The American president meets the American pope

By sheer good luck, I happened to be in St. Peter’s Square last May — together with 150,000 of my best friends — when white smoke from the Sistine Chapel signaled the election of a new pope. Without even yet knowing who he was, the crowd went wild. It went even more wild an hour later, when Pope Leo XIV first appeared on the balcony.

My immediate reaction was two-fold. First, Holy Cow! This guy’s an American — Bob Prevost, from Chicago. Few thought Catholic cardinals would ever choose an American pope. But, as veteran Vatican commentators soon noted, Prevost had spent more time as a priest and prelate in Peru than he had in the United States. He was a pan-American cardinal, not a USA cardinal. That made him acceptable.

Second reaction: I was struck by how, in his first comments as pope, Leo went out of his way to praise the work of Pope Francis, who had been no big fan of President Trump. Watch out, I thought — this might set up an interesting dynamic between the new American pope and the new American president.

And indeed, in less than a year, it has, on two big issues — war and immigration — where Pope Leo and President Trump are on opposite sides. 

On the issue of war, nowhere was that vast gap between Leo and Trump more evident than last weekend. From the beginning, Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have tried to paint the Iran war, now in its fifth week, as part of God’s plan, and where God is clearly on our........

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