Catholics finally splitting with Trump over Iran war and Israel

In 2024, President Donald Trump handily beat Vice President Kamala Harris with Catholic voters by a 12-point margin.

Almost a year-and-a-half into Trump’s second term, he began attacking Pope Leo XIV, personally and aggressively. Then he shared an image depicting himself as Jesus Christ, days after his defense secretary called for war in the name of Jesus Christ.

Between Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025 and today, tensions have steadily grown between Trump and the Catholic strain of his coalition. This relationship started ripping apart during Israel’s brutal war against Gaza and is now shattering during the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. Ahead of this year’s midterms, Republicans cannot afford to lose the Catholic constituency, which is considered one of the most important swing votes in American politics today.

Meanwhile, the Vatican has come out forcefully against the U.S. and Israel’s wars, setting up a war of words between the administration and their Evangelical supporters on one side and American Catholics and the church on the other.

The Vatican has long opposed Israel’s war in Gaza. Aside from raising alarms over the humanitarian devastation, the church, dating back to Pope Francis, has sought protection of ancient Christian communities in Israel and Palestine. In July of 2025, the Holy Family Church, the only Catholic church in Gaza, was hit by Israeli fire, killing three. The Israelis said it was an accident.

The criticism has carried over to the U.S.-Israel bombing of Iran, which began on Feb. 28. Now the Vatican’s criticisms include the administration’s constant framing of Operation Epic Fury as a holy war blessed by God.

Two weeks before Easter, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spoke at the Pentagon about the U.S. military using “overwhelming force” and lauded its special ability to rain “death and destruction from above” on America’s Iranian enemies. Hegseth urged Americans to pray for military victory “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and to do so “every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches.”

On Holy Thursday, Pope Leo appeared to respond directly, saying such a Christian view was “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” On April 10th, Pope Leo would add, “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

This obviously rankled Trump, who — after his own invocation of God amid threats to “reign hell” on the Iranians on Easter Sunday, one of Catholicism’s most holy days — struck out at the pope, saying he is “weak on crime,” knows nothing about foreign policy, and caters to “the radical left.” Trump then suggested he was the reason why the Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected to the papacy in 2025 after Pope Francis’ death earlier last year.

“He 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,” the president wrote. “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

Trump then shared an AI-generated image that appeared to depict himself as Jesus Christ — a resemblance he denied shortly before taking down the image amid social media outrage.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians, the U.S.’s largest organization of Irish Catholics, reacted in a statement: “When a president mocks the Vicar of Christ and then cloaks himself in Christ’s image, he has left the realm of politics entirely.”

“He has committed an act of desecration against a faith held sacred by over a billion souls,” it added. There are approximately 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, and 75 million in the United States.

It’s as if Trump is deliberately torpedoing his Catholic base, and over what? Critics say war and his blank check to Israel — which wants so desperately to keep the U.S. in the position of funding and fighting — are at the root of the problem. As defenders of both, American Evangelical Christians have been mixing it up with Catholic voices on the right for months, at one point suggesting that Catholics in Gaza did not deserve sympathy.

Over the summer, the Evangelical Christian editor of the Babylon Bee Joel Berry stirred the pot after Israeli shelling hit the Church of the Holy Family (it had been sheltering Palestinian Christians during the civilian slaughter). “This won’t be easy for people to hear, but there are only about 200 professed Catholics still living in Gaza and they all support Hamas,” he posted on X.

“True Christian faith still exists in Gaza, but it’s all underground. Anyone allowed by Hamas to practice openly is allowed to do so only because they aid and support the terror regime,” Berry added.

This drew a swift backlash.“I don’t know about anyone else, but as a Catholic who supports and prays for my persecuted Christian brothers and sisters in Gaza and the Holy Land, I won’t be sharing or boosting anything produced by the Babylon Bee or its anti-Catholic, dispensationalist editors ever again,” wrote author and Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson.

Last summer saw a number of Catholics on the right start questioning further support of the war in Gaza.

Military contractor (and Catholic) Erik Prince, no pacifist, accused Israel in August 2025 of taking “pot shots” at the cross on the top of the Holy Family Church. He said the U.S. should stop supporting Israel. Hamas “need to die,” he continued, but "the real losers are the normal people in Gaza just trying to live.” He has also criticized the current war in Iran.

Things got worse last week when Vice President JD Vance, who is a Catholic convert (he has a new book coming out in June about it), suggested the pope should stay in his lane. “In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” the vice president said at a conservative Turning Point USA event.

This prompted the chairman of the U.S. Catholic bishops committee, Bishop James Massa, to issue a statement clarifying Pope Leo’s role and duties, “For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war.”

UnHerd Editor Sohrab Ahmari has been a supporter of Vance, but is frustrated with a strain of conservative Catholics who appear to be ignoring the faith’s teachings on Just War and the sanctity of life when it comes to Israel’s conduct, primarily the widespread killing of civilians, and U.S. material and political support for it.

“There is a Catholic church that reminds us that it’s a citadel of civilization, of rationality, this institution that so many people think is pre-modern … actually is unbending when it comes to basic questions of morality,” Ahmari told Politico. “Lashing out in revenge … for 47 years of Iranian acts that we disapprove of and should and can disapprove of is not reason to then bomb the country.”

If the Trump administration is seemingly turning off Catholic Americans, the last bastion of strident Christian U.S. support for its pro-war, pro-Israel agenda appears to be Evangelicals.

This is something Israeli leaders seem to comprehend, particularly given the Zionist theology of so many American Evangelical Christians (including Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Hegseth himself). In a now infamous interview, Huckabee told Tucker Carlson that essentially Israel has a biblical right to take Middle East lands.

In December, more than 1,000 American Christian pastors and influencers traveled to Israel, all paid for by that country’s government, “to provide training and prepare participants to serve as unofficial ambassadors for Israel in their communities.”

Meanwhile, Pope Leo says he is not afraid of the Trump Administration, but the president might want to start worrying about Catholic voters ahead of the midterms.

A poll conducted at the end of March, before Trump’s attacks on the pope were in full swing, showed that the president’s approval among Catholic voters had already dropped to 48%, with 52% disapproving.

Religion has been invoked in many wars across history, with uneasy relations between secular and religious leaders throughout. But the Trump administration is going to find out the hard way that Americans are uneasy with this feud.