Published in Newsroom.co.nz (Wellington), 21 April 2026
In May 1935, as Winston Churchill later told the story, Pierre Laval travelled to Moscow to sound out Stalin about an alliance against Hitler. Late in the talks, the French foreign minister asked whether the Soviet leader might ease his persecution of Russian Catholics. It would help him, he said, with the Pope.
Stalin laughed and asked how many divisions the Pope had.
The exchange has been quoted ever since. But Stalin posthumously got his answer in 1989. A Polish Pope helped bring down the Soviet Union.
I come to this story from inside the church rather than outside it. I was baptised Catholic, served as an altar boy, briefly contemplated the priesthood in my early twenties and still go to mass every Sunday.
A lifetime of Sundays teaches you that the Catholic church is not a monolithic bloc. It is an eccentric collection of world views loosely held together by a religion.
The various papacies of the last 50 years are evidence enough. John Paul II was fiercely anti-communist, and he opposed George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, calling it a defeat for humanity.
Benedict XVI was less a political Pope than a theological one. Still, his 2011 address to the German Bundestag, on the foundations of a free state of law, remains one of the sharpest defences of the rule of law delivered anywhere in the past generation.
Francis then leaned hard into environmentalism and a critique of capitalism, while trying his hardest to appear modest and humble.
Then came Leo XIV, the first American Pope, who took his name to signal continuity with the social teaching of Leo XIII. In his first months, he seemed the least activist of the lot: quiet, mild-mannered, softly spoken – even humorous.
The same range shows up at parish level. In my parish in Wellington, two priests alternate. One is a former chemist who came to the priesthood late and occasionally performs small experiments during his homilies to illustrate a theological point.
The other is a veteran political activist who chained himself to Nicola Willis’s electorate office in protest against Israel last year. I respect his views. But after a working week spent on geopolitics, I often wish for a Sunday sermon that sticks to scripture.
My activist priest at least picks the fights he chooses. By contrast, Leo began quietly and refrained from political commentary. But now he has ended up at the centre of the worst public clash between the Vatican and the White House I can remember.
Then came Tehran. When American and Israeli bombs began falling on the city, and US President Donald Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight”, Leo called the threat unacceptable, and he has not stopped since.
The Vatican’s record on secular power is not heroic. In July 1933, six months after Hitler took office, the Holy See signed a treaty with Nazi Germany. It was called the Reichskonkordat.
The church got guarantees for its schools and institutions. Hitler got, in effect, international legitimacy at the moment he needed it most, and the collapse of political Catholicism in Germany. The cardinal who negotiated the deal, Eugenio Pacelli, then became Pope Pius XII in 1939, and his near-silence during the Holocaust remains a wound the church has never healed.
Leo, by contrast, has chosen to speak, and unlike his predecessors he is being heard. On Ash Wednesday 2003, John Paul II sent Cardinal Pio Laghi, a family friend of the Bushes, to hand-deliver a letter to the White House urging the President not to invade Iraq; Bush set it aside, and the war began a fortnight later.
Twenty-three years on, Trump is not setting Leo aside. He is attacking him.
At midnight on Truth Social, Trump shares an AI-generated image of himself as Christ healing the sick (which he later said was meant to depict him as a doctor).
It is not just the US President attacking the Pope. His Vice President has joined in. JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, taking Augustine as his confirmation saint. Last Tuesday, at a Turning Point USA conference, he lectured the Pope on just-war theory. He told Leo he should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology”.
Now, Leo is an Augustinian friar who twice served as Prior General of the Augustinians before his election. Just-war theory originated with Augustine.
Vance, a Catholic convert of six years, had told the former head of the Augustinians to be careful about Augustinian theology. He had done so while Leo prayed in the ruins of Augustine’s Hippo in Algeria, where Augustine had been bishop for 34 years.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops rebuked Vance the following day.
In 1960, John Kennedy stood before Baptist ministers in Houston and promised that “no Catholic prelate would tell the President, should he be Catholic, how to act”. Tony Blair still waited until he had left Downing Street in 2007 to convert, worried about being labelled “a nutter”. The old Anglo-Protestant fear was that a Catholic politician would be too loyal to Rome.
Leo’s America has the opposite problem.
Whether any of this is accidental is a fair question. Trump has a long record of humiliating potential rivals, and Vance’s 2028 ambitions are no secret. By picking a fight with the Pope, Trump has built a trap his Vice President cannot escape without either losing the Catholic vote he will need or breaking with his own boss.
What Stalin missed, and what Trump has remembered, is that the papacy still exercises a kind of power. It is not tanks or divisions. It is moral authority, which outlasts its enemies, and sometimes their states as well.
There may also be something more personal at work. The Pope is one of the very few people on earth who rivals Trump in celebrity.
Dealing with hostile political leaders is nothing new for the church. It has two thousand years of practice, from Herod and Pilate through Napoleon to Stalin and Hitler. An institution that outlasted all of them will probably manage Donald Trump as well.
Leo did not ask for this. A man who wanted a quiet papacy of social teaching has been given a louder one, by a fight he did not pick and a President who picked it for him.
Trump has lately posed as many things: the Pope, in a White House image last year, and Christ, in one he shared last Sunday.
Still, that does not make Trump pushing Leo onto the world stage a divine intervention.
