House Speaker Mike Johnson was confronted over President Donald Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo and suggested the Catholic leader was asking for trouble with his comments.
Johnson, who prides himself on being a devout Christian, was asked by a reporter about the feud outside the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, where he said he was not one to criticize religious leaders before defending the president.
“A pontiff or religious leader can say anything they want, but obviously, if you wade into political waters, I think you should expect some political response,” Johnson said. “I think the pope’s received some of that.”
It comes after Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV were met with fierce backlash from Catholics both in the U.S. and around the globe.
Trump, 79, blasted the pope on Sunday in a post, in which he accused him of being “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” raged about him meeting with Democrats, and argued he should “get his act together as Pope.”
His lengthy attack came after the pope criticized the war in Iran at a Saturday service and said, without naming Trump specifically, “Enough of war!”
After the president’s attack, Pope Leo responded directly that he had no fear of the Trump administration.
Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, also fired back this week that he thinks it’s “very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
In his own response on Tuesday, Johnson continued to back up the president, who criticized Pope Leo again in another post that day.
Johnson claimed he was taken aback by what he believed the pope had said, paraphrasing it as, “something about ‘those who engage in war, Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers’ or something.”
What the pope had said during his mass was that “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
But that did not stop Johnson from lecturing the highest Catholic on Christian theology.
“It is a very well-settled matter of Christian theology. There’s something called the ‘just war doctrine,” Johnson said.
“There’s a time to every purpose under heaven,” Johnson preached.
The theory or doctrine serves as an ethics framework in the military, rooted in Catholicism.
Johnson argued that what Trump and Vance’s comments reflect is, “their understanding deep in the, you know, the SCIF and the classified briefings of the stakes that are so high and the situation that we’re facing and the fact that you had the nation that was the largest sponsor of terrorism now having had that ability taken away from them.”
The speaker claimed it meant that millions of innocent people would likely be able to “keep their lives and not be killed by terrorists.”
As he spoke, GOP lawmakers around him applauded. Johnson concluded that he did not want to get into a theological debate with the people.
Asked about the president’s threats last week to wipe out the civilization of Iran, a country of more than 90 million, by CNN on Tuesday, Johnson had no comment.
The same day Johnson preached about the “just war doctrine,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement clarifying the theory and warned that the pope was not merely offering theological opinions when he spoke.
“A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed,’” they said in a statement. “That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’”
