Catholics around Atlanta wrestle with Trump’s feud with Pope Leo

At the Catholic Church of Saint Monica in Duluth, Georgia, Alex Sullivan left Sunday Mass and turned to his five children on the church lawn, a small suburban scene that captured a larger test inside American Catholic life: whether faith still outranks party. The parish’s 8:00 a.m. Traditional Latin Mass draws worshippers especially attentive to liturgy and Church authority, and the feud between Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV has made those loyalties harder to separate.

The tension matters because Catholics are one of the country’s largest religious blocs. Pew’s latest Religious Landscape Study says about 20% of U.S. adults identify as Catholic, roughly 50 million to 52 million people. In places like Atlanta’s northern suburbs, where churchgoing Catholics help shape the politics of swing-state neighborhoods, the clash is not just theological. It reaches into questions of immigration, war, moral authority and whether the Vatican can still command deference from voters who also backed Trump.

Pope Leo, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago and elected on May 8, 2025, is the first U.S.-born pope and the first Augustinian pope. That made the dispute with Trump especially charged when it escalated in April over the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and the pope’s appeals for peace. Leo said he had “no fear” of Trump and would keep speaking out against war. The Vatican later said he was not interested in debating the president and insisted that threats against the Iranian people were unacceptable, urging peace and dialogue instead.

Trump kept pressing the fight, attacking Leo publicly and posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus before deleting it. The response from Catholic leadership was swift. Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he was disheartened by Trump’s disparaging words and stressed that the pope is not a rival or a politician but the Vicar of Christ. Cardinal Robert McElroy and Bishop John Dolan also defended Leo and rejected the idea that he should be reduced to a political actor.

The split reaches beyond the hierarchy. Young Catholics at Notre Dame were reported to side with Leo over Trump, while some conservative Catholics have expressed discomfort with folding faith into presidential combat. In Duluth, where a Latin Mass parish sits within driving distance of Atlanta’s Republican-leaning suburbs and closely watched swing-state precincts, the argument feels less abstract: for many churchgoers, the question is whether a Catholic can remain loyal to the Church when a president demands something else.