JD Vance Thanks Pope Leo XIV After Trump Criticisms Spark Bishop Calls For Apology

JD Vance reversed course after criticizing Pope Leo XIV’s remarks, thanking the pope in a post on X and saying the pope’s comments during the flight toward Angola were not meant “come se cercassi di dibattere nuovamente con il presidente Trump, cosa che non è nel mio interesse”.

“He did not choose the austere residence in Santa Marta; he had the apartment reserved for the pope reopened, he wears the mozzetta at important moments, and he clings to symbols far more than his predecessor, but otherwise Pope Leo XIV’s papacy is proving to be in full harmony with Francis’s”

Articolo21

In the United States, EWTN Italia reported that Donald Trump described Pope Leo XIV as “weak in the face of crime and terrible in foreign policy” and that Bishop Robert Barron called the attack “disrespectful.”

Articolo21

Barron, of the Winona-Rochester Diocese (Minnesota), wrote on X that the comments were “completely inappropriate and disrespectful” and added: “I believe the president owes the Pope an apology.”

EWTN Italia also said Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, wrote: “Together with Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the USCCB, and my fellow bishops, I have been discouraged by the president's recent comments about Pope Leo XIV and the Church.”

Articolo21 framed Pope Leo XIV’s papacy as aligned with Francis, describing Leo’s approach to repudiating “arms, wars, violence, brutality, and ferocity toward migrants” and citing a letter to the American episcopate condemning a program of mass deportations.

The article quoted the letter’s line that “A rightly formed conscience cannot fail to render a critical judgment and express its dissent… the act of deporting people who have left their homeland for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or grave environmental deterioration harms the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.”

El Heraldo de México

It also said that this coming July 4, Pope Leo XIV “will be in Lampedusa to express his closeness to Europe’s spiritual and material periphery,” tying the date to the article’s view of an “American pope” opposed to the “Trump Doctrine.”

Articolo21 added that in Assisi the latest March for Peace took place, described as an attempt to “awaken the consciences of the powerful” and urging them “not to be merchants of death but builders of bridges.”

Pope Leo XIV issued what Il Heraldo de México called an apology on Monday, May 25, for the Vatican’s role in legitimizing slavery and for not condemning it for centuries, describing the Vatican’s history as “it is a wound in the memory of Christianity”.

“Catholic bishops and elected officials in the United States publicly criticized Donald Trump's statements about Pope Leo XIV”

EWTN Italia

yalibnan reported that in a key passage of his first papal encyclical, Leo said the Church had taken centuries to fully recognise “the scourge of slavery” as incompatible with human dignity and called the legacy “a wound in Christian memory.”

yalibnan also quoted Leo writing: “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” and said he expressed “deep sorrow” for the suffering endured by enslaved people.

The same source said Leo acknowledged that Church authorities had, at times, responded to rulers by regulating and legitimizing forms of subjugation, including the enslavement of non-Christians, and that the Church reached a “formal, absolute and universal condemnation” of slavery in the 19th century under Pope Leo XIII.