Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies in Europe, sided with Pope Leo XIV in his feud with the president.
In her first direct rebuke of Trump since he retook office, Meloni denounced his comments criticizing the pope, made over the weekend.
“I find President Trump’s remarks about the Holy Father unacceptable,” she said on Monday. “The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and proper that he call for peace and condemn all forms of war.”
“I express my solidarity with Pope Leo. I won’t feel comfortable living in a society where religious leaders do what political leaders tell them to do,” she later told reporters.
Trump was outraged by her comments, directing his heaviest criticism against her yet, despite his past liberal praise of her.
“I’m shocked by her,” he told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Tuesday. “I thought she was brave; I was wrong.”
Trump extended his criticism to voice his frustration over her neutrality in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, saying, “She doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would let it blow Italy to smithereens in two minutes if it could.”
“Meloni doesn’t want to help us with NATO; she doesn’t want to help us get rid of the nuclear weapons,” he added. “She’s very different from what I thought.”
Trump’s feud with the first American pope forced most of the Italian right wing, typically favorable toward him, to issue rare criticisms. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, one of his most vocal supporters, was particularly critical.
“Attacking the pope, a symbol of peace and spiritual guide for billions of Catholics, doesn’t seem like a useful or intelligent thing to do,” he added.
Leo had given indirect criticisms of the war with Iran over the past month, but the Catholic Church’s U.S. bishops had gotten increasingly overt in recent weeks. In an unprecedented move earlier this month, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, went so far as to openly suggest that Catholic servicemembers could be justified in committing insubordination.
The breaking point for Trump came when three U.S. cardinals directly denounced the war with Iran, Trump’s deportation policies, and other aspects of the Trump administration. Trump then posted a lengthy message on Truth Social criticizing the pope, saying he was “weak on crime and terrible on foreign policy.”
Historically, the Catholic Church usually supported Christian states at war, most famously in its explicit call for war to reclaim the Holy Land in the Crusades. This approach had a lasting impact, and even centuries after the mainline Crusades to the Holy Land ended, the pope continued to invoke the concept of holy war to justify resistance against the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim entities. Several popes have even personally led armies into battle, the most recent being Pope Julius II in the 16th century.
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As recently as the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, the pope openly backed the nationalist forces of Gen. Francisco Franco and used partisan rhetoric to describe the conflict. In the United States, which was skeptical of Catholic influence for much of its existence, bishops took a more nuanced view but were typically supportive. Protestant churches have varied in their stances, but most mainline ones have been strongly supportive of the U.S. during its wars.
In contrast, the Orthodox Churches of Ukraine and Russia have openly supported their respective governments in the Russia-Ukraine war.