Candida Moss is professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and a fellow at the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Birmingham.

Popes and presidents have always circled each other warily. But given the fraught relationship between President Donald Trump and Pope Francis, their lack of agreement on key issues and both leaders’ penchant for flaunting the diplomatic expectations of their office, their meeting Wednesday has the makings of the strangest, most misaligned president-pontiff pairings in recent history.

Pope Francis is a Jesuit from Argentina who grew up as the child of immigrants and believes entertainment is a distraction from family and interpersonal connections. Trump is a thrice-married real estate and entertainment mogul known for his brusqueness and occasional vulgarity. While Francis is lauded for gestures like washing the feet of prison inmates, Trump has demeaned war heroes for being captured in battle and regularly describes opponents as “losers.” Francis is the spiritual head of the largest Christian sect in the world; Trump is a lapsed Presbyterian who bungles Bible verses and has rarely been seen in a church.


How are these two men supposed to find common ground? They aren’t just wildly opposite personalities; they also hold vastly different positions on everything from climate change to immigration to caring for the poor.

During an impromptu media briefing last year, Francis was told of candidate Trump’s plans to build a wall on America’s southern border. “A person who thinks only about building walls—wherever they may be—and not building bridges, is not Christian,” said the pope, who months before had given a speech on the White House lawn appealing to America’s immigrant history. Trump shocked many with a fiery comeback, declaring it “disgraceful” for a religious leader to question his faith and describing the pope as a “very political person.” Since that initial scuffle, Francis has continued to use the now politically loaded language of “tearing down walls” in his exhortations to the Catholic faithful.

On the issue of refugees, Francis has repeatedly urged religious and political leaders to accept them into their literal and metaphorical homes, even welcoming one family into the Vatican itself. Trump, by contrast, has tried to ban refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries and has spoken about wanting to accept only “the best.” On the issue of climate change, Francis has dedicated serious attention to concern for the environment, including with a landmark 192-page encyclical published in 2015. Before becoming president, Trump claimed that global warming was an invention of the Chinese government, and he is considering withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accord. While Francis and Trump are (now) in agreement on the centrality of the family and the moral indefensibility of abortion, Trump so far has not made good on his campaign promise to defund Planned Parenthood, and some doubt the sincerity of these commitments.

Trump is hardly the first president to clash with the pope: Relations have ebbed and flowed over the years, through wars, political crises and shifting social mores. The United States has maintained consular relations with the Vatican from the time of George Washington. But in the 19th century, the influx of Catholic immigrants to the United States, coupled with the involvement of several Catholics in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, led to heightened anti-Catholic sentiment. In 1867, Congress stopped funding diplomatic missions between the two countries, and until 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a personal envoy to the Vatican, there was no formal diplomatic contact between them. Even as relations with the Vatican slowly warmed, American Protestants remained deeply suspicious of Catholicism in the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian, became the first U.S. president to visit the Vatican in 1919, though he refused to kneel for a blessing from Pope Benedict XV.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Vatican grew closer as they aligned against communism and began working together in political crises. On October 12, 1962, for example, John XXIII issued a radio broadcast urging the world’s leaders to step back from the brink of war. The following day, the Soviet Union’s Nikita Krushchev called John F. Kennedy and made the first move in deescalating the Cuban Missile Crisis. Neither Krushchev nor Kennedy attributed the détente to the pope, though John XXIII’s comments were published in Pravda. Kennedy met Pope Paul VI at the Vatican the next year and shook, though did not kiss, the pontiff’s hand, so as to maintain some political distance at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment was still in the air.

It wasn’t Kennedy, America’s first Catholic president, but Ronald Reagan who had the closest presidential relationship with the pope, by then John Paul II. Their relationship was grounded primarily in their shared concerns about communism as a threat to free markets and the free exercise of religion. In 1984, Reagan’s White House cited the “courageous stand [the pope] takes in defense of Western values” when it restored full diplomatic relations with the Holy See, appointing the first U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.

The pope has not always been successful in exerting influence over the United States, in particular when it comes to matters of war, which has made for awkward interactions. In 1991, John Paul II received a letter from President George H.W. Bush alerting him to the imminent first Gulf War; the pope attempted to dissuade Bush from launching the operation but failed. Still, the Vatican repositioned itself as a vocal supporter of post-war peace efforts, and Bush and John Paul II carried on warm relations thereafter, including with a lengthy private meeting in November 1991.

The closest we’ve seen to a Trump-Francis faceoff was between Bill Clinton and John Paul II. In 1993, the White House described a private meeting between the two as warm, only to be caught off guard when the pope publicly chastised Clinton—in the president’s presence and on his home turf—for his stance in favor of abortion rights. A year later, when the Clinton administration co-sponsored a Cairo conference on population and development, the pope became concerned by a draft list of principles the participating countries would be voting on—among them, a women’s right to “pregnancy termination.” Having failed to gain Clinton’s attention on the matter, John Paul II reached out to delegates from other, predominantly Catholic, Christian and Muslim countries and persuaded them to oppose the pregnancy language. The measure was defeated, and abortion was not listed as a means of population control. Clinton had wildly underestimated the Vatican’s influence.

In the early 2000s, George W. Bush, who enjoyed the political support of many conservative Christians in the United States, established a warm relationship with John Paul II’s successor, Benedict XVI. Bush’s landmark AIDS relief program (known as PEPFAR) focused on three “ABC” principles—“Abstinence only,” “Be faithful,” “Use a Condom”—and specified that at least one-third of the program’s five-year $15 billion budget be spent on education about abstinence and fidelity. For Benedict, who a few years later would describe condoms as exacerbating the HIV/AIDS crisis, Bush’s approach was a strong show of faith. In advocating against abortion, Bush also borrowed John Paul II’s language about the “culture of life,” which further highlighted the common ground between the Republican president and traditional Catholic teaching on the family.

In Pope Francis, who has been pontiff since 2013, President Barack Obama found something of a kindred spirit, making for another strong pope-president pairing. Obama described Francis as a moral exemplar (he had not done the same for Pope Benedict XVI), quoted from Francis’ speeches in his own addresses and used the idea of a “liberal pope” to boost support for his own initiatives on issues like inequality and the climate. (What most impressed Obama about Francis irked Trump, however: Even as Trump complimented Francis for his humility, he tweeted in 2013 that he didn’t like seeing the pontiff standing at the checkout counter to pay his bill.)

If the past 60 years of U.S.-Holy See relations has taught us anything, it is that the Vatican does not back down on moral issues of great consequence, nor will it be bullied by military threats. The pope can be an agent for peace in high-stakes political affairs, but amicable relations with Washington hinge on respect and communication.

What does this mean for Trump? Francis has said that he is committed to having an open conversation and finding common ground. Both men, for instance, have spoken out against the persecution of Christians, as Trump did in his speech in Saudi Arabia over the weekend. But it’s hard to overlook Trump’s comments about Francis in a bizarre 2015 interview. Asked what he would do if he were to meet Francis, and specifically if the pope were to critique capitalism, Trump responded, “I’d say ISIS wants to get you. You know that ISIS wants to go in and take over the Vatican? You have heard that. You know, that’s a dream of theirs, to go into Italy.” He added, “[The Vatican] better hope that capitalism works, because it’s the only thing we have right now. And it’s a great thing when it works properly.” Who knows whether Trump will actually speak this way to the Bishop of Rome, but if he does, it could end badly.

It is not unheard of for popes to criticize and even feud with the president of the United States. What is unprecedented, in modern times at least, is for a political leader to attack the religious authority of the pope and for the pope to question the Christian credentials of a political leader. The fact that this has already occurred before Trump and Francis’ meeting doesn’t bode well. It does, however, speak to the one thing the two leaders have in common: Both are attractive to their respective fan bases because they can cut through the carefully managed veneer of public office. Their tendency to go off script and “tell it like it is” has endeared them to their constituents—if not each other.