Was that lightning in the distance? The sound of God’s fury thundering over the White House? Probably not. But thanks to a series of incendiary moves by Republican lawmakers, it sure feels as though we’re witnessing the preceding events to some Old Testament plague. They include Donald Trump insulting Pope Leo XIV, a now-deleted AI image the president posted of himself appearing as Jesus Christ, and prominent Republicans suggesting that the pope isn’t a very smart Catholic.

“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vice President JD Vance said at a recent Turning Point event. “If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful; you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth.”

So it’s against this apocalyptic anxiety that I reached out to Heath W. Carter, a religious historian at the Princeton Theological Seminary who specializes in Christianity’s role in public life, to hear what he had to say about all of this.

What was your initial reaction to Trump’s attacks against the pope?

The president, in his criticism of the pope, didn’t reflect a deep understanding of the office of the pope or of the kind of Catholic theological traditions out of which the pope speaks about war. Various Catholics have since responded to say that the pope isn’t a warrior of American political life, and rather, that the pope is speaking out of these deep Catholic traditions about “just war” theory. It wasn’t clear to me in the president’s messages about the pope that he has a great depth of understanding of that tradition.

For sure. Even the president claiming that the pope was “weak on crime” really calls into question whether or not Trump understands what the pope even does. Can you clarify this for him? What is the pope’s role in the Catholic Church, and how does that reality contradict Trump’s insults?

The pope is the leader of a global church that is millennia old, and a church that would understand itself as being animated by the gospel, by the good news of Jesus Christ, and by the teachings of the Christian tradition for millennia.........

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