AI-generated image of himself (which he has since deleted) as a Jesus-like figure, laying presumably healing hands on a man’s forehead while eagles and an American flag adorned the sky behind him.

The trigger for this meltdown, in case you missed it, was Leo standing up in St Peter’s Basilica and denouncing wars fuelled by the ‘delusion of omnipotence’.

He didn’t directly namecheck Trump’s attacks on Iran when he did so, but he also didn’t need to.

He called threats to destroy ‘an entire civilization’ (Trump’s actual words about a country of 93 million people) ‘truly unacceptable’.

He told worshippers that Jesus ‘does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them’.

That, apparently, was enough to get the Vicar of Christ filed under ‘traitor’, and for the flying monkeys to be summoned.

Fox News host Sean Hannity, one of Trump’s most reliable cheerleaders, promptly wondered on air whether the Pope had ‘even read the Bible’.

I know that doesn’t feel like the bar we should be setting, but it’s where we are.

The Pope has a luxury that politicians don’t have.

He can tell the most powerful man on Earth to put his weapons down without caring about ‘losing a phone call’.

A lot of people in the UK wouldn’t know a cardinal from a curate and haven’t been inside a church since someone got married in one, and yet they will understand that this is not a theological or religious argument.

It’s a litigation of basic decency – and the role of being the voice of reason has been outsourced to a man who gets driven around in the back of a white Mercedes G wagon.

So suddenly, bizarrely, I find myself pro-Pope – and the polling suggests I’m not alone.

A recent NBC News poll found Leo with a net favourability of plus 34 with American voters, comfortably ahead of Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

Among American Catholics – 55% of whom backed Trump in 2024 – things are shifting even quicker.

New Fox News polling has Trump’s approval among Catholic voters now underwater.

Even the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops broke cover this weekend to say he was ‘disheartened’ by the Truth Social attack, reminding everyone that ‘the Pope is not his rival’ – Trump, enthusiastic and dedicated creator of one-sided rivalries, clearly didn’t get this memo.

All this to say that a chunk of the Catholic MAGA constituency is being asked, politely but insistently, to pick a side.

Christ or Trump.

The guy in the white robes or the guy in the red hat.

What’s funny, in a grim sort of way, is that Trump reportedly assumed an American pope would be his biggest fan.

A Chicago-born pontiff would look at the White House, see a fellow countryman, and fall into line.

Instead, Leo has done the one thing Trump genuinely cannot cope with: refuse to be impressed.

At first glance, this might seem like nothing of great importance – it’s just yet another fracas synthetised by Donald Trump for his own amusement.

Something to grimace over then file away with the countless other memories of the absurd times we’re living in.

And it is that.

But it’s also proof that the social construct by which we agree not to threaten to annihilate civilian populations is being enforced, right now, by a small number of people willing to talk back.

One of them just happens to be the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church.

And this matters because every time Trump picks a new fight – with a pope, a prime minister, a judge, a weather forecaster – he hands another person a reason to root for the other side.

Or 53 million people, if we’re talking American Catholic adults (voters, as they’re sometimes known).

I still don’t believe in the Pope as a figurehead with authority derived from Christ.

I never will.

But as an adversary for Trump and his dictatorial impulses, he’s a contender I can get behind.

It just might be a showdown for the ages.