Donald Trump’s confrontation with Pope Leo XIV appears to be costing him support among US Catholics, with a new poll suggesting that most now say they do not approve of the president as tensions over the Iran war and immigration harden into an open rift between the White House and the Vatican.
For context, the numbers come from a Shaw & Company Research and Beacon Research survey, published on Catholic news site Zenit on Monday, that tracked Catholic opinion as the war in Iran intensified and Donald Trump escalated his attacks on the Church’s new leader. According to the poll, the president’s approval rating among Catholics has dropped to 48%, while 52% now say they disapprove of him. The same survey found that 60% of Catholic respondents disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, compared with 40% who approve.
Jorge Enrique Mujica of Zenit.org, reflecting on the data, argued that something deeper than routine political volatility is underway. ‘What emerges from this convergence of data and events is not simply a decline in approval ratings, but a more profound recalibration,’ he said, suggesting that many Catholics now see their political choices as a direct test of how faithfully they are living their beliefs.
‘For many Catholic voters, the question is no longer confined to partisan preference,’ Mujica added. ‘It touches on the coherence between faith and political judgment, particularly in matters of war, peace, and the moral limits of power.’
Donald Trump, Pope Leo And The Iran War
The latest slide in Catholic support for Donald Trump followed a series of highly public clashes with Pope Leo XIV, who took office after the death of Pope Francis last year. Relations between the president and the new pontiff have deteriorated quickly, centring on the Iran war but spilling over into familiar flashpoints such as migration and law and order.
Tensions escalated after Pope Leo delivered a stark sermon condemning nuclear warfare while bombs were falling on Iran and parts of the wider Middle East. From the Vatican pulpit, he insisted that God does not endorse nuclear war, a line that landed squarely against the president’s own rhetoric and strategy.
Trump, for his part, has shown little interest in de-escalation. Speaking to reporters, he said, ‘I don’t think it’s necessary’ to resolve the dispute with the Vatican. On Truth Social, he went further, posting a lengthy tirade that read more like a campaign stump speech than a diplomatic reply.
‘I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,’ Trump wrote on Monday, accusing Leo of being soft both on Tehran and on hostile regimes in Latin America. He went on to attack the pope’s criticism of US action against Venezuela, claiming the country had been ‘sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country.’
He framed his clash with Rome as a mandate issue. The pope, Trump complained, was criticising a president who was ‘doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do’, boasting of ‘Record Low Numbers in Crime’ and ‘the Greatest Stock Market in History’.
Catholic Backlash To Donald Trump’s War Talk
If that was designed to stiffen his base, the poll numbers suggest many Catholics are unconvinced. Pope Leo has emerged as one of the most forceful critics of Trump’s conduct over Iran, denouncing the president’s threats to annihilate Iranian civilisation as ‘truly unacceptable’. He has been joined, unusually, by critics from across the political spectrum, including some of Trump’s longtime allies such as Tucker Carlson.
The president has responded by questioning the pope’s competence on core political issues. In one broadside, he labelled the Chicago-born pontiff ‘WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy’, dismissing his moral appeals as naïve in the face of hardened adversaries.
Leo has remained focused on the human cost of war rather than the personal feud. In a combative address on Thursday, he condemned what he called the ‘masters of war’, accusing them of ignoring the basic asymmetry between destruction and repair. ‘The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild,’ he said. ‘They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education and restoration are nowhere to be found.’
Those words will resonate with Catholics already disquieted by images from the conflict zones and the increasingly apocalyptic language coming out of Washington. The Shaw & Company and Beacon poll does not claim to predict how Catholics will ultimately vote, nor does it establish a direct causal link between every papal remark and every shift in opinion. But it does suggest that Trump’s posture on Iran — and his evident eagerness to go toe-to-toe with the pope — is eroding support in a religious constituency that Republicans have long treated as a crucial, if sometimes volatile, pillar.
Compounding that unease is a separate episode that touched a raw nerve for many Christians. Trump recently posted an AI-generated image of himself on Truth Social that appeared to depict him in an explicitly Christ-like manner. After critics denounced the image as ‘blasphemous’, the president insisted he had believed he was being shown as a doctor rather than as Jesus. Even so, he deleted the post — a rare retreat from a man who typically doubles down.
Nothing in the latest polling can yet be treated as definitive, and views among Catholics, like the conflict itself, remain in flux. Still, the numbers are an early warning that Donald Trump’s decision to take on Pope Leo XIV in the middle of a war may be exacting a political price well beyond the walls of the Vatican.
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