VATICAN CITY — When the far-right Italian politician Matteo Salvini rose to testify that he hoped to be a better Christian despite being a divorced and first-class “sinner,” one of the ultraconservative cardinals most critical of the pope smiled and clapped on the dais behind him.

“In my own little way, with my professional activity, I try to do my best to help the 60 million Italians with what doesn’t depend on us alone,” Mr. Salvini, Italy’s anti-migrant, nationalist interior minister, said in October at a pontifical university next to the Vatican.

But even as Cardinal Raymond Burke, the de facto leader of the conservative opposition to Pope Francis in the Roman Catholic Church, warmly applauded for Mr. Salvini, the pope himself has been less impressed with Mr. Salvini’s “professional activities.”

Those actions have included blocking ships full of desperate migrants from entering Italy and working to destabilize the European Union by flouting its rules and potentially undercutting its currency. On the day after Mr. Salvini’s thumping victory in elections for the European Parliament, Francis warned, as he had for months, that fearmongers had made people “intolerant, closed and perhaps even, without realizing it, racist.”