Conservative Catholic Intellectuals Are Quiet About Trump’s Attack on the Pope

The conservative Catholic intelligentsia has been conspicuously quiet about President Donald Trump’s recent diatribes against Pope Leo XIV.

Various right-leaning and pro-Trump American Catholics, in contrast, have expressed dismay about the president’s statements. Why the discrepancy?

Leading conservative Catholic scholars — Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame and Robert George at Princeton, among others — are highly public intellectuals, routinely weighing in on religious and political topics.

Yet it’s as if they’re going out of their way to avoid the Trump-pope kerfuffle — even as conservative Catholic faith leaders and advocates are speaking out.

In March, Pope Leo called the Iran war a “scandal for humanity” and, on April 7, called Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization “truly unacceptable.”

In a Truth Social post on April 12, Trump called Pope Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” “I don’t think he’s doing a very good job,” the president told reporters the same day. “I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo.” A few days later, the president falsely claimed that the pope “says Iran can have a nuclear weapon.”

Bishop Robert Barron, a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission who has been described as having gone “full MAGA,” wrote on X that the president’s comments “were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful” and that “the President owes the Pope an apology.”

Trump’s post was “insulting” and “crossed … a line,” Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of the conservative advocacy group CatholicVote, wrote on X.

Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation — who describes himself as “a serious Roman Catholic and a proud supporter of President Trump” — told USA Today that “there are more constructive ways for the President to engage with the church on policy disagreements.”

Yet one is hard pressed to find similar statements from leading conservative Catholic scholars. New Lines reached out to several of them for this piece, but only one responded — and declined to comment.

“The lacuna is the story,” Steve Millies, chair of the Department of Historical and Doctrinal Studies at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and author of “Good Intentions: A History of Catholic Voters’ Road from Roe to Trump” (2018), told New Lines. “This is making a lot of Catholic intellectuals very uncomfortable.”

And perhaps that discomfort explains their silence.

Vermeule is one of the key thinkers associated with “Catholic integralism,” the idea that doctrine shouldn’t be consigned to the private realm but should instead guide public policy and social order.

Deneen, another “Catholic integralist,” responded to my request but declined to offer a comment. He hasn’t written anything about the issue either — including on X. Likewise for George, who heads Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Ditto for R. R. (Rusty) Reno, the editor of First Things, an influential magazine of conservative Christian thought. (First Things is not an exclusively Catholic publication, but Reno is a Catholic.) Reno did not respond to multiple email messages from New Lines. Nor has he mentioned the Trump-pope dustup in his column for the magazine or on the podcast he hosts.

Sohrab Ahmari’s recent essay “The Pope versus the President” is an exception to the rule. Ahmari is the U.S. editor of UnHerd (where the essay appeared) and was one of the founding editors of the magazine Compact. A convert to Catholicism, Ahmari has been identified as an important intellectual influence on Vice President JD Vance.

In the essay, Ahmari took Trump to task for the tone of his broadside against Pope Leo. The president “slammed the Roman pontiff as ‘WEAK on crime’, as if he were addressing the Democratic mayor of a coastal city,” he wrote. But he also challenged his fellow Catholic intellectuals.

“First Things has yet to raise a critical peep about Trump’s anti-Leo harangue,” he wrote. “[M]any of the Catholic Republicans in my social networks,” he observed, “appear more anxious about their relationship with the party, the White House, and the conservative world in the wake of the Leo spat than they are about the honor of the Roman pontiff.”

Ahmari told New Lines that he sees statements like “Not my pope!” and “Leo is a communist!” from MAGA Catholics “all the time” on social media.

Since Ahmari wrote his essay, First Things has published a pair of pieces that offer criticisms of Trump’s tone toward the pope. Dan Hitchens, a senior editor of the magazine, described Trump’s “pride and vengefulness”; Stephen Daisley, a contributor, criticized the president’s “ill-mannered and ill-lettered denunciation of the Holy Father.”

But the leading conservative Catholic intellectuals have been missing in action on the Trump-pope controversy. The silence is deafening.