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Terry Glavin: The Pope vs. Trump saga is a propaganda boon for Iran

Tension between Washington and Rome has been building for months

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“‘Unhinged & UnChristian’: Global outrage erupts after Trump attacks Pope, poses as Jesus.” That’s a headline that you wouldn’t be surprised to find in any of the more liberal American news platforms at the moment. And it wouldn’t be what President Donald Trump likes to call fake news, either.

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“The leadership of Pope Leo XIV inspires millions” is an assertion that could be convincingly attributed to, say, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, or perhaps California Governor Gavin Newsom, who happens to be a Roman Catholic.

Terry Glavin: The Pope vs. Trump saga is a propaganda boon for Iran Back to video

In response to an especially deranged Truth Social Post in which the president used AI imagery to depict himself as Jesus Christ, it might have been Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni who said “the desecration of Jesus, the prophet of peace and brotherhood, is not acceptable to any free person.” Or it could have been, say, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, the Catholic archbishop of Newark, N.J.

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But here’s where things get excruciatingly awkward for Pope Leo XIV in his epic standoff with Donald J. Trump, who many reasonable people will comprehend as the most erratic, destructive and indecent president in American history.

The headline defending the pope against President Trump’s “unhinged and unChristian” vulgarity appeared in Press TV, the primary English-language propaganda conduit run by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The perfectly defensible claim that Pope Leo “inspires millions” was made by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Maslij, Iran’s Potemkin parliament. And it was Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian who purported to be so offended with Trump’s blasphemous AI manipulations.

After an estrangement between Washington and Rome that has been gathering pace for several months, the praise for Pope Leo, the first American pope, is now coming from the pinnacle of the Khomeinist regime’s theocratic superstructure.

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In a letter sent to Pope Leo on Monday, the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Nouri Hamedani urged the pope to lead a global coalition of the world’s monotheistic religions in the cause of Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. “Undoubtedly, your courageous position against American arrogance and corrupt Zionism was among the most necessary stances — one that will etch your name and actions into global memory.”

One of Iran’s most senior clerics, Hamedani is known for harangues against liberalism and secularism and accuses Jews of hoarding the world’s wealth in a plot to achieve global domination. Already, he says, Europe and the United States are “slaves” to the Jews.

Pope Leo clearly would not have intended his several oblique and sometimes direct condemnations of the American-Israeli war on the Iranian regime to have provided such a propaganda bonanza to the world’s foremost terrorist state. But that’s how far the Vatican-Washington antagonisms have gone.

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After Trump issued a broadside against him Tuesday night, calling him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” Pope Leo said: “I do not look at my role as being political, a politician.” He said it was never his intention to get into a debate with Trump. However, “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing.”

This was clearly a reference to the bloodcurdling rhetoric favoured by Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, who has invoked “God’s almighty providence” in aid of the American war effort. Hegseth has summoned Americans to pray for victory in the Middle East conflict “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

In a stirring address to thousands of the faithful at St Peter’s Basilica last Saturday, the pope lamented: “Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death.”

It hasn’t helped that Hegseth’s church is affiliated with an Idaho-based evangelical congregation led by Doug Wilson, a Calvinist cleric who preaches that single women should be denied the right to vote and public displays of Catholic piety should be banned. A recrudescence of antisemitism and anti-Catholic bigotry has been percolating at the fringes of Trump’s White House, and even the more prominent Catholics in the MAGA movement are recent converts who have found themselves at odds with the Vatican.

On Tuesday night, Vice-President J.D. Vance, who was accepted into the Catholic Church only seven years ago, was heckled at a conservative event at the University of Georgia by opponents of the Iran war. Defending his anti-war credentials, Vance said that denying Ukraine the funds to defend itself against Russia’s invasion was “one of the things I’m proudest we’ve done in this administration.”

Vance said the pope should mind his own business and stay out of American politics. The trouble is, while Pope Leo may be as uninterested in politics as he claims to be, American politics is exceedingly interested in Pope Leo.

If he is as great a moral authority on the global scene as his supporters claim, and since he consistently argues for dialogue over confrontation, and he’s captured the attention of the most senior political and clerical figures in the Khomeinist dictatorship, he might try to make some use of himself on behalf of the persecuted people of Iran. Especially Iran’s minorities.

Iran’s Baha’i community is currently besieged. After every democratic upheaval in Iran, the regime always goes looking for scapegoats. And after last December’s protests, when the regime gunned down perhaps 30,000 people, the Baha’i are once again being singled out for persecution, even though the Baha’i custom is to avoid involvement in protests completely.

Peyvand Naeimi, for instance. Arrested Jan. 8 and held in solitary confinement, the 30-year-old Peyvand has been subjected to severe torture, electric shocks and mock hangings, all in aid of extracting a false confession from him. His cousin, Borna, 29, was arrested March 1, and was forced to sign a false confession in the murder of three members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Perhaps it would be too close for diplomatic comfort, protesting too loudly about the Christians who are routinely rounded up by the IRGC and accused of being Mossad agents.

A word on behalf of Peyvand and Borna, then. Would that be too much trouble?

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