“We discussed a lot one-on-one. Hoping for results on everything we covered. Protecting lives of our people. Full and unconditional ceasefire. Reliable and lasting peace that will prevent another war from breaking out. Very symbolic meeting that has potential to become historic, if we achieve joint results,” the Ukrainian president wrote, thanking and tagging Trump.
The president and Pope Francis have clashed several times since Trump’s first bid for the White House nearly a decade ago.
In 2016, the pope criticized Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the US-Mexico border, telling reporters at the time that, “a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Trump quickly fired back, saying, “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”
“If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President,” he said in a statement.
Then, when the pair met during a 2017 trip to the Vatican, the president claimed they had a “fantastic meeting.” This interaction gave rise to the viral photo of Trump and Francis standing next to each other with very different expressions.
Fast forward to Trump’s second presidency, and the pope again made a rare rebuke of the United States’ leadership. In a public letter from February to Catholic bishops in the United States, Francis described the program of mass deportations as a “major crisis.”
Deporting migrants who often come from difficult situations, Francis wrote, violates the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families,” adding that he had “followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” and believes that any policy built on force “begins badly and will end badly.”