Pontiff responds after US president accuses him of ‘endangering a lot of Catholics’ with stance on Iran war

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• People in the US: what do you think of Chicago-born Pope Leo?

Pope Leo has said he has never supported nuclear weapons and that those who criticise him need to speak the truth, in response to Donald Trump’s latest tirade accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics” with his stance on the Iran war.

Speaking to journalists on Tuesday night after leaving the papal retreat in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the first US-born pontiff said: “The mission of the church is to preach the gospel, to preach peace.”

US president directs fresh criticism at pontiff days before secretary of state Marco Rubio’s visit to Vatican

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Donald Trump has issued another verbal attack against Pope Leo, accusing the pontiff of “endangering a lot of Catholics” because “he thinks it’s fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon”.

The remarks come two days before Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, meets Leo at the Vatican in an effort to ease the tensions sparked by Trump’s previous broadside against the Chicago-born pontiff over his condemnation of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

US secretary of state will be in Italian capital on Thursday and Friday, the one-year anniversary of Pope Leo’s papacy

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is to travel to Rome this week for a visit reportedly aimed at thawing frosty relations with the Italian government and the Vatican.

Rubio is scheduled to be in the Italian capital on Thursday and Friday, which will also mark the one-year anniversary of the papacy of Pope Leo, the first US-born pontiff.

Leo, who has criticized Trump’s hardline immigration policy, selected Evelio Menjivar-Ayala as state’s new bishop

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Pope Leo XIV has appointed a man who had once entered the United States as an undocumented immigrant, hidden in the trunk of a car, as the new bishop of West Virginia.

The pope approved the resignation of Bishop Mark E Brennan of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, and selected Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, 55, of Washington to take his place, reported OSV News.

Amid the US far right’s hijacking of Christianity and his very public row with Trump, Pope Leo XIV’s visit is symbolic of the ‘growing centrality of Africa and its Black diaspora’

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Almost a year after his election, Pope Leo XIV made his first visit to Africa, the longest international trip of his tenure so far. The visit is heavy with symbolism at a time of global unsettlement, one during which the stature and importance of the pope extends far beyond the church. I spoke with Father Ambroise Tine, formerly secretary general of Caritas Senegal, and currently of the diocese of Thiès in Senegal, about the significance of the papal visit.

With his stand against Trump, the pope has shown the far right doesn’t have a monopoly on Christianity. If people of good faith push hard, the future could be redefined

In the same way that America’s shambolic war on Iran has turned Donald Trump into the most effective EV salesman the world has ever seen, so his attempts to defend said war have produced another unlikely outcome: the rise of a genuine and global theological debate. Led by Pope Leo but extending across Christian denominations, it’s producing the sudden recognition that a kind of progressive Christianity long given over for dead seems to be stirring. Christ is risen, as it were – and if people of good faith push hard, the future could be redefined in powerful ways.

This story has developed so rapidly, with so many steps, that it’s hard to remember them all. When America launched its cruel attack, there was widespread reporting that some officers were exhorting to treat it as a prelude to the second coming. That provoked no pushback from the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a representative of a tattooed Christianity (not that it matters, but have these people not read Leviticus?); indeed, with each press conference Hegseth edged closer to a revival meeting, invoking God’s blessing on his bombing and pillaging. “We are hitting them while they’re down, which is the way it should be,” he said.

Name the deadliest of sins – cruelty, deceit, avarice – and Trump will both exhibit them and celebrate them

It’s no accident that the figure emerging as the global challenger to the might of Donald Trump is a priest in white, known as Pope Leo XIV. In recent weeks, the pope has issued a string of barely coded denunciations of the US president, unfazed by the insults that have come his way in return. It’s no longer fanciful to imagine that what an eastern European pontiff, John Paul II, did by confronting the Soviet empire in the 1980s, an American-born pope may do in the 2020s by daring to speak truth to the would-be emperor in the White House.

Of course, several heads of government have stood up to Trump too. Canada’s Mark Carney has done it most explicitly, while his European counterparts have taken a stand by refusing to join the president’s reckless, wrong-headed war on Iran. But none has the global reach of the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The political gap between US evangelicals and Catholics is widening. And Trump won’t tolerate authority outside his own

“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Henry II was reputed to have muttered. His knights heard his pointed remark as an order. They rode to confront Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke too freely and critically about the king. When they failed to intimidate him into silence, they murdered him. Absolute rule demanded absolute fealty.

The representative of the holy trinity could not be allowed to stand above the unitary executive in 1170.

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On Tuesday, the president read from the Bible in a taped message. Religious scholars were not impressed

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Donald Trump, who recently posted an image on social media which portrayed him as Jesus Christ (or, rather, “a doctor”), and who seems unable to stop attacking the pope, read the Bible to America on Tuesday night.

Sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, hands resting on a book that looked like a Bible, Trump stared straight into the camera (presumably there was a teleprompter) as he recited from the book 2 Chronicles. It’s a passage which has become fashionable among the right wing, and which quotes God as saying:

The pontiff’s criticisms of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran indicate a welcome resolve to follow in his predecessor’s footseps

One year after the death of Pope Francis, the Vatican this week hosted the premiere of a documentary tribute by Martin Scorsese. For a pontiff whose charisma and crowd-pleasing style helped cut through to a secular audience, marking the anniversary with the help of one of the world’s most famous film directors was a nice touch.

Francis’s successor, Leo XIV, is a far less flamboyant personality. In his inaugural year in St Peter’s chair, the first pope to come from the United States has generally taken a cautious, circumspect approach to his role. But it turns out that an aura of mildness and restraint makes him no less effective when criticising the posturing that passes for Christian piety in Donald Trump’s Washington.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Catholics around Atlanta share mixed feelings on faith and politics as Trump engages in rhetorical war with pope

Alex Sullivan tended to his five children on the lawn after a traditional Latin mass at the Catholic Church of Saint Monica in Duluth, Georgia, and contemplated his faith in the light of God and the shadow of Donald Trump.

Sullivan, a self-described conservative who once staffed a libertarian state representative at the Georgia capitol, described his faith as almost medieval.

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a long supporter of Trump, says president’s feud with the pope is a ‘distraction’

A Republican lawmaker has condemned what he refers to as Donald Trump’s “holy war” against Pope Leo XIV.

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a long supporter of Trump and the ultraconservative Maga movement, condemned the president’s attacks on the pope during a Fox News interview on Saturday.

Trump appears to have crossed a line with his Christian supporters. Will it come back to bite him in the midterms?

Donald Trump’s depiction of himself as Jesus Christ and recent spat with Pope Leo XIV could come back to bite him and the Republican party in the midterm elections, according to experts, with some newly aggrieved Christian groups set to play an outsized role in key races across the US.

The president’s Trump-as-the-Messiah Truth Social post sparked immediate criticism among some Christians, including some on the right. Trump, 79, said he thought the AI image of him administering an ethereal light to a stricken man’s head as translucent figures descended from the heavens represented him as a doctor.

The vice-president has endured his most humiliating – and damaging – week as his boss’s fall guy. How much more can Maga’s great hope take?

For a would-be president, JD Vance has an unfortunate habit of getting into fights he cannot win. Three losing battles in the past week – with Iranian negotiators, Hungarian voters and Pope Leo – brought censure, humiliation and mockery raining down on his head. None were of Vance’s choosing. All were fought vicariously on Donald Trump’s behalf.

The vice-president is paying a high price for sycophantic loyalty to his boss. His poll ratings are plunging. His Maga succession hopes falter. He suffers by association – although his own inflammatory statements and misjudgments often make matters worse. Yet amid growing doubts about Trump’s mental health and fitness to govern, Vance remains the White House’s next-in-line.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

Pontiff says that despite ‘certain narrative that has not been accurate’, he will continue to preach message of peace

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Pope Leo XIV said on Saturday that it was “not in my interest at all” to debate the US president, Donald Trump, about the Iran war, but that he would continue preaching the Gospel message of peace.

Leo spoke to reporters aboard the papal plane flying from Cameroon to Angola as part of his 11-day tour of Africa.