This is the story, unimaginable only a couple of weeks ago, of two men born a few years apart midway through the last century, suddenly sharing the international stage as the most powerful Americans on Earth.
In background, experience, and demeanor, President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born leader of the Catholic Church, could hardly be more different.
They also hold contrasting political views concerning the needs of poor people and of immigrants, the perils of climate change, and Russia’s invasion of what the pope has called “martyred Ukraine.”
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV start from very different places, and they have very different aims. Whose worldview will prevail?
Yet at the new pontiff’s inaugural Mass, celebrated last Sunday in St. Peter’s Square, it became clear that far more profound questions will define the two men’s shared time in the spotlight.
How do they view what afflicts a divided world? How to repair these divisions?
And how will they handle their own power? How should it be used? What it is for?
Their differences do not mean that they are going to clash head-on, a conflict both will seek to avoid.
Still, the elevation of Chicago-born Robert Prevost to the papacy could have an important, if more subtle, impact if it changes the political conversation in the world.
His arrival on the world stage has set up a juxtaposition between two divergent views of power: the Trump White House’s reliance on “hard power” and the softer, more collegial, morally grounded approach that Leo championed at his inaugural Mass.
Indeed, some Vatican commentators suspect that this was on the conclave’s mind when the cardinals chose an American to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.
An American pope had always been dismissed as an impossibility, risking the impression of a monopoly takeover by the world’s main superpower.
Yet with Mr. Trump deploying American economic and political muscle worldwide in a way not seen for a century, the Vatican hierarchy may envisage a different possibility: two Americans, yes, but with two diametrically different understandings of power, and of the world.
So far, the Trump administration seems eager to seek common purpose with Leo.
Some strident Trump supporters did greet his elevation with scorn. Social influencer Laura Loomer denounced him as “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open borders, and a total Marxist.”
Yet the president called his nomination “a great honor” for America.
When Leo celebrated his public Mass, the administration’s two most prominent Catholics, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, were among the foreign dignitaries in attendance.
And this week, Mr. Trump took a dramatic further step in the new pontiff’s direction.
Impatient over the difficulties that are complicating his efforts to mediate peace between Russia and Ukraine, he signaled that he might pull back. Surprisingly, he picked up on Leo’s readiness to offer the Vatican as a place where rivals in international conflicts could meet and seek peace.
He suggested that Russia and Ukraine take up the offer, adding, “Let the process begin!”
Even if such talks do convene, however, any role played by Leo would likely further highlight differences with Mr. Trump’s approach.
In his homily to the crowd of some 200,000 gathered for his Mass, the pope set out a vision of leadership based on humility and conciliation rather than on top-down intervention.
The main focus of his remarks was the church itself, divided between traditionalists and reformers as it seeks to bring its message to the 21st-century world.
But the contrast with Mr. Trump was hard to miss.
“I was chosen without any merit of my own,” he said, for the role of “walking with you … united in one family.”
Church leaders’ authority, he said, must not be “a question of capturing others by force … or by means of power.” St. Peter himself, after all, was tasked with “shepherding” his flock of faithful – “without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, or lording it over those entrusted to him.”
And the church’s vocation in the wider world?
“We still see too much discord,” he said, “too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest.”
Working with other Christians, other faiths, and “all women and men of goodwill,” he said, “we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion and fraternity within the world.”
What impact that might have on Mr. Trump’s policies remains to be seen. Secretary Rubio argued that Washington’s tough immigration policy was not incompatible with “compassion,” saying there was “nothing compassionate about open borders that allow people to be trafficked.”
He also pointed out that the pope was not a “political” leader, but a “spiritual” one.
Still, the moral force of the papacy has sometimes moved political tides – most recently in the emergence of the independent trade union movement Solidarity in communist Poland after the 1978 election of Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pontiff.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was famously reported to have dismissed Winston Churchill’s words of caution about his approach to post-World War II Poland by quipping, “How many divisions does the pope have?”
But as the Harvard academic Joseph Nye – a leading proponent of American “soft power” – wrote shortly before his death earlier this month, “The papacy continues. Stalin’s Soviet Union is long gone.”
