EWTN News portal reports on April 16, 2026, that U.S. President Donald Trump downplayed his public criticism of the usurper Leo XIV, stating he has “nothing against the pope” while continuing to falsely claim that Leo said Iran “can have a nuclear weapon.” Trump declared, “I want him to preach the Gospel,” even as he asserted his own authority to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, stating, “As president of the United States of America, I can’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” The article notes Trump’s support among Catholics has dipped since the launch of the Iran war, with 52% of Catholic voters now disapproving of his job performance. This entire spectacle—a secular political leader dictating terms to the occupant of the Vatican, and the conciliar apparatus reduced to issuing platitudes about “peace” while the world hurtles toward nuclear annihilation—is a direct and damning consequence of the post-conciliar apostasy that has gutted the Church of her supernatural mission and reduced her to a toothless humanitarian NGO.
The “Gospel” According to Caesar: A Profane Inversion of the Order of Powers
When Donald Trump declares, “I want him to preach the Gospel,” and simultaneously asserts that “As president of the United States of America, I can’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he is not merely engaging in political theater. He is enacting, with brazen clarity, the very inversion of the divine order that the conciliar revolution has made possible. Here sits a secular ruler—a man who has never professed the integral Catholic faith, who has lived in public contradiction of every moral teaching of the Church—presuming to instruct the occupant of the Vatican on what the “Gospel” demands, while simultaneously claiming for the State the prerogative of deciding matters of life and death that belong to God alone.
This is the logical terminus of the errors condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors: the denial that the Church is a true and perfect society endowed with proper and perpetual rights conferred by her Divine Founder (Proposition 19); the claim that the civil power defines the limits of the Church’s rights (ibid.); the assertion that the Church has no temporal power, direct or indirect (Proposition 24); and the ultimate error that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The conciliar sect, having embraced religious liberty, false ecumenism, and the “autonomy of earthly affairs” as defined by the heretical Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes, has no doctrinal ground from which to resist this inversion. The neo-church has already surrendered the public reign of Christ the King; Trump merely walks through the door that John XXIII, Paul VI, and their successors flung wide open.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, taught with unmistakable clarity: “The State must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders and Congregations, both male and female, who are indeed the most valiant helpers of the Pastors of the Church and contribute most to the expansion and establishment of Christ’s Kingdom.” And further: “The annual celebration of this solemnity will also remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him: for it will remind them of the final judgment, in which Christ, whom not only was cast out of the state, but was also forgotten and ignored through contempt, will very severely avenge these insults.” The conciliar sect has not only failed to remind states of this duty—it has actively collaborated in the expulsion of Christ from public life, and now a secular president dares to tell the Vatican what the “Gospel” means.
The Antipope Leo XIV and the Conciliar Sect’s Silence on the Supernatural
The article reports that Leo XIV “has several times in recent weeks called for peace while criticizing the ongoing U.S.-led war against Iran” and that he “has spoken out explicitly against the expansion of global nuclear armaments in the recent past.” These are the platitudes of a secular diplomat, not the pronouncements of a true successor of St. Peter. Where is the call to repentance? Where is the proclamation that the salvation of souls is the supreme law of the Church (salus animarum suprema lex)? Where is the teaching that the Church’s mission is not to broker geopolitical arrangements but to lead souls to eternal life through the sacraments, the preaching of the integral faith, and the submission of all nations to the social reign of Christ the King?
The conciliar sect’s silence on supernatural matters is the gravest accusation that can be leveled against it. St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, identified the core of Modernism as the denial that religion is objectively true and its reduction to subjective experience and social utility. The “peace” advocated by Leo XIV is not the Pax Christi—the peace that comes only through submission to the true faith and the sacramental life of the Church—but the false peace of the world, the peace that Our Lord explicitly said He came not to bring: “Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword” (Matt. 10:34). The conciliar sect, having embraced the “cult of man” and the “democratization” of the Church, can offer nothing more than the same tired humanitarianism that every secular institution peddles.
Trump’s False Claims and the Conciliar Sect’s Complicity in Disinformation
The article notes that Trump “falsely claimed” that Leo said Iran “can have a nuclear weapon,” and that “it is unclear why Trump has repeatedly claimed that Leo has advocated for nuclear weapons in Iran.” This is a critical point, but the article fails to draw the obvious conclusion: the conciliar sect’s deliberate ambiguity and refusal to speak with doctrinal precision creates the very conditions in which such distortions flourish. When the neo-church speaks in the vague, bureaucratic language of UN resolutions rather than the clear, authoritative language of the Magisterium, it invites misinterpretation and manipulation by secular powers.
Moreover, the article’s framing—treating Trump’s statements and Leo’s statements as though they carry equal weight, as though this is a mere “disagreement” between two legitimate authorities—is itself a symptom of the conciliar disease. The Catholic position is not that the Church and the State are two equal powers negotiating from positions of comparable authority. The Catholic position, as defined by Pius XI in Quas Primas and by Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, is that the Church possesses a spiritual authority that is supreme in its own order, and that the State, while autonomous in purely temporal matters, is bound to recognize the Church’s authority in all that pertains to the salvation of souls and the moral law. The conciliar sect’s abandonment of this teaching has reduced the Vatican to just another voice in the chorus of global opinion, to be bullied, misquoted, and ignored at will.
The Dipping Catholic Vote: A Judgment on the Conciliar Apostasy
The article reports that “Trump’s support among Catholics dipped notably after the launch of the Iran war, with bipartisan polling finding that 48% of Catholic voters approve of the job Trump is doing as president and 52% disapprove.” The article attributes this to Catholics’ disapproval of “Trump’s actions in Iran and the use of military force against the country.” But this explanation is superficial. The deeper reality is that the conciliar sect’s decades-long abandonment of doctrinal clarity, its embrace of religious indifferentism, its refusal to teach the faithful about the moral principles governing just war, and its reduction of Catholicism to a vague “social justice” agenda have produced a Catholic laity that is, in the words of St. Pius X, “a synthesis of all errors”—Modernists who happen to attend the simulacrum of Mass offered in conciliar structures.
These “Catholics” do not vote according to the social teaching of the Church because they have never received the social teaching of the Church. They have received, instead, the conciliar sect’s watered-down humanitarianism, its false ecumenism, its worship of “human rights” defined by secular liberalism rather than by the natural law and divine revelation. The result is a Catholic electorate that is indistinguishable from the general population in its moral and political confusion—a direct consequence of the conciliar revolution’s destruction of Catholic identity and formation.
The “Abomination of Desolation” and the Duty of the Faithful
The entire spectacle described in this article—a secular president dictating terms to the Vatican, the conciliar sect reduced to issuing platitudes about “peace” while the world arms itself for nuclear war, and a Catholic laity so poorly formed that it cannot distinguish between the Gospel and the ideology of secular liberalism—is a manifestation of what the Church has traditionally called the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15). The conciliar sect, having occupied the physical structures of the Vatican while emptying them of their supernatural content, is the very embodiment of this prophecy.
The duty of the faithful is clear: to reject the conciliar sect in all its manifestations, to cling to the integral Catholic faith as taught by the unchanging Magisterium, to seek out true priests who offer the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass according to the immemorial rite, and to pray for the restoration of the Church. As St. Pius X warned in Lamentabili Sane Exitu, the errors of Modernism—the evolution of dogmas, the reduction of faith to subjective experience, the subordination of the Church to secular power—are not merely intellectual errors but a comprehensive apostasy that strikes at the very foundations of the faith. The conciliar sect is the institutional embodiment of this apostasy, and no amount of “dialogue” or “reconciliation” with the world can alter this fundamental reality.
The faithful must not be deceived by the conciliar sect’s pretensions to authority or by the secular world’s manipulation of its pronouncements. The true Church endures—in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, in the priests who validly offer the Holy Sacrifice, and in the bishops who guard the deposit of faith against all innovation. Outside of this, there is only the synagogue of Satan, which, as Pius IX warned in the Syllabus of Errors, “gathers its troops against the Church of Christ” and seeks “to submit the Church of God to the most cruel servitude, to undermine the foundations on which it rests, to contaminate its splendid qualities; and, moreover, to strike it with frequent blows, to shake it, to overthrow it, and, if possible, to make it disappear completely from the earth.”
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Source:
Donald Trump on tensions with Pope Leo XIV: ‘I have nothing against the pope’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 16.04.2026