Trump's rift with Pope is playing out in public - it's costing him valuable support

It is not unusual for President Trump to face criticism from Catholic leaders.

His hardline immigration policies, promised in his campaign and cheered on by supporters, have prompted condemnation from church leaders.

For months it has put the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the US at odds with more right-leaning rank-and-file Catholics.

But the broad backlash in the last 48 hours, over Trump's attack on Pope Leo and his sharing of an AI image of himself as a Christ-like figure, is very different.

What is striking is where some of this criticism is coming from - loyal, conservative Catholic allies.

They are unhappy, not just because of Trump's public friction with Pope Leo, but at a much deeper level over the Iran war.

The uproar over Trump's lengthy social media attack on the first American pope, as too liberal and too "weak on crime", together with the AI image, have crystallised a shift in opinion among many Catholic conservatives since the war began six weeks ago.

"I pray that all of this will clarify for people that we don't look to a national leader, we don't look to those who have the most money or the most weapons. We look to Christ," says Bishop Joseph Strickland.

These words come from a man who, only last year, participated in a prayer event to "consecrate" the president's Mar-a-Lago home.

In 2024, Strickland delivered the keynote speech at CPAC where Donald Trump was the guest of honor. In 2020, he addressed a march of Trump supporters calling to overturn the election results.

He has been a staunch supporter of Donald Trump through thick and thin. Indeed, his overt political alignment, and open confrontation with the late Pope Francis, even played a part in his removal from office as Bishop of Tyler, Texas.

Yet, in the face of starkly competing White House and Vatican narratives regarding the war in Iran and the wider Middle East, Bishop Strickland has made a rare break from the administration.

"I do not believe this conflict meets the criteria of a just war. I stand with the Holy Father and his call for peace. This is not about politics. It's about moral truth," he told the BBC, saying the scale of death and suffering faced by innocent civilians meant the war could never be viewed as "just".

More than that, he has challenged the White House on its handling of the war and encouraged other Catholics to do the same.

"It becomes very dark when religion is used to justify immoral behaviour... using religion to justify especially dropping bombs is contradicting what the faith is about," says Bishop Strickland.

When asked about Trump's attack on Pope Leo and the image some have referred to as "AI Jesus", which Trump said he thought was a doctor not Jesus, Bishop Strickland said he felt it was his "duty" to remind the US president of the Gospel of Matthew. He pointed to a passage that teaches that supreme power resides with Christ and not with any man.

"When world leaders forget this truth, all are in peril," he said.

This shift in the way conservative Catholics regard the US president comes with political perils, given that he increased his support among that group in the 2024 election.

It remains a complex picture, according to Pew Research Center. Racial background played a significant role, with 62% of White Catholics voting for Donald Trump and 37% for Kamala Harris, while 41% of Hispanic Catholics voted Trump and 58% Harris.

This still constituted a trend towards the Republican Party among Catholics as a whole, but with pronounced splits.

Historically, the data suggests that when it comes to outlook, politics is more important than faith for a lot of American Catholics. They are largely split along party lines, says Greg Smith, Senior Associate Director of Religion Research at Pew Research Center.

US Catholics have constituencies that hold highly polarised positions on issues like abortion and immigration. It is why a coming together like this among Catholics on the left and right over the Iran war is rare.

Their views of the head of the Catholic Church bear this out. Pope Francis was much more popular among Catholic Democrats than Catholic Republicans, while Leo enjoys high support from both, according to Pew.

Pope Francis was often seen as a spontaneous progressive, who sometimes alienated Catholic traditionalists - for example in his restrictions on Latin Mass, which Pope Leo has eased.

The Pope is not above a certain level of criticism, says Peter Wolfgang, the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, and a prominent voice of the US Catholic "right".

"The Pope is the Pope, we owe him a certain amount of deference, but I don't think that Catholicism wants the obedience of cadavers. We are living, thinking persons," he says.

Wolfgang has transitioned from a cautious Trump pragmatist, keen that abortion laws be overturned, to a more enthusiastic supporter. He is a strong defender of mass deportation policies and the brand of Catholic nationalism represented by JD Vance. But he is now highly critical of the US president's behaviour towards Pope Leo.

"President Trump does not understand how Catholicism works. The Pope is not merely a head of state, he is the Vicar of Christ. Attacks on him are received as attacks on the Church itself. The more he attacks the Pope the more his support will drop among his Catholic voters," Wolfgang told the BBC.

Peter Wolfgang says his faith led him to challenge US Catholic bishops when they criticised President Trump's immigration policies, but the same faith makes him opposed to this war.

"When President Trump is out there talking about ending Iranian civilisation, or Secretary Hegseth is out there making some bloodthirsty prayer that is unrecognisable to Catholics, then it's completely natural for conservative Catholics to line up behind Pope Leo," he says.

Soon after the first US and Israeli attacks on Iran, US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth recited a highly controversial prayer at a Pentagon worship service that talked of "overwhelming violence" and "justice executed swiftly and without remorse".

In his writings, Peter Wolfgang often reserves his fiercest criticism for the Catholic "left" but he thinks the Iran issue has to some extent unified factions, partly because of the clarity of the Pope's anti-war messaging.

Unusually no senior US Catholic member of clergy publicly has supported the war in Iran. Even Robert Barron, Bishop of Winona-Rochester, a key Trump ally, demanded that the US president apologise to the pope for his angry tirade, a demand that was rebuffed.

Positioned on the liberal wing of the Catholic church, Steven Greydanus, a deacon and prominent commentator, also sees this unusual convergence of opinion.

He feels that a contributory factor has been the White House's "subversion" of the principles of "Just War Theory" - theology that determines when it is right to go to war and how to conduct that war.

But he says it is also partly down to the contrast between President Trump and the "healing presence" of Pope Leo.

"While I am grieved by the directness of Donald Trump's attacks on Pope Leo, in a way I welcome the clarity of the choice Catholics are being presented with," Greydanus says.

The Vatican has stuck to the narrative that what we have seen play out in recent weeks is not a battle between Pope Leo and President Trump at all, but a Pope clearly drawing on his faith to oppose the logic of this war.

But when President Trump said that "a whole civilisation would die" in Iran, the pope did respond directly, calling the threat "truly unacceptable".

"There is an important difference between challenging a man and challenging the principle that makes war possible," says the Reverend Antonio Spadaro SJ, Undersecretary for the Vatican's Dicastery (Ministry) for Culture and Education.

Rev Spadaro told the BBC that while dialogue was happening behind the scenes in "places of power", the Pope also had to make public pronouncements against the conflict to "mark the moral limit" of what was acceptable.

So what is the view from Vatican City about some convergence between US Catholics on the left and right in their backing of Pope Leo's anti-war messaging?

"He does not unite everyone, of course," says Rev Spadaro. "But Pope Leo moves the Catholic debate away from a purely partisan track."

There are questions about why President Trump would post an AI image that was certain to alienate and offend some of his supporters. Unusually, he did back down and delete it.

And there are questions about the the motive of the tirade against Pope Leo. For some, it appeared to be designed to diminish the Pope's opposition to the war.

"But in trying to delegitimise, Trump's attack implicitly acknowledges the weight of the pope's moral voice," says the Vatican's Rev Spadaro.

"If Leo were irrelevant, he would not deserve a word. Instead, he is invoked, named, opposed - a sign that his words matter."