The pontiff and the president had little in common.
One spurned the traditional red shoes and luxurious apostolic palace for religious simplicity, living humbly in a Vatican City guesthouse. The other made a brand of his own name and wrapped nearly everything he touched, from New York City skyscrapers to the Oval Office, in a gilded sheen.
But Pope Francis and President Trump disagreed over far more than style. By the time they met at the Vatican in 2017, the vast differences in their priorities and worldviews were clear.
Both rose to global prominence during the same decade of rapid political and societal change, as war, poverty and climate change disrupted nations and sent millions of migrants across the globe. And both leveraged their personal charisma to flex their power in transformative ways, remaking the Catholic church and American politics in their own outsider images.
Yet the relationship between the two was defined by the chasm between them, frequently bursting into public view in extraordinary clashes that revealed radically opposing visions of how to lead, and of what kind of world they hoped to create.
Until the pope’s final day, the two leaders had been tangling over immigration, an issue both saw as crucial to their mission and legacy.
Mr. Trump twice won the White House on promises to halt illegal border crossings, blaming undocumented immigrants for crime, economic malaise and terrorism.
Pope Francis believed that Christian love required compassionate care for migrants, and that Mr. Trump’s agenda of mass deportation violated the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.”
His first papal trip, in 2013, had been to the island of Lampedusa, a Mediterranean gateway to Europe for asylum seekers, to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis he felt the world was ignoring.
During the 2016 election, the pope criticized Mr. Trump’s pledge to build a wall on the United States’ border with Mexico, saying it suggested that the Republican candidate was “not Christian.”
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis said as he flew back to Rome from Mexico hours after celebrating a 200,000-person Mass in Ciudad Juárez.
Mr. Trump shot back, calling the Pope’s comments “disgraceful” and saying, through a campaign statement, that if the Vatican were ever “attacked by ISIS,” the pope “would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President.”
Representative Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat and observant Catholic, said the Pope’s early criticism of Mr. Trump had created the “completely unprecedented circumstance” of a pontiff who had openly excoriated an American president and a president who had been eager to return the fire.
“The fact that Trump, unlike previous presidents — Democrats and Republicans — was so vitriolically against immigration, and would use, and continues to use, really insulting rhetoric about immigrants, prompted this pope to speak out in a way that you didn’t see earlier,” said Mr. Boyle, who attended Pope Francis’s address to Congress in 2015.
On Monday, unlike other world leaders, who offered grateful and glowing testimonials to the pope, Mr. Trump offered a terse tribute on social media. “Rest in Peace Pope Francis!” he wrote on Truth Social. “May God Bless him and all who loved him!”
Mr. Trump also addressed the pope’s death in brief remarks later on Monday morning before the White House Easter Egg Roll.
“He loved the world, and he especially loved people that were having a hard time — and that’s good with me,” Mr. Trump said, announcing that he was ordering flags at the White House and federal and military facilities to be flown at half-staff.
Asked if he agreed with the pope’s tolerance toward migrants, Mr. Trump said, “Yeah, I do.” But moments later, in response to a question about a legal case over his administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants, Trump railed against the “millions and millions” of migrants who have entered the United States.
After Mr. Trump’s first election, the two met — for the only time — at the Vatican in 2017. The photos quickly went viral. Standing side by side, the president smiled broadly as the pope appeared stern.
The Pope gave the president, a known skeptic of climate change, a set of English-language translations of his papal writings, including a 2015 encyclical on climate change.
Mr. Trump, seemingly star-struck, told reporters: “He is something. We had a fantastic meeting.”
But in 2018, Pope Francis condemned Mr. Trump’s separation of migrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, calling the policy “immoral” and “contrary to our Catholic values.”
And in 2019, in another criticism of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, the pope warned that those who close borders “will become prisoners of the walls that they build.”
The pope’s tone with Mr. Trump was markedly different from the one he had struck with former President Barack Obama, whose White House he visited and with whose goals he was often aligned, on issues including an easing of tensions with Cuba and the Iran nuclear deal.
The Obama-Francis relationship had symbolized what many liberals believed was the coming of a progressive era on the world stage.
“There was a meeting of minds,” said John Kerry, Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, who met repeatedly with Pope Francis. “The pope had enormous admiration for President Obama’s journey and what he represented and his efforts as a peacemaker.”
That sense of overlapping missions allowed Democrats to claim the pope as one of their own — even if they didn’t agree on every issue, including abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But it also set the stage for Republican backlash and for the conflict with Mr. Trump, who aggressively courted disgruntled conservative Catholics.
“For Donald Trump, Pope Francis looked like an enemy because he’s been friendly with Obama and with Biden,” said Steven P. Millies, the director of the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and an expert on the Catholic church’s relationship to politics. “There was not going to be much chance of a personal relationship between Pope Francis and Donald Trump. What we can call personal tensions have been visible very publicly.”
Indeed, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the White House, becoming America’s second Catholic president, the Pope called him “to tell me how much he appreciated the fact that I would focus on the poor and focus on the needs of people are in trouble,” Mr. Biden later recounted.
And in a visit to the Vatican in 2021, after U.S. bishops had advanced a proposal that would deny Mr. Biden communion for his support of abortion rights, Mr. Biden said the pope had told him that he was happy that Mr. Biden was a “good Catholic.”
By contrast, when Mr. Biden decided to not seek re-election in 2024 and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the pope advised Catholic voters to choose the “lesser of two evils” because “both are against life” — Ms. Harris for her support for abortion rights, and Mr. Trump for closing the door to immigrants.
“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”
Mr. Trump’s re-election in November again put the two leaders’ starkly contrasting values in opposition. As Mr. Trump promised to elevate conservative Christian values in America, Pope Francis, whom Catholics view as God’s representative on earth, escalated his criticism.
In January, the pope said in an interview on Italian television that it would be a “disgrace” if Mr. Trump went forward with plans to intensify immigration enforcement. In February, the pope issued an unusual open letter to America’s Catholic bishops denouncing mass deportations and predicting that the policy would “end badly.”
“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church,” he wrote, “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
The letter, written just days before the pope was hospitalized, also offered an apparent rebuttal to Vice President JD Vance’s interpretation of a Catholic teaching that he had used to defend the administration’s deportation policies.
Still, in the final hours of his life, the pope briefly welcomed Mr. Vance, a Catholic convert, into his residence for an Easter greeting. Soon after, he went to the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, where an aide read aloud what would be the pontiff’s final public message.
“How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!” he said.