The day before he died, Pope Francis expressed the Easter Sunday message of unity and appeal for marginalized and migrants in his final public address. “All of us,” he said, “there are God’s children!”
President Donald Trump released an offensive post on Sunday’s other report on Sunday, including a happy Easter, including “radical left madmen”, “weak and ineffective judges and coercive officials” and former President Joe Biden, “our worst and worst president”.
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Some basic differences between the US President and the late Pope – not only their diverse styles, but their positions for migration, the environment and poverty – will focus sharply when Trump travels to Rome for Francis funeral on Friday, which will be held on Saturday morning on St. Peter.
David Gibson, director of the Center for Religion and Culture at the University of Fordham, New York, said, “It is obvious that it was a full relationship.”
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The relationship erode
Things were not great between Trump and Pope during Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021.
Argentine Pope and US President soon joined immigration. In 2016, Francis, who mentioned Trump’s candidate at the time, called anyone who would build a wall to prevent migrants “not Christian”. Trump called the comment “shameful”.
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Over the billionaire divergence of the star of the former reality over the years with Francis, which was known for a modest style, Trump’s support gradually increased among American Catholics. He eliminated them in his last presidential campaign and many influential bishops are among his supporters.
Trump, who identified himself as a “non -female Christian”, has long calculated Christians, especially evangelical Christians, among its key blocks of support.
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His policies on abortion, including his role in appointing three of the five US Supreme Court judges who have overturned national abortion rights, deepened his support among Christians, including many conservative Catholics.
His policy is also closely aligned with many conservative American Catholic bishops who were often contrary to Francis’s more progressive approach to the Church.
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The Republican President begged Catholics last year to vote for him. In October, when he approached the charity dinner Al Smith in New York, which receives millions of dollars for Catholic charity organizations, Trump said: “You have to get out and vote. And Catholics, you have to vote for me.”
Many Catholics Yes. In the 2024 elections, Trump won a Catholic voice, according to AP VOTECAST, a survey of more than 120,000 voters. In 2020, the Catholic vote was evenly divided between Joe Biden, but in 2024, Trump supported 54% of Catholic voters and 44% supported Kamal Harris.
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For Trump, the support of Catholics did not receive Francis’
But while Trump may have won a Catholic vote, he never won over Francis.
Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, who briefly met Francis the day before he died, rejected the disagreements of the Pope with the administration and told reporters this week that the Pope was a “much wider figure” than American politics – a man who led the church with 1.4 billion members around the world.
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“I am aware that he had some disagreements with some policies of our administration,” Vance said. “He also had a lot of agreements with some policies of our administration. I will not file a human inheritance by talking about politics.”
Trump also met Francis, at a predominantly cordial meeting in the Vatican in 2017. However, their differences persisted.
In February this year, Francis sent a letter to American bishops that was similar to his comments on immigration almost ten years earlier.
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He condemned that Trump’s administration would embark on plans for mass deportations and noted that in the Bible there were infant Jesus and his family themselves refugees in Egypt and fled from the threat of their lives.
Some leading bishops applauded some of the new Trump Administration initiatives about the “selection of school” and gender -defining politicians as determined at birth. Francis, while adhering to the Church’s teaching about sexuality, has taken a more tolerant attitude towards people LGBTQ.
The other prominent bishops, named Francis, are more sympathetic to his priorities. These include the new Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Robert Mcelroy.
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Catholics are a diverse group and act accordingly
However, the Catholic vote is not monolithic. John Fea, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, said that many conservative Catholics, even though they respect the Pope’s Office, “do not like his progressive views” on immigrants and his permission blessing for the same sex.
“Views of many conservative American Catholics line-ups with the brand of populism: Strong boundaries, Pro-Life for abortion, concerns about the critical theory of race in schools, etc.,” Fea, author “believe me: Evangelical way to Donald Trump,” he said e-mail.
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On the other hand, he speculated that many progressive Catholics, who share concerns about the social justice of Pope Francis, probably did not vote for Trump.
In addition to migration, Francis also varied with Trump on the environment and wrote an encyclical calling for climate, unlike the President’s pressure to bring fossil fuels back. Francis also became a death penalty, which Trump supports.
Stylistically, Trump’s great personality also contrasted with Francis’s more self -being and welcome tone, the curious of his “Who am I to judge?” Answer the question of homosexual priests.
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Trump and Francis shared some political objectives such as abortion and religious freedom, and the US-Vatikan relations include more than two people, said Steven Millies, director of the Bernadin Center in the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
“However, the harmonization was more than at a personal or political level, of course,” said Millies, a professor of public theology.
“They were deeply different people – the one who was made up of Jesuit spirituality and lived his life in deepening the faith he shared with the world, the other who mangled the quotations of the script, sold the Bible for personal profit and uses Christian faith as the brand’s identity in market competition.”
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