Pope Leo Reportedly Unlikely to Visit US After Trainwreck Trump Admin Meeting

(Photo by Eric Vandeville/Abaca/Sipa USA) (Sipa via AP Images)

Pope Leo XIV may never visit the U.S. under the Trump administration following a disastrous meeting between the Pentagon and a Vatican diplomat.

The Pope has been at odds with President Donald Trump’s administration for nearly a year. Since the beginning of his papacy, Pope Leo has repeatedly expressed support for immigrants and criticized the way they’ve been vilified across the globe. In recent weeks, Pope Leo has strongly condemned the war in Iran while taking a number of indirect shots at the Trump administration for its role in the conflict.

According to a Monday report from The Free Press, the two sides have also had more direct conflict. Following Pope Leo’s “state of the world” address this past January, the Pentagon invited Holy See ambassador to the U.S. Cardinal Christophe Pierre for a meeting. The move was characterized as “unprecedented” in the report, as “there is no public evidence of any Vatican official ever taking a meeting at the Pentagon.”

There, U.S. officials expressed their disapproval of the Pope’s speech. The report continued:

According to both Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the meeting, Pentagon brass picked apart the pontiff’s January speech, reading it as a hostile message directed at Trump’s policies. What particularly enraged the Pentagon, one Vatican official said, was the passage in which Leo appeared to challenge the Donroe Doctrine—Trump’s update of the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere.

In his speech, the Pope declared: “A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.”

At one point in the meeting, the report said, one U.S. official made mention of the Avignon Papacy of the 14th century. During this time, the French Crown used its military power to influence the papacy.

Tensions have apparently grown so severe that Pope Leo, the first-ever U.S. born pontiff, refused to accept Trump’s invitation to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. The report added:

Instead, on July 4, 2026, the American pope will visit Lampedusa, a tiny island in the Mediterranean that serves as a gateway for North African migrants risking everything to reach Europe. No pope has ever been more aware of what that date means, and Leo is too deliberate to have chosen July 4 by accident.

One Vatican official put it bluntly: “The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration.”

—

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!