Catholics are by and large reacting very negatively to President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on Pope Leo XIV.Despite denying reports that Trump officials tried to bully a Vatican representative several months ago, on Sunday the president posted a lengthy diatribe lambasting the Pope. Denouncing him as “Weak on Crime” and “Weak on Nuclear Weapons,” Trump included an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure healing the sick with patriotic iconography in the background. He later claimed he thought the image showed him as a doctor and promoted the Red Cross before taking down the post entirely.Trump is criticizing the Pope because Leo XIV, who was born in America as Robert Prevost, has urged him to treat immigrants more humanely and cease his unprovoked wars against Venezuela and Iran. In response to Trump’s recent posts, the Pope noted that the president did so on a social media platform he owns called Truth Social."It's ironic, the name of the site itself,” the Pope said. “Say no more.”Speaking to AlterNet about Trump’s anti-Pope statements, Christendom College associate professor of history Dr. Christopher Shannon explained that he is participating in a larger history of U.S. anti-Catholic sentiment.“Anti-Catholicism is baked into Anglo-American political culture,” Shannon told AlterNet. “During the Revolution, patriot leaders from [future president] John Adams to Thomas Paine repeatedly denounced British oppression in language drawn directly from earlier denunciations of the Catholic Church. For example, in Common Sense, Paine likened monarchy to ‘popery.’”Shannon elaborated on how the so-called American Party thrived during the mid-19th Century on a platform of opposing mass immigration, especially from Catholics. Millard Fillmore, then a former president, won the second-highest vote ever accrued for a third-party candidate (22 percent) when he ran in the 1856 presidential election on an explicitly anti-Catholic ticket.“Even up to 1960, [America’s first Catholic president John] Kennedy had to respond to a fear of a papal takeover of America were he to be elected,” Shannon pointed out. “Popes [e.g., Leo XIII (1878-1903)] sometimes had good things to say about America, yet no pope clearly endorsed modern democracy and religious pluralism, so the papacy was always suspect in the eyes of non-Catholic Americans. In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, under Pope Paul VI, issued a document that finally affirmed the legitimacy of democracy and religious pluralism. After that, tensions greatly decreased.” Yet even then, President Ronald Reagan aroused controversy from anti-Catholic groups when he appointed an ambassador to the Vatican City in 1984 — the first such diplomat in US history.It is into this fraught context that Trump stepped when he attacked the Pope, a decision Shannon speculated was made because “Trump thinks [it] is about him. He thinks everything is about him.” He disagreed with Trump’s insinuation that Leo XIV owes his papacy to the idea that he would somehow be a pro-Trump pope.“As far as Leo XIV, I suppose his status as an American had something to do with his election, but it is important to remember that he is as much the second Latin American pope (after Francis) as he is the first United States pope,” Shannon wrote. “Most of his episcopal career has been in Peru. He certainly had no public profile in the Church in the United States. He cannot be pigeon-holed into either of the ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ sides of the internal Catholic culture war. Though American by birth, he is perhaps the least American of bishops because he refuses to take sides in what, considering the global nature of the Catholic Church, is a very petty squabble.”Given that Pope Leo XIV has a global rather than specifically American outlook to his papacy, American Trump supporters (including, as the president pointed out, the Pope’s big brother and Navy veteran Louis Prevost) now need to choose between their loyalty to basic Catholic principles and their loyalty to the president. Drawing from recent history to understand precedents, Shannon predicted they would do so by ignoring seeming contradictions between their religious and their political beliefs.“John Paul II and Benedict XVI both spoke out against the second Iraq War [when they were popes], but American Catholics did not, as a unified people, follow their lead,” Shannon told AlterNet. “Conservative Catholics supported the war for conservative reasons, liberal Catholics opposed the war (mostly) for liberal reasons. I do not see the recent dust up between Trump and Leo changing this.