Recent crises are exposing deeper fractures in a relationship shaped by more than two centuries of cooperation, suspicion, and rivalry.

Cuba’s deepening crisis has once again pulled the Vatican into a familiar role. In March, it was revealed that Cuban officials turned to the Holy See to help persuade U.S. President Donald Trump to ease its oil embargo, underscoring the Church’s position as one of the few actors capable of mediating between Washington and Havana. Since Cuba relaxed religious restrictions in the 1990s, the Vatican has reemerged as a major institutional force on the island, helping to facilitate the normalization of U.S.–Cuba relations in 2015.

Yet tensions with the Trump administration are complicating the role the Church has traditionally played in diplomatic mediation. In late 2025, the Vatican sought to mediate in Venezuela by offering asylum to former President Nicolás Maduro in Russia to avert military escalation, which ultimately failed. Days after the January 2026 raid by the U.S. to capture Maduro, Pope Leo XIV warned against further conflict in his “state of the world” address, after which Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, was summoned to a tense, closed-door meeting at the Pentagon, where U.S. officials later denied issuing veiled threats.

The divide has further widened over Iran. As an early critic of war, the pope called on the U.S. on March 31 to halt its campaign, naming Trump for the first time publicly. Shortly after, the pope condemned Trump’s rhetoric about destroying Iran as “completely unacceptable.” Amid the fallout, the pope’s planned 2026 visit to the U.S. has been postponed indefinitely.

On April 13, matters further escalated after Pope Leo XIV said that he had “no fear of the Trump administration,” responding to Trump’s criticism of him on social media as being “weak on crime,” according to the New York Times.

These tensions follow decades of outwardly stable relations between Washington and the Holy See. Catholics make up roughly 20 percent of American adults and remain well represented at the highest levels of government, including former President Joe Biden, Vice President J.D. Vance, and six of the nine Supreme Court justices. The current pope, notably, is the first American to lead the Church.

Underneath this overlap lies a more complicated history. Early American suspicion of centralized religious authority, tied to predominantly Protestant culture, has evolved into recurring domestic and foreign political disagreements with the Vatican. While the two sides share some common ground, competing spheres of influence are becoming more pronounced under Trump.

Given that the U.S. was founded in part on a rejection of entrenched religious hierarchy, early friction with the Vatican was almost inevitable. At the time, however, the Papal States were already in decline against the growing power of neighboring monarchies in Europe, and American leaders paid little attention to the Holy See as either a strategic concern or domestic threat. Catholics made up only a small minority of relatively elite communities until about 1845, within a larger society dominated by a Protestant political and........

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