MAY 24 — Pope Francis and Donald Trump have been circling each other for a while now. Ever since Francis first visited the US, during the early days of Trump’s presidential campaign, it’s been hard not to ponder what they make of each other.
Sometimes they’ve invited the comparisons: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis told reporters after visiting Mexico last year, not mentioning Trump by name — but inevitably bringing to mind one wall in particular.
Trump, for his part, has swung between suggesting the Vatican is weak on terrorism and praising Francis for having “a lot of energy.”
On Wednesday, Francis and Trump are to actually meet. If all goes according to plan, their encounter will be subdued. Ken Hackett, a former US ambassador to the Holy See, put it this way: “From the Vatican’s point of view, it’s pretty normal fare for them to deal with heads of state.
They’ve been doing it for centuries.” The two leaders probably will spend less than an hour in each other’s company, including the exchange of gifts and requisite photo-ops. It seems unlikely the meeting will be anything other than, well, diplomatic.
But the juxtaposition of Trump and Francis, however brief, will be brimming with meaning. They offer nothing less than two competing visions of how humans should live together, two different ways of responding to the anxieties and dilemmas of our time.
The differences between the man in white and the one with the orange scowl may seem obvious. But ever since Trump shot to the lead in the Republican primaries, a number of conservative critics have argued he and Francis actually are quite similar.
Once his nomination seemed a real possibility, Matthew Schmitz claimed in the Washington Post that Francis and Trump have “much in common” because, to take one example, they both are “outsiders bent on shaking up their establishments.”
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat declared them “strangely alike” — after all, both “have become leading populists in our increasingly populist moment.”
And after Trump’s surprise victory in November, Rod Dreher at the American Conservative said that the case for “comparing Francis to Trump is even stronger now than it was earlier this year.”
The analogies show no signs of abating: Just this week, the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn began a column by plaintively asking, “Is Pope Francis the Donald Trump of popes?” (No surprises here: The leaders are “more alike than commonly supposed,” he observes, particularly on global trade.)
It’s almost enough to make you hope Trump finishes his first term — who can imagine all the deep resonances between the two that will have been discovered by then?
Many of these arguments focus on style rather than substance; Schmitz, for example, notes supposed “rhetorical similarities” between Francis and Trump, while McGurn underscored that both have a “penchant for insults.”
It’s easy to understand why such airy assertions, or deploying vague formulations like “populist,” are necessary. When it comes to actual issues, the two leaders differ dramatically.
On climate change and the environment, for example, Francis is one of the most forceful voices on the world scene; his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ urged all people of good will, not just Christians, to care for our common home.
Trump, on the other hand, almost is a parody of climate-change denialism, suggesting that the concept was a Chinese-invented hoax; Scott Pruitt, appointed by Trump to run the EPA, contests that carbon-dioxide emissions are a main cause of global warming.
That’s not all. When it comes to the economy, the pope assailed trickle-down economics in his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, as having “never been confirmed by the facts,” and condemned the “tyranny” of money.
Trump’s proposals, on the other hand, are breathtakingly pro-rich, especially the massive tax cuts he wants to give the wealthiest Americans, like himself.
Francis has urged us to not abandon refugees, while Trump has sought to ban them from entering the United States. Francis believes health care is a human right and not a privilege, but Trump neatly reverses the formulation, moving aggressively to make it unaffordable for all but the privileged.
Lurking beneath all these policy particulars, however, is a deeper incompatibility. Francis has made “mercy” the theme of his papacy — he has called it “the very foundation of the church’s life,” and has tried to build a “culture of mercy.”
Mercy sides with the poor, the sick, the failures, the “losers” of this world. While it can only be imperfectly applied to politics, mercy means upholding the dignity of every human being.
It means solidarity with prisoners, workers and immigrants. Living mercifully, as Francis has put it, means striving to “break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness” that mark too much of our lives.
If there is one element that holds together the dominant Republican worldview, perhaps it is a rejection of mercy.
In that, the congressional GOP has found a ready ally in Trump — only consider his just-released “wish list” budget, which proposed massively slashing aid to the poor, the sick, and the disabled. Trump and his allies are only for the winners.
If you are struggling to feed your family, you deserve almost no help. If you are an immigrant, you deserve even less. If you are sick, who cares? Trump offers the logic of the GOP in its purest form: a brutal mix of bigotry and cruelty.
The meeting between Francis and Trump comes at a time not just of political crisis, but of division among US Catholics — and the two seem deeply connected.
A recent Georgetown analysis has shown that the Catholic vote was close to evenly split in November, while white Catholics gave Trump a solid majority of their vote.
That fact only affirms the need for Francis’s message of solidarity and hope — both in the church he leads, and in a broader world marked by suffering and fear.
When the photos of Francis and Trump at the Vatican are published, there will be more than a few voices on the right who want to keep blurring the contrast between them. Don’t be fooled. The differences are there for all with eyes to see. — Bloomberg
* Matthew Sitman is an associate editor of Commonweal magazine. His work has appeared in Dissent, the Daily Beast and other publications.
** This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
