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Guest Essay

By David Gibson

Mr. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.

Since his election in May as the first American pope, Leo XIV has become a political and temperamental counterweight to an incendiary American president.

A face-off between the two most prominent Americans on the world stage was inevitable, if only for the contrast between President Trump’s blustery inconstancy and Leo’s soft-spoken yet firm dignity. The pope is “neither quiet nor shy — if he has something to say, he will say it,” in the words of his eldest brother, Louis Prevost, a Trump devotee whom the president has hosted in the Oval Office and at Mar-a-Lago.

Indeed, after Mr. Trump sent forces to seize the Venezuelan........

© The New York Times