Reagan led the most powerful country in the world, while the pope represented a religious institution that at the time had almost a billion members. In 1984 Reagan welcomed John Paul to the U.S. "Your pastorate," he noted, "represents one of humanity's greatest moral and spiritual forces."
The two men pledged to work together. The collapse of communism in Europe cemented the Vatican as a U.S. geopolitical partner.
Decades later, an American sits on the papal throne for the first time in history. Catholics occupy some of the most powerful positions in the U.S. government: the vice president, the secretary of state and six of nine Supreme Court justices. Their success is testament to the relentless efforts of Catholic leaders in the U.S. and Rome since World War II to work together to develop a clear set of shared goals: defending democracy, championing human rights and seeking world peace.
No more.
Trump administration policies have inspired Leo to question recent U.S. actions and to reaffirm what he believes are historic, core Catholic principles. The president in response is lashing out and challenging the holy father's authority over political matters. For every insult that Trump lobs, Pope Leo appears to be issuing veiled statements in response.
Today, the values that American leaders are projecting and acting on, and the values that Vatican authorities are seeking to enshrine in their 1.4 billion followers, are in direct conflict.
Americans, and especially American policymakers, have had a long and complicated relationship with Rome. For the first century and a half of the nation's existence, American political and religious leaders viewed the Vatican with deep suspicion, convinced that papal authority threatened church-state separation and democratic governance. Seven of the original states even banned Catholics from holding political office.
Among the skeptical leaders, Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph and Morse code, warned Americans about a global Catholic cabal conspiring to take over the country's political system. "All true patriots must wake to the cry of danger," he harangued. "It is no false alarm. Our liberties are in danger. The Philistines are upon us."
While the impending civil war threatened to tear the nation apart, Americans enthusiastically consumed bestselling, lurid accounts of sexually promiscuous and abusive priests and nuns. The most popular came from Maria Monk, a nun who wrote about her convent sisters being forced to have sex with priests. Whenever nuns became pregnant, she recalled, their newborns were "always baptized, and immediately strangled." Later exposed as a total fabrication, the revelation did little to hurt sales of her memoir.
To corral and direct growing anti-Catholic fervor, some Protestants organized secret societies and in the 1850s a new political organization, the American Party, also known as "The Know Nothing Party," because its members were so notoriously secretive that when questioned about their activities or rituals, they typically replied, "I know nothing." They advocated for Protestant-based Bible reading in the nation's public schools, stricter immigration and naturalization policies, and a prohibition on Catholics holding political office.
Yet, in the late 19 century, the number of Catholics immigrating to the U.S. surged. Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, the percentage of Americans identifying as Catholics doubled from about 8% of the population to 17%. Catholics overtook Methodists as the largest denomination in the nation.
Of course the suspicion went both ways. Much of the Catholic hierarchy in Rome remained distrustful of American political norms. Pope Leo XIII warned his American congregants in 1895 that the separation of church and state wasn't the biblical ideal. "It would be very erroneous," he instructed, "to draw the conclusion that State and Church" should be "as in America, dissevered and divorced." He aspired to build a global church with influence over political life.
This tension between the Church and the U.S. lasted well into the early part of the 20th century. In the 1920s, the revived Ku Klux Klan made Catholics one of their primary targets.
When Democratic governor of New York, Al Smith, ran for president in 1928, one Baptist warned his nomination was "the boldest attempt that the pope of Rome has ever made to get hold of the United States." Smith responded by pledging himself to American ideals and claimed that they didn't conflict with the tenets of his church.
It didn't matter. Anti-Catholic fervor helped kill his campaign.
World War II, in particular, signaled a strategic shift between the U.S. and Rome. As Roosevelt moved the U.S. toward intervention, he sent an envoy to the Vatican, hoping to craft global, ecumenical religious alliances -- and there was no alliance he coveted more than with the Roman Catholic Church.
Protestants were outraged. But the move, he assured grousing Protestant leaders, had nothing to do with "the functions of church and state." Always the pragmatist, Roosevelt believed that if sending a delegate to Rome could help American foreign policy, he was going to send a delegate to Rome.
When Harry Truman moved into the Oval Office, he also recognized that the pope could be a strategic foreign policy ally. After the war, he sought to unify the world's Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Protestants and Jews together in the struggle against "godless" communism. The president made religious faith, or the lack thereof, a tool of Cold War diplomacy.
In 1947 Truman reached out to Pope Pius XII, pledging to work with the holy father for "an enduring peace," and assured the pope that the U.S. "is a Christian Nation."
From that point forward, presidents of both parties treated the Vatican less as a theological rival than as a foreign-policy partner. Dwight Eisenhower built on the Cold War foundations that Truman had laid, imbuing the Cold War with religious fervor; a stance that almost all subsequent presidents -- among them Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and, of course, Reagan -- would take for decades to come. John F. Kennedy, however, approached the Vatican with a little more caution. Because he was Catholic, he had to self-consciously fend off accusations that he was an agent of Rome and promised to keep the Vatican at a distance. Nevertheless, like his predecessors, he framed the Cold War in moral and religious terms.
Meanwhile, the Catholic church, launching reforms that culminated in Vatican II, officially recognized that political institutions could be independent from church structures. The pope vowed that the church was not in the business of building theocracies. That made it much easier for American Catholics to embrace church-state separation and democratic forms of governance while maintaining loyalty to their church.
The massive social upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s driven by the sexual revolution, debates over legalizing abortion, the gay rights movement and much more inspired yet another shift in the Catholic relationship to the country as some socially conservative Protestants and Catholics found common cause.
The political parties had never really tried to organize religious voters along partisan lines, but by 1980, New Right Republican strategists sensed a growing opportunity. These activists recognized that if they could organize religious voters, they could drive the GOP to the right.
Paul Weyrich, a Catholic and Republican politico, approached evangelical minister Jerry Falwell about creating a new political organization. "Jerry," Weyrich said when they met, "there is in America a moral majority that agrees about the basic issues. But they aren't organized. They don't have a platform. The media ignore them. Somebody's got to get that moral majority together." Falwell agreed. With that, the modern religious right was born.
Post-Cold War presidents mostly walked in lockstep with Catholic leaders at home and in Rome, with a major exception being the Iraq war. John Paul II advised George W. Bush not to take pre-emptive action against Saddam Hussein. Bush stayed the course but reaffirmed his respect for the holy father. The next year Bush presented the pope with the Presidential Medal of Freedom; vowing to work with the pope "for human liberty and human dignity; in order to spread peace and compassion."
Trump has chosen a different path.
In each election since 2016, Trump won a majority of the White Catholic vote; increasing his percentage in 2024 to about 60%. Yet beneath these positive election results; the mood can be tense. Many of the president's actions suggest values that are out of step with those of previous presidents; and as recent popes have demonstrated; they are also out of line with those espoused by Catholic church leaders.
During Trump's first presidential campaign and first term; Pope Francis noted that the gospel called on Christians to build bridges; not (border) walls. Trump issued a statement that Francis was going to wish Trump was president if ISIS attacked Vatican City.
But the real escalation of the conflict has come in recent months. Pope Leo XIV; the first American pontiff; has proven to be very politically savvy. He seems to have ensured that when he speaks; American bishops generally fall in line behind him. He has called on bishops to defend rights and dignity of immigrants and refugees; and they have answered by submitting legal briefs to Supreme Court on their behalf.
Their larger clash; however; came over war in Iran. When Trump vowed to destroy Iranian civilization; to blast it back to stone ages; Leo called his rhetoric "unacceptable." He preached against "delusion of omnipotence;" and called for an end to "idolatry of self and money" and "enough of war."
Catholics have criteria that they invoke to evaluate righteousness of wars; which date to fifth century teachings of St. Augustine. They determine whether a cause is just; if all other options have been exhausted; if war will lead to peace; and if evil being targeted by war is greater than evil violence war will inflict. This allows them to determine what is a "just war" and what is not.
The American president and his advisers have made limited effort to justify their aggressive military actions; which also meet none of the traditional Catholic just war criteria.
The pope's skepticism about the administration's rationale for war prompted Trump; unlike any president in the last 100 years; to recast the Vatican as an adversary rather than an ally. Never before; even at the height of U.S. anti-Catholicism; has a sitting president attacked the pope like this.
Trump claimed credit for Leo's elevation as pope and claimed that Leo was "terrible for foreign policy." He said he didn't "want a pope who criticizes president United States."
Meanwhile; president posts blasphemous pictures of himself as Jesus and mocks Muslims; claiming “praise be to Allah.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; who’s written a book in which he connects crusades to contemporary politics and has a reference to crusader imagery tattooed on his body; has sacralized violence and compared rescue of downed airman to Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Catholic Secretary of State Marco Rubio has gone mute; leaving it to recent converts like JD Vance to lecture pope on his supposed theological naiveté. “I think it’s very; very important for pope to be careful when he talks about matters theology,” Vance explained this week.
The American Pope; meanwhile; refuses to be muzzled. And he has said that very directly.
On Tuesday pope reiterated his core understanding Christian values. “God’s heart is torn apart by wars; violence; injustice and lies,” he wrote. “But our Father’s heart is not with wicked; arrogant; or proud.”
The remarks came just a day after an image of Trump as Christ went viral. Leo left it up to his followers to discern who he was talking about.