On April 12, U.S. President Donald Trump launched a lengthy broadside against Pope Leo XIV. In a social media post, he described the head of the Catholic Church as being “weak on crime”, “weak on nuclear weapons”, and “terrible for foreign policy”. As he went on, the tirade became a personal attack, with Mr. Trump taking credit for Leo – born Robert Francis Prevost – getting picked to be the Pope. “He [Prevost] wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” he wrote.

Mr. Trump ended by urging ‘Leo’ to “get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

Pope Leo XIV on Friday (April 17, 2026) warned against the use of AI to fan “polarisation, conflict, fear and violence” and criticised the “environmental devastation” caused by the extraction of rare earths to fuel the digital boom.

“The challenge posed by these systems is greater than it appears: it is not just about the use of new technologies, but about the gradual replacement of reality by its simulation,” he said in a speech at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaounde, Cameroon.