Pope Francis exchanges items with US President Donald Trump (C) and US First Woman Melania Trump throughout a personal viewers on the Vatican on Might 24, 2017. US President Donald Trump met Pope Francis on the Vatican as we speak in a keenly-anticipated first face-to-face encounter between two world leaders who’ve clashed repeatedly on a number of points.
Alessandra Tarantino/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
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Alessandra Tarantino/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
President Trump has acknowledged the pope’s loss of life in a one-line submit on Fact Social, writing: “Relaxation in Peace Pope Francis! Might God Bless him and all who beloved him!”
Trump and Francis clashed repeatedly lately.
Trump praised the pope at the beginning of Francis’s papacy, in 2013, a number of years earlier than Trump reached the White Home.
“The brand new Pope is a humble man, very very like me, which in all probability explains why I like him a lot!” Trump tweeted in December of that yr, a number of months after Francis grew to become pope.
Issues soured quickly after. In the course of the 2016 election, Francis roundly criticized Trump’s marketing campaign proposal to construct a wall on the U.S.-Canada border.
“An individual who thinks solely about constructing partitions, wherever they could be, and never constructing bridges, will not be Christian,” Francis mentioned on the time.
Trump — who aggressively courted evangelical Christian leaders and voters throughout his marketing campaign — fired again instantly, saying, “for a spiritual chief to query an individual’s religion is disgraceful.”
“If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everybody is aware of is ISIS’s final trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have solely wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President as a result of this may not have occurred,” he added.
Trump met the Pope throughout a 2017 journey to the Vatican, later telling reporters: “He’s one thing. We had a improbable assembly.” A photograph from the go to, during which Trump is smiling subsequent to a glum-looking Francis, shortly went viral.
Almost a decade later, amidst the second Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, the pope as soon as once more made a uncommon public rebuke of the president’s insurance policies.
In a public letter to U.S. Catholic bishops, February, Francis described this system of mass deportations as a “main disaster.”
He mentioned whereas nations have the precise to defend themselves, “the rightly fashioned conscience can not fail to make a crucial judgment and specific its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the unlawful standing of some migrants with criminality.”
“The act of deporting individuals who in lots of instances have left their very own land for causes of maximum poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or critical deterioration of the setting, damages the dignity of many women and men, and of complete households, and locations them in a state of explicit vulnerability and defenselessness,” Francis wrote.
The letter additionally appeared to reply to widely-criticized feedback that Vice President Vance, who’s Catholic, had made weeks earlier. Vance mentioned folks ought to care for his or her household, communities and nation earlier than caring for others — and Francis disagreed.
“Christian love will not be a concentric growth of pursuits that little by little prolong to different individuals and teams,” the pope wrote.
