Christopher Hale: ‘Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.’ The great Benedict XVI wrote those words in Truth and Tolerance more than twenty years ago, and they hang over recent days like a warning finally come due.
On April 12, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social and mocked the Successor of Peter, calling Pope Leo XIV ‘terrible on Foreign Policy’ for the Pope’s opposition to the widening wars in Iran and Venezuela. Hours later, the president posted an AI-generated image of himself depicted as Christ the healer. Evangelical pastors erupted – among them Doug Wilson, whose parishioners include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, along with the podcaster Riley Gaines. Within a day, the Christ image came down. The post mocking our Holy Father stayed up.
