Last Sunday, when US president Donald Trump was lambasting Pope Leo as “weak on crime and terrible on foreign policy”, the pope was preparing to leave for a trip to four African countries, starting with Algeria.

Pope Leo is an Augustinian, and St Augustine was Bishop of Hippo, now called Annaba in modern Algeria. Algeria has a powerful grip on the pope’s imagination for another reason. The date of his election is also the liturgical feast day of the 19 Christian missionary martyrs who died in the Black Decade of Algeria’s civil war. Their number includes two missionary Augustinians, Sisters María Caridad Álvarez Martín and Esther Paniagua Alonso, murdered on their way to Mass. But perhaps the best-known are the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine monastery who were kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist terrorists.

Xavier Beavois’s award-winning, atmospheric 2010 film, Of Gods and Men, dramatises the dilemma faced by the Trappists. Deeply embedded in service to their local Islamic community, including through medical attention, they were threatened by terrorists for the first time at Christmas 1994. Remarkably, their prior, Father Christian de Chergé, managed to persuade them to leave, but by choosing to remain in the monastery, the Trappists were always on borrowed time.

One of the motifs of Leo’s papacy has been the repeated use of the phrase “unarmed and disarming peace”. The phrase is based on the writings of Fr Christian de Chergé, the martyred prior of the Tibhirine Monastery.

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Vance seems to have completely subcontracted his conscience to Trump

Vance seems to have completely subcontracted his conscience to Trump

After the first violent incursion, de Chergé wrote, “Do I have the right to ask, disarm him, if I do not begin by asking: disarm me and disarm us in the community? Now this is my prayer which I confide to you in all simplicity”.

“Unarmed and disarming peace” is very far from Trump’s worldview. It is hard to imagine that Trump has read St Augustine’s The City of God, written partly in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Augustine distinguishes between two cities, the city of God and the earthly city. This is not a distinction between an ethereal vision of heaven and an earthly reality but between two ways of living as a human community. The earthly city is dominated by libido dominandi – translated as the lust to dominate. It categorises everyone as either a winner or a loser. The city of God is characterised by love of God and love of neighbour, and the willingness to sacrifice for others.

As a leader, Trump epitomises libido dominandi.

Pope Leo is an entirely different type of leader. Last Tuesday he visited the Little Sisters of the Poor’s Home for the Elderly in Annaba. The pope told the sisters and the 40 residents, almost all of whom are Muslims, that “God’s heart is with the little ones, with the humble, and with them he builds up his Kingdom of love and peace day by day, just as you are striving to do here in your daily service, in your friendship and life together.”

There is an Irish connection to this home. Sr Margaret Mary of the Cross – Peg Kelleher to her family and friends – spent many years there before returning to Ireland, where she died in 2022. Her nephew, well-known Redemptorist Fr Michael Kelleher, visited her in Annaba. He described how life is fraught for the tiny minority of Christians in this Muslim-majority country. On paper, there is religious freedom but in practice, Christians cannot seek converts and are hedged about with restrictions. Even in this challenging situation, the Little Sisters have earned respect in the local community through their care of their elderly Muslim residents. By spending time with this small, some would say insignificant community, Pope Leo signalled his endorsement of this model of quiet, selfless service.

[ No rest for JD Vance as Trump gets cross with the pope againOpens in new window ]

Trump insulting the pope is just Trump being his usual bullying, obnoxious self. But JD Vance is a Catholic convert. Vance suggested that while Pope Leo has a right to enter into debates, “if you are going to opine on matters of theology, you have got to be careful, you have got to be sure that it is anchored in the truth.”

The audacity of a newbie Catholic presuming to lecture the pope is breathtaking, especially given that Trump threatened the entire Iranian nation, over 92 million people, with the death of their civilisation. Pope Leo had just planted an olive tree in Hippo where Augustine, father of just war theory, lived and worked, but Vance knows better than the pope what constitutes a just war.

Whatever about Vance, who seems to have completely subcontracted his conscience to Trump, it has been disconcerting to see US Catholics belatedly turning on Trump, just because he belittled the pope and posts AI-slop images of himself as a quasi-messianic figure. Where was the outrage when he was allowing Elon Musk to defund vital, life-saving programmes in places like Cameroon, where Pope Leo also visited? Or every time Trump lied or debased the political process by scattershot use of illegal executive orders?

Perhaps Pope Leo’s courage will encourage some timely, if belated, examinations of conscience.

© The Irish Times