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A recent NBC News survey of 4,557 American adults gives Pope Leo XIV a net favorability rating of plus thirty-four. Donald Trump’s net favorability in the same poll is negative twelve. That is a 46 point gap between the first American pope and the American president — a gap measured during a month of sustained public attacks from Trump on the Holy Father.
The numbers did not arrive without context.
On April 5, Pope Leo XIV used his Easter address to command the warring nations of the world to “lay down your weapons.” Six days later, he stood inside St. Peter’s Basilica and warned of a “delusion of omnipotence” fueling the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
That weekend, 60 Minutes aired.
In the joint interview with Norah O’Donnell, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington was asked whether the war in Iran is a just war. McElroy answered: “In Catholic teaching, this is not a just war.” He went on: “This is a war of choice that we went to, and I think it’s embedded in a wider moment in the United States that’s worrying.”
Beside him, Newark’s Cardinal Joseph Tobin defended his January description of ICE as “a lawless organization,” arguing that the agency forces its officers to “hide their identities to terrify people” in violation of the Constitution.
Then, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, took aim at the White House’s habit of splicing movie clips with bombing footage on social media — a practice he called “sickening” and a “gamification” of war that, in his words, dehumanizes the killing of children and American soldiers by turning their suffering into entertainment.
Within minutes of the broadcast, the president responded on Truth Social.
Pope Leo XIV was, Trump wrote, “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Trump followed with an AI-generated image of himself wrapped in a heavenly embrace by Jesus Christ. Catholic conservatives erupted. Even some of Trump’s own evangelical allies called the image “gross blasphemy.”
From the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, the president told reporters Pope Leo XIV should “get his act together” and “stop catering to the radical left.”
Speaking with NBC News on April 12, the pope said he had “no fear of the Trump administration” and would keep “speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel.”
The voters were watching, and the early returns are punishing. A Public Religion Research Institute survey released this month shows Trump’s favorability among Latino Catholic voters has collapsed from forty-one percent in November 2024 to twenty-five percent today.
On the war itself, a YouGov poll fielded April 17 through April 20 measured a twenty-point chasm: 48% of Americans said they agreed more with Pope Leo XIV on Iran, 28% with Trump and Vance.
Among American Catholics overall, Pope Leo XIV’s approval rating is 84%.
Trump’s national approval hovers near forty. Vice President JD Vance — a Catholic convert who personally led the Iran negotiations in Pakistan and came home empty-handed — carries a net favorability of negative eleven among the very Catholics he was meant to bring home for the Republican Party.
On the Sunday evening of the attack, Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, addressed Trump’s social media post directly. “I am disheartened that the President chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father,” Coakley wrote. “Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.”
Within forty-eight hours, dozens of American bishops echoed him. The U.S. hierarchy, fractured for a decade by liturgical, political, and personal feuds, has not stood this unified in a generation.
Pope Leo XIV did not ask for any of this. He has avoided naming the president in nearly every public address since the war began, keeping his focus on Iran, on the children of Tehran and Isfahan, and on the moral demands of the Sermon on the Mount, where the peacemakers are the ones called sons and daughters of God.
He has spoken in St. Peter’s Square about peace, in Cameroon about the suffering of African Christians, and in private letters to American lawmakers about the cost of perpetual war on the human family.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, has used the past seventeen days to mock the pope, take credit for his election, and publish an AI-generated image of himself in the embrace of Christ on the same Truth Social feed where he calls the Holy Father weak.
As I have argued before, the president owns this confrontation entirely.
Six months from the midterms, Republicans are bleeding Catholics in the exact places they cannot afford to lose them. Voters who flipped the Sunbelt for the GOP in 2024 are drifting toward a pope they trust more than the man they elected.
PRRI president Robert P. Jones has called a sustained drop in Catholic support from 2024 levels “almost certain defeat” for Republicans in competitive races. And the man in white — silver-haired, bespectacled, born in Chicago — has only just begun to speak.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of American Catholics — and people of every faith and no faith at all — who refuse to confuse the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the gospel of Donald Trump.
We stand with a pope speaking peace while bombs fall on Tehran, three U.S. cardinals naming the Iran war unjust on national television, and an American hierarchy that has told the White House the Vicar of Christ is not the president’s political rival.
In an era poisoned by the gamification of war and the AI sanctification of authoritarian power, this work could not be more urgent.
Letters from Leo is the fastest-growing Catholic community in America because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda — something rooted in human dignity, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor that has guided the Church since the Sermon on the Mount.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the Gospel against authoritarian cruelty — I am asking you to join us.
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