As a Catholic, how magnificent it is that the Pope is the world leader who has finally taken a stand against Donald Trump. Political world leaders are constrained by diplomacy and economics. The Vatican is not. Pope Leo XIV’s wonderful speech bears repeating:

“Blessed are the peacemakers, but woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

The Holy Father said what other world leaders could not. “Darkness and filth” sums up the Trump White House to perfection.

It takes a particular kind of obscenity to bring the grifting televangelist wing of American Christianity into the most openly grifting White House the republic has produced in 250 years, then to market the whole spectacle as moral renewal. That is Trumpism’s religious project. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” The Trump administration is a den of robbers.

At a White House Easter event, Paula White-Cain, the senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, likened Trump to Jesus. Hegseth used scripture to bless “overwhelming violence” and, appallingly, to frame the rescue of a downed airman as a story of Christ-like redemption. Vance takes pride in condemning Ukrainians to death under Russian missiles without missile defences. Rubio put his conscience in storage for the duration of a presidential audition and continues to enact policies he knows are twisted and wrong. This administration’s Christianity is sickening cosplay; a costume stitched together from power worship, victim theatre and TV-preacher opportunism.

Trump attacked the Pope as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy” because Leo articulated a Christianity that Trump could never understand; one that places limits on violence, ego, idolatry, and rulers who confuse themselves with providence. It is a vision of Christianity grounded in humility, restraint, and moral seriousness.

Trump's response? Derision, mockery, and the kind of casual contempt he reserves for anyone who cannot be bent to his will. The absurdity of it would be comical if it were not so revealing. Epstein's former best friend, a man who has spent a lifetime indulging every appetite, presumes to lecture the Catholic Church on what Christianity should be.

What of the language? What of the moral atmosphere? Christianity, at its best, places limits on power. It teaches that rulers are fallen creatures, not messianic figures. It speaks of duty, truth, service to others, mercy, repentance, and the equal dignity of the weak.

Trumpism, by contrast, celebrates appetite. It rewards cruelty. It treats opponents not as fellow citizens but as contaminants. It has trained millions to confuse aggression with courage, blasphemous self-regard with strength, and conspicuous wealth with divine favour. That goes beyond merely un-Christian. It is anti-Christian. It substitutes Caesar for Christ and spectacle for conscience. This administration is an obscenity, a profanation of religion in the service of vanity, personal enrichment and brute power.

Pope Leo has given us the epitaph for the Trump administration: darkness and filth. The greed, the cosplay, the cruelty, the gangster theology, the sneering at the weak, the open contempt for law, the sheer vulgarity of men who think staging a prayer circle can launder a grift. This is, in every serious sense, the least Christian administration in American history.

When the Trump debacle is over, the real test will begin. America itself will face the choice between redemption and damnation: apologise to the world, repair the alliances and institutions it has smashed, rebuild the aid and refuge it has shredded, restore the constitutional restraints it mocked, and try to atone for the damage done in its name; or keep calling this sewage MAGA movement a revival. If it chooses the second path, the stain will not belong to Trump alone. It will belong to the country that beheld an obscenity, continued to elect it, and called it faith.