From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know! Many of the local parishioners filing into pews at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church in Levittown on Sunday have been following the story of an escalating dispute between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV. The clash began after the pontiff criticized the United States’ attacks on Iran. Trump responded by calling the pope “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” creating a rare public confrontation between a U.S. president and the Vatican.
For some worshippers, the remarks struck a nerve.
Mike Bolli told WHYY News it was “very inappropriate for [the president] to talk to the pope like that.” “I mean, come on, have some respect,” he said shortly after arriving for 11 a.m. church services. “I think he needs to apologize, but he’d never apologize for anything that he does, no matter how wrong he is.”
Bolli voted for Trump in 2016, but said he soon realized he made a mistake and voted against him in the last two presidential elections.
Hillary Clinton narrowly won Bucks County in her 2016 run for president, and Joe Biden won it in 2020. However, Trump flipped the Pennsylvania county back in 2024, winning by a few hundred votes.
Cassandra Thornton was one of those that helped put him over the line in that election, but now, Trump’s papal attacks are making her rethink her vote. “I think he crossed the line,” Thornton said. “I thought he was going to make a good difference. But after I saw that, I just kind of lost all respect for what he was preaching for America.”
Kelsey Reinhardt, president of the conservative advocacy group CatholicVote, said she understands why many Catholics are upset by the president’s attacks. “Donald Trump has done enormous things for Catholics and religious liberty in this country, but picking a fight with a spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics in those terms was surprising, shocking, disappointing, unfounded, uncalled for,” Reinhardt said. “I think that Catholics who even supported Trump were wondering why the tone, why the particular rhetoric that was used, because I’ve seen an unprecedented level of reaction to that statement.”
However, Reinhardt urged Catholics to reject the idea they have to choose sides and that it’s inaccurate to see the back-and-forth as a conflict. She pointed out that the Vatican has historically called for peace during times of war and that “context is missing” this time around. “I think that Pope Leo did something that was surprising in weighing in the way that he did,” she said. “It probably was seen as very political by the Trump administration.”
