No, the US didn’t threaten to bomb the Vatican |
The first American pope does not like the President of the United States. One of the few things we knew about the Chicago-born Robert Prevost when he was elected last May was that – despite having an older brother who supported MAGA – he detested the immigration policies of the Trump administration. His private X account, now deleted, made that clear. Pope Leo has rejected the president’s invitation to visit the United States to celebrate his own country’s 250th anniversary; instead, he will visit Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island collapsing under the strain of thousands of North African migrants who have risked their lives to get there.
When President Trump issued his blood-curdling threat to destroy Iranian civilisation, the Pope immediately condemned him. ‘Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable,’ Leo said on Tuesday. Under other circumstances, this would have been surprising. One thing we have learned about the Pope is that he speaks cautiously; despite his personal disapproval of the President, he has never goaded him in the passive-aggressive style of Pope Francis, a shameless Trump-baiter. As Reuters reported, ‘It is rare for the pope, who leads 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, to respond directly to a world leader.’ But the warning that ‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’ had to be addressed directly: the line Leo crossed was nothing compared to the one crossed by Trump.
In any case, the Pope’s words hardly came out of the blue. He had earlier urged the United States to find an ‘off-ramp’ to end the war with Iran and suggested that God does not hear the prayers of leaders who start wars. On Wednesday, the respected conservative Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi........