Catholic church

What’s really behind Trump’s clash with the Pope?

Donald Trump’s latest clash with the Catholic Church stunned even the most hardened veterans of culture-war X. According to the President of the United States, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, the conspicuously holy spiritual leader of 1.3 billion people, is “WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy.” He also claimed that, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” For commentators accustomed to the fog of modern diplomatic platitudes, such trash talk was the equivalent of a Holy Roman Emperor hurling insults at a medieval pontiff. In the year 963, for example, the Emperor Otto I accused Pope John XII of fornicating with his

trump pope damian thompson

Israel needs to rethink its relationship with Christians

Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The story