Will Pope Leo speak truth to power to Donald Trump?

The Vatican's money problems mean Pope Leo’s freedom to act as an independent moral player on the world stage is compromised

If Pope Leo goes after Maga money in the USA to sort out the Vatican’s financial crisis, some observers fear this could draw him into an alliance of some sorts with Trump. Picture: Antonio Masiello/Getty

Will an American Pope ever go head-to-head with an American president? What a bizarre scenario — but in the greatly unsettled and uncertain world in which we now live, such a confrontation cannot be entirely ruled out. But to what end?

For starters, on his form so far, marked by disdain for convention, protocol, and a rules-based order — not to mention moral norms — there is no reason to believe that President Trump would even listen to Pope Leo XIV, let alone pay heed.

On his own admission, the current occupant of the White House can only be constrained, not by any papal reprimand, not even by international law — he has claimed that the only constraint on his exercise of power is “my own morality, my own mind”.

We know by now that his own “morality” comes straight from the pages of The Godfather, with Trump’s fondness (as he has demonstrated in the case of Greenland) for making offers that other countries can’t refuse.

He doesn’t care about Nato and other global alliances, and wants to see the dismemberment of the EU.

Trump believes US power matters more than international law. And like a Mafia don, he plays dirty; if you are a politician who opposes him, you’re likely to wake up one morning to find a horse’s head in your bed. Or worse, as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro found out.

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro at the Drug Enforcement Administration after being detained by US forces.

For Trump, as his political adviser Stephen Miller has brazenly declared, the world henceforth is to be “governed by strength, by force, by power”. Respect for the rule of law, human rights, democracy, and the territorial integrity of nation states has been cast aside.

Gone, too, what the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown has recognised is “the founding principle of the postwar settlement: that countries choose diplomacy and multilateral co-operation over aggression and unilateral action”.

In that context, it is surely clear now that flattery, currying favour, and appeasement do not work in the current White House where the 47th president is surrounded by toadies. What was Maria Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, thinking when she handed over her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump?

US president Donald Trump meets with MarÌa Corina Machado of Venezuela in the Oval Office during which she presented him with her Nobel Peace Prize.

There is also the fact that three of Trump’s chief toadies are Catholics; vice-president JD Vance is a convert, while both secretary of state Marco Rubio and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt are lifelong Catholics.

And according to The Washington Post, 56% of Catholics supported Trump in the 2024 election, compared to 41% for Kamala Harris. This level of support cannot be discounted, especially by the Vatican which is strapped for cash. It depends heavily on financial support from the two wealthiest national churches in the world — the German and the American.

But if Pope Leo goes after Maga money in the USA to sort out the Vatican’s financial crisis, some observers fear this could draw him into an alliance of some sorts with Trump. There is no doubt that the Vatican’s money problems are one of Pope Leo’s big worries.

“Just days before Francis entered hospital for his final time, in February 2025, he established a new global fundraising commission to help close the Vatican’s annual budget shortfalls,” according to Christopher White, former Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. 

“While hard figures have always been difficult to come by for an institution that has never had clear accounting procedures, a July 2024 report estimated an annual operating budget deficit of €87m. Compounding the problem is a looming pension fund crisis that is estimated to be underfunded by €1.5bn.” 

This — however much Vatican officials may claim otherwise — means that Pope Leo’s freedom to act as an independent moral player on the world stage is compromised. He has to think twice before any denunciation of Trump and his madcap policies. This is also a powerful argument for abolishing the entire Vatican apparatus, the funding of which has very negative connotations for the Papacy — but that’s an argument for another day.

Pope Leo XIV prays before to close the Holy Door of St. Peter's Basilica on the Feast of the Epiphany, at the Vatican, on January 6, 2026. Picture: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty

Mind you, Pope Francis refused to allow budgetary problems to intimidate him. He took the very unusual step of issuing a rebuke of Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. Appearing on Fox News for a segment on immigration, Vance defended Trump’s 'America First' border-enforcement policy by invoking what he characterised as an “old school” Christian concept: “You love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus on and prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” 

This started an intra-Catholic debate over the meaning of odro amoris, or “rightly ordered love”, a phrase that appears in Augustine’s City of God and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.

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Some Catholic commentators pushed back against Vance’s superficial understanding of Catholic social teaching.

More extraordinary, Pope Francis also took the time to rebuke Vance and correct the vice-president’s flawed theology in a pointed letter to the American bishops, while offering a powerful defence of migrants and refugees.

But then Jorge Mario Bergoglio was not an American, and didn’t have to take into consideration factors that will weigh heavily on his successor.

In any case, the chances of a papal reprimand are not great, not in the case of Robert Prevost (aka Pope Leo). He is constrained by his own background and cultural and religious formation (which would include an exalted view of the US presidency) and the Augustinian belief that rulers rule by divine right (Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 13: 1-7).

Pope Leo XIV, who has shown himself to be a timorous pontiff, may speak in generalised and indirect terms about the need to uphold a liberal global order, but he is unlikely to risk a head-to-head confrontation with Trump. In addition to the Vatican’s precarious finances, he will have to steer the Church through the geopolitical turmoil stemming from Trump and factor in the latter’s unpredictability.

“Once, we needed to have a Pope who would speak in favour of human rights in Russia and China,” said Massimo Fagioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University. 

“You now need someone who can speak truth to American power.”

Is Pope Leo XIV that “someone”? Time will tell.