God works in mysterious ways. Take U.S. President Donald Trump. He claims that he survived an assassination attempt last July thanks to divine intervention. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” Trump said in an inaugural address. His belief is shared by many Christian leaders.

In their ranks, however, you won’t find the most influential of them all: the vicar of Christ. Pope Francis clearly doesn’t think that Trump has been anointed by God and is more likely to be praying for his failure than his success.

The day before Trump took office, Francis denounced the president’s plan for the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants while appearing on an Italian talk show. “If it is true, it will be a disgrace because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill for the imbalance,” the pope declared. “It won’t do. This is not the way to solve things.”

That wasn’t a one-off jab from the Vatican. The pope has a history of opposing the U.S. leader. Back in 2016, when Trump was just a Republican candidate promising to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, Francis said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Throughout Trump’s first term, he spoke out against what he saw as the president’s dangerous excesses, from spurning climate action to stoking fear in American society.

Now, nearly a decade later, the pope is back at it. “I think Francis is heading back into battle with Trump whether he wants to or not,” said Philip Shenon, a former New York Times investigative reporter and the author of Jesus Wept, a new book on the modern Catholic Church.

Francis doesn’t appear gleeful about the prospect of another crusade against Trump. “The pope is reluctant to do it, given how ugly the confrontation became in Trump’s first term,” Shenon said.

At 88, Francis is in bad shape for a grueling fight. He has weak lungs and falls ill often. Just a few days ago, he couldn’t speak at his weekly audience on account of a nasty cold. “He may worry, understandably, that he doesn’t have the energy for another go-round with Trump,” Shenon said. “But Francis doesn’t have a choice, I think, especially given the imminent prospect of mass deportations.”

For the Vatican, however, the initial casus belli wasn’t the United States’ mass deportation scheme but a provocation from Trump last December. The president appointed his close ally Brian Burch, president and co-founder of the conservative advocacy organization CatholicVote, as the U.S ambassador to the Holy See.

Burch, like many far-right Catholics in the United States, is a fierce critic of Francis. He has accused the pope of “progressive Catholic cheerleading” and castigated him for creating “massive confusion” by allowing priests to bless same-sex couples. He has also lent his support to Francis’s enemies in the church, including Carlo Maria Viganò, a traditionalist archbishop who was excommunicated in 2024.

This has all been in service of a radical political project. Burch was instrumental in fueling the rise of a conservative Catholic movement aligned with Trump—call it the church of Trump. Membership includes Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, as well as other high-profile members of the new administration such as border czar Tom Homan and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Although U.S. conservative Catholics like to flaunt their faith, they have little respect for Francis. “They have long cast him as an enemy, a champion of liberal values they deem anathema to traditional Church doctrine,” said David Kertzer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Pope and Mussolini and The Pope at War. “And from what I can tell, it is U.S. wealthy Catholics who are the world’s primary funders of anti-Francis Church activities.” To top it all, Trump sent one of them to be his man in Vatican City.

As payback for the Burch appointment, Francis made a shock appointment of his own—naming Cardinal Robert McElroy as the new archbishop of Washington, D.C. A dedicated supporter of migrants, McElroy is among the most vocal anti-Trump clerics in the United States. He wasn’t the pope’s first choice, but circumstances changed his mind. “Last fall, word in the Vatican was that Francis had settled on a far less confrontational choice for the D.C. job,” Shenon said.

Confrontation now looks inevitable. Unsurprisingly, the first two weeks of Trump’s return to power have already given way to a war of words between the church and the White House.

On Jan. 20 and 21, the president signed a raft of executive orders cracking down on immigration. Two measures concerned the church directly: the suspension of refugee resettlement programs, which the church has long participated in, and the lifting of restrictions on U.S. immigration agents entering places of worship to round up undocumented immigrants.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops immediately issued a statement in condemnation. Bishop Mark J. Seitz, who chairs the conference’s Committee on Migration, spoke to CBS News and sounded the alarm on the new administration’s immigration policies. He argued they went “against some of the basic tenets of our faith, frankly, the fundamental right of every human person that needs to be respected, no matter their origin, no matter their situation.” Seitz added that Francis “certainly is paying attention.”

The Trump administration didn’t turn the other cheek. Homan, who oversees deportations, struck a defiant tone in an interview for Newsmax, declaring that Francis “ought to stick to the Catholic Church and fix that because that’s a mess.” Vance, meanwhile, took aim at the bishops, accusing them of cupidity since the church receives money from the U.S. government under its refugee admission program. “The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said to CBS News.

Vance’s remarks rocked the church. Even Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is close to Trump and led a prayer at his inauguration, was incensed. “That’s just scurrilous. It’s very nasty, and it’s not true,” he said in rebuke to Vance on his weekly radio show. “You think we make money caring for the immigrants? We’re losing it hand over fist.” Dolan later expressed his solidarity with migrants in a video posted on the Good Newsroom. “The church I love should not be blasted for simply obeying the Bible and caring for those immigrants who came here through this clumsy, fractured system.”

In recent days, the Trump administration has made another move that affects the church: drastically slashing the foreign aid administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). As a result, Catholic Relief Services, an international humanitarian organization, stands to lose up to $750 million in grants from USAID, according to the National Catholic Reporter. Michael Czerny, a cardinal close to Francis, has condemned Trump’s USAID cuts, saying that millions will die as a result.

Francis has not directly commented yet, but relations between the White House and the Vatican are likely to worsen fast. The Trump administration shows no signs of contrition, but it should beware. The Catholic Church has a history of coming out on top against the merciless. During the second half of the Cold War, for instance, it supported the Solidarity movement in communist Poland, eventually leading to the fall of the regime in 1989. Three years earlier, in the Philippines, the church was instrumental in the People Power Revolution that toppled the brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

An ailing Francis might look like an easy target. But, unlike other heads of state, Trump can’t browbeat him. The reason is simple: The president has no leverage on the pope. He can’t slap tariffs on Vatican City, nor can he threaten to annex it and turn St. Peter’s Basilica into a hotel.

As he nears the end of his life, Francis is focused on shoring up his legacy. He just released his autobiography and is still determined to make his voice heard about the world. He won’t stand attacks from the MAGA movement, and neither will the Catholic Church.

Ultimately, therein lies the cardinal sin in the Trump administration’s reckless attitude toward the Vatican. They are turning their feud with the pope into something bigger: a feud with the church itself.

Francis might not be pope for long. And while U.S. conservative Catholics are hoping that they can influence the outcome of the next conclave, this is dubious. Francis has transformed the College of Cardinals. Nearly 80 percent of those who will elect the next pope were appointed by him. Many come from the global south and are in broad agreement with him. As such, Francis’s successor is likely to look unfavorably on Trump and Vance—all the more so if the church finally picks an African pope, who would put Africa’s economic development at the heart of their agenda. Cutting foreign aid and disparaging the vital work of charities around the world won’t be something that the next pope would forgive easily.

MAGA’s antics against the Vatican may well come back to haunt them. They think in soundbites. The Catholic Church, as the phrase goes, thinks in centuries.