By Albert Mohler.
PART I
President Trump vs. Pope Leo: The White House Squares Off with Vatican over a Range of Issues
The controversy between the President of the United States and the Catholic Pope continues, and oddly enough, it’s caught the attention of much of the watching world, it seems. The most immediate occasion is an exchange between the President and the Pope, some direct, some indirect, and you have now open criticism coming from the Speaker of the House, the Vice President of the United States, others in the administration.
Of course, leading point in this is the President himself. Now, at this point, let’s just make an historical observation. This is the most public conflict between a President of the United States and the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church in all time. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Now, that’s not to say that the papacy has not run into political conflict before because it certainly has.
As a matter of fact, there were centuries of political conflict between the papacy and other kingdoms, most importantly, European kingdoms. You even had a time in which the papacy was in exile. You also had major developments such as the fact that by the time you get into the late medieval age and you go into centuries closer to us, and in particular, even the 19th century, you had the Pope as not only a religious, but as a temporal authority over a significant amount of land.
Read also: The Swapping of Roles: Pope Leo and JD Vance by Gavin Ashenden