Even Catholic Trump supporters feel conflicted over the president’s tiff with the pope

(CNN) — A peace and faith focused sermon delivered during Sunday mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City did little to clear the minds of some parishioners who walked out of church saying they remained distraught over the extraordinary conflict that erupted between Pope Leo and President Trump a week ago.

Some Catholic supporters of the president said they took issue with Trump’s fiery comments about Pope Leo, the first American pontiff. In the 2024 presidential election, Catholic voters broke for President Donald Trump, with nearly six in 10 voting to reelect the president, according to a CNN exit poll.

“I like Donald a lot, but he needs to calm down,” said Lola Reese after attending Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s.

Reese said growing up Catholic in New Orleans taught her the importance of the separation of church and state.

The president’s back-and-forth with the pope might hurt his relationship with his supporters, she said. She called for the president to “back off and kind of calm down his little bitty, tiny streak of a little meanness here and there.”

Reese’s sentiment was shared by several churchgoers, including those who said they had voted for the president but saw his recent comments as out of line.

Anita Bauman, a Catholic Trump voter from Pennsylvania, said the president’s comments were “colossally stupid.”

“I don’t think it helps the president at all,” she said. Bauman said she supported the president’s actions in Iran, where, in early April, US-based rights group HRANA said more than 3,600 people had been killed since a joint US-Israeli bombing campaign began in February.

“I do think that things needed to be done in Iran,” she said. “I think that regime was dangerous, but I don’t think picking a fight with the pope or trying to school the pope on theology is a good idea at all.”

Unprecedented rift

The president’s unprecedented — and largely one-sided — conflict with the Chicago-born Augustinian seemingly sparked last week, when Pope Leo said he hoped the president would find an “off-ramp” to the US-Israeli war with Iran and called the president’s rhetoric about the Iranian people “truly unacceptable.” In a rare event in the history of the modern Catholic Church, Pope Leo actually referred to the sitting president by name in at least one of his remarks.

The president, who along with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has often invoked God and Biblical metaphors to justify the war, responded forcefully on social media: “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” He added he does not want a pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, who thinks it’s “terrible that America attacked Venezuela” or “who criticizes the President of the United States.” The pope has not said he thought it was OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Soon after, Trump further inflamed some Christian supporters when he posted an AI-generated image to Truth Social last Monday depicting himself as a Christ-like figure healing a sick person with American flags and eagles in the background.

By later in the afternoon, the post was deleted. Trump claimed he thought the image showed him as a doctor.

Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in adulthood, had his own pointed words for Pope Leo. Speaking at a Turning Point USA event on Tuesday, he urged the pontiff to be “careful” when talking about theology.

The leader of the Catholic Church has insisted he’s not interested in any feud with the president.

“It was looked at as if I was trying to debate again the president, which is not in my interest at all,” he said Saturday on board the papal plane from Cameroon to Angola, part of an 11-day trip to Africa.

“I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do,” he said earlier.

Like his predecessor, Pope Francis, who was a vocal advocate for peace in Ukraine and Gaza, Pope Leo has widely condemned war and criticized the US government’s treatment of migrants, which he called “extremely disrespectful.” The pope hasn’t visited the US since his selection at the papal conclave in May 2025 and doesn’t have plans to visit this year, according to the Vatican.

Neither Pope Leo nor Pope Francis are the first pontiffs to speak up about politics, including US military actions. Pope John Paul II was a vocal critic of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, calling all war a “defeat for humanity.”

Chase Lerew, a 24-year-old Georgia native who said he converted to Catholicism a few weeks ago, said he found the president’s attacks on the pope “distressing.”

“We haven’t seen an authority figure trying to exert this much control on the papacy since the Avignon Papacy,” Lerew said, referencing the outcome of the 14th-century conflict between the French monarchy and the papacy that saw the French government exerting power over several popes. “Seeing a lot of Catholics kind of bow down to a secular authority instead of a religious one has been disheartening.”

It’s not just ordinary churchgoers who have had strong reactions to the president’s comments. Catholic leaders, too, have rallied behind the pope.

“I am disheartened that the president chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father,” said Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the pope a politician.”

Some Catholic Democratic politicians have also condemned the president’s comments, including Sen. Mark Kelly, who called the attacks “abhorrent” in a post on X.

‘Hurtful to us’

For Mary Meehan, the president’s image of himself as a Christ-like figure was both offensive to Catholics and somewhat unsurprising.

“I think that our president does things off the cuff a lot.”

Meehan, who has spent 12 years attending services at Our Lady of Mount Carmel-Annunciation Parish, a Roman Catholic church in Brooklyn, New York, said she felt empathy for the president even though she found the image offensive.

As Catholics, “we all love God above all things,” she said after the church’s Saturday evening Mass. “And that’s hurtful to us when we see him doing that because we feel sorry for the president not realizing the pain he’s giving to all the people that love not only God but love him so much, too.”

During Monsignor David Cassato’s sermon at the church, he didn’t touch on the president’s comments.

But Trump’s remarks have come up in some conversations with parishioners, Cassato said.

“It’s a very strange time, in the world and in the world of politics,” he said.

He prayed for the pontiff and president to reach an “understanding” — and says he believes both men ultimately want peace.

The US is home to around an estimated 50 million adult Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center, making up around 20% of the total population.

It’s a crucial voting bloc, which has increasingly voted for Republicans in the past few decades, according to Ryan Burge, a political scientist who researches the impact of religion on American life. Common Republican policies like restrictions on abortion and opposition to same-sex marriage have traditionally attracted Catholic voters to the party, he said.

Trump has generally sought to integrate Christianity into his government, appointing an evangelical spiritual adviser to lead a newly created White House faith office and creating by executive order a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.”

The president’s conflict with the pope “isn’t going to help” win over Catholic voters in the midterm elections, Burge said.

He noted Pope Leo is extremely popular: Americans viewed him most favorably of 14 international public figures evaluated by Gallup in 2025. Archbishop Ronald Aldon Hicks echoed the sentiment, saying Sunday, “The majority of our Catholics, they are very happy with our pope.”

The president, alternatively, has faced falling approval ratings, with approval ratings for his handling of the economy falling to a new career low of 31% earlier this month, according to a CNN poll.

One Sunday churchgoer, Valerie Fodser, said the comments reflect “just who Trump is.”

“He just feels he can say and do what he wants, and we’ve seen that even with the war,” she said. “He knows that people will push back against it, but he likes that pushback. He loves that pushback.”

Sabina Hitchen, who was visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral from Chicago Sunday, said she thinks the president should “stay in his lane.”

“The pope’s lane is leading us right as Christians,” she said.

Hitchen said she hopes the president “could focus his goals on leading the country.”

“I would say he could take some notes from the pope on kindness, taking care of our neighbors, and things like that.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Maria Sole Campinoti, Christopher Lamb and Sarah Hutter contributed to this report.