Maureen Dowd
The Pope Bedevils
Trump
April 18, 2026
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Washington
See more of our coverage in your search results.Add The New York Times on Google
I might have to go back
to church.
My mother always told me
that the Catholic Church was greater than the men running it.
But I grew so
disillusioned with the men running it while I was covering the sex abuse
scandals that I could no longer stomach going to Mass.
The church that had
helped form my sense of right and wrong as a child suddenly seemed blind about
right and wrong.
But Pope Leo XIV, or Pope Bob, as the
first American pope is sometimes affectionately called, may win me over.
President Trump has been
rampaging around the globe like Grendel at dinner time, a rapacious, feral
creature. Who could stand up to him?
The soft-spoken, humble
Leo, who strives to unify, squared off against the bombastic, solipsistic
Trump, who strives to divide. And watching the saintly pope school the amoral
president is a blessed sight.
I’m sure His Holiness
watched askance as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cast the conflict with Iran as a holy war, trying
to put God on the American side as our troops are asked to rain “death and
destruction from above” on “apocalyptic” Iranian foes.
In March, Hegseth called
for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,”
asking God to “break the teeth of the ungodly.”
This past week, he recited a passage
that was an adaptation of a Quentin Tarantino “Pulp Fiction” adaptation of a
biblical passage: “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and
furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.”
He also denounced the
press as the “Pharisees,” plotting to harm the Trump administration the same
way the Pharisees plotted to harm Jesus.
George W. Bush had to
walk back his use of the word “crusade” in reference to the war on terror,
given the offensive echo of the papacy’s crusaders wiping out Muslims in the
holy land.
But Hegseth is no
historian. His book is called “American Crusade.” He carries a Crusader
Bible, known for
violent pictures of early Christian wars. He is tattooed with a Crusader cross
and the words “Deus vult” — Latin for “God wills it.”
Hegseth could learn a
lesson from George H.W. Bush. As a young pilot in World War II, Bush was shot
down near a Japanese island. When he campaigned for president, Bush was asked
what he was thinking as he floated in the Pacific, fearing he would be picked
up by the enemy.
He replied that he was thinking about
“fundamental values,” such as “the separation of church and state.”
During Easter week, the
pope seemed to chide Hegseth, saying that the Christian mission has often been
“distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus
Christ.”
On Easter Sunday,
Trump blasted out one
of his assorted threats to destroy Iranian civilization, crudely appending the
phrase “Praise be to Allah.” Leo called the existential extortion “truly
unacceptable,” a transgression against moral law.
Trump escalated. He
posted a meme of himself as a Jesus-like figure healing a sick man and he
attacked the Holy Father on social media with sinful aspersions, saying the pope
is “WEAK on crime” and “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have
a Nuclear Weapon.”
Leo, who’s
Chicago-tough, hasn’t backed down. On X, he said: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a
disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once
wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”
He reminded the authoritarian,
Strangelovian president that he should be promoting peace through dialogue and
multilateralism.
“Too many people are
suffering today, too many innocent people have been killed,” Leo told reporters, “and
I believe someone must stand up and say that there is a better way.”
JD Vance, a fairly
recent convert to Catholicism, dutifully jumped into the fray to try to brush
back the pope and butter up Trump, lecturing Leo to “be careful when he talks
about matters of theology” and yapping about
the “tradition of just war theory.”
When you’re down in the
weeds about whether it’s a just war or not, the answer is: probably not.
In a puerile fit of
apparent retribution on Thursday, Trump canceled an $11
million federal contract with Catholic Charities in Miami to house and feed
migrant children coming to America alone. (Even my Trump-indulging sister found
that disgusting.)
It’s hard for the
president to give the pope the respect that he deserves because Trump clearly
thinks that he’s the Messiah.
Right before Leo was elected, Trump
put out a meme of himself as the pope. He struts and peacocks, playacting as
everything — a king, a pope, Jesus.
But the president should
read the Grimms’ fairy tale about the poor man in a hovel who caught a magic
fish. His wife pestered the man to ask for a bigger house, then a mansion, then
to be king, then emperor, then pope. The fish granted all these wishes. But
when the wife coveted even more and told the man to wish her to be “equal to
God,” the fish cast them back into their hovel.
It is dangerous to play
God — unless you’re God.
