Though President Donald Trump is not a member of the Roman Catholic Church and professes to be a Protestant, he has cultivated a strong base of support among American Catholics, despite his often public spats with Rome and the church’s leaders within the United States.

With the death of Pope Francis, the often tumultuous relationship between the church and President Donald Trump appears poised for a redefining moment as the selection of the next Pope may yield a pontiff more sympathetic to the president’s worldview. During his tenure, Francis had been a vocal critic of Trump’s plans to build a southern border wall and regularly attacked his plans for mass deportations, suggesting they were cruel and even constituted sinful behavior.

Nevertheless, Trump made historic gains among American Catholics during his three presidential elections, many of whom flocked to him as he promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, uphold religious liberty, and to support conservative values.

Abortion

During the 2024 campaign, the president seized on his appointment of Catholic Supreme Court justices who ultimately voted to overturn the constitutional right to abortion established in the Roe v. Wade case. Trump-appointed Catholic Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh voted with the majority. Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch was raised Catholic but attends an Episcopal Church.

The decision was part of the campaign’s sales pitch to Catholics when launching the Catholics for Trump coalition. Vice President JD Vance and first lady Melania Trump are both Roman Catholics and the former often references his faith as shaping his political views.

Capital punishment

Trump often ran afoul of Catholic leadership during Francis’s tenure, most notably over his support for the death penalty and mass deportations. While the church has historically permitted the death penalty, Pope Francis issued an encyclical declaring that it was no longer admissible in the modern era. The document does not constitute an official statement of Catholic doctrine and individual Catholics may still support the death penalty, though the church as an institution advocates against its use.

The president has repeatedly called for the death penalty for drug dealers and his first term saw the end of a de facto moratorium on federal executions that led to objections from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Immigration

Pope Francis regularly criticized Trump’s policies of building a border wall and refusing “refugees” admission to the U.S. interior. Trump himself would often highlight the existence of a wall around the Vatican and its refusal to allow immigrants to settle there in rebuttal.

The matter moved back into the spotlight amid Trump’s return to the White House and the Pope reiterated his criticisms. Border Czar Tom Homan, himself a Roman Catholic, offered stern words for the Pope, suggesting he was ignorant of the actual situation at the border.

A Trump administration policy allowing immigration raids at houses of worship, moreover, led to pointed criticism from Catholic leaders.

"Turning places of care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need, while endangering the trust between pastors, providers, educators and the people they serve, will not make our communities safer," the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement.

“I think that 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?" Vance retorted. "Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?"

Prominent Trump supporters disciplined

Under Pope Francis, several of Trump’s most prominent supporters in the American clergy were subject to church discipline. Frank Pavone, a former priest who led the “Priests for Life” organization, was defrocked outright in 2022 over “blasphemous communications on social media.”

The Vatican in 2023 removed Joseph Strickland from his post as Bishop of Tyler, Texas. Strickland was a vocal critic of Francis’s progressive reforms and has since spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The exercise of church discipline against prominent Trump supporting clergy amid the Pope’s own disputes with Trump have led some to suggest that the moves may have had at least some political motivations.

Whether a new pontiff will reverse those actions remains unclear.