Between Two Fathers: The Trump–Pope Leo XIV Clash and the Filipino American Soul
Between Two Fathers: The Trump–Pope Leo XIV Clash and the Filipino American Soul
When the President of the United States calls the Pope "weak on crime," Filipino American Catholics are caught between two fathers — one who claims their political allegiance, one who claims their conscience. A PinoyBuilt deep dive on paninindigan, the American Pope, and the diaspora in the middle.
On Easter Monday last year — April 21, 2025 — Pope Francis died in Vatican City. Seventeen days later, a conclave of 133 cardinals walked into the Sistine Chapel, and on the second day, the fourth ballot, they chose a 69-year-old Augustinian friar from Chicago. Robert Francis Prevost, missionary, former bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, took the name Leo XIV. For the first time in 2,000 years, an American sat in the Chair of Peter.
Almost no one inside Vatican-watching circles predicted it. The conventional wisdom had always been that the cardinal electors would never hand the papacy to a citizen of the world's most powerful country, precisely because of that power. And yet the unthinkable happened — and now, less than a year later, the two most influential Americans in the world are feuding in public, and Filipino American Catholics are trying to figure out whose side they're on.
Did You Know?
Before he was Pope Leo XIV, Robert Prevost spent decades as a missionary in Chiclayo, Peru, and holds Peruvian citizenship alongside his American passport. That Global South formation — ministering to the poor in a developing nation — mirrors the pastoral instincts of many Filipino bishops and of Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle himself. It also helps explain why the first American pope sounds, on migration and war, nothing like "America First."
Tagalog Word of the Day
Paninindigan
(pa-ni-nin-DI-gan)
Meaning: conviction; the position one stands on; a principled stance you are willing to be tested for.
Root: from tindig (to stand) → manindigan (to stand firm) → paninindigan (the noun form). It is not belief you merely hold — it is belief you are willing to carry when it costs you something.
The April 2026 Flashpoint
The immediate spark was the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran, which began in late February 2026. Pope Leo XIV had been steadily critical of the conflict, urging dialogue and warning against "the idolatry of self and money" and "the display of force." When President Trump threatened on April 7 that "a whole civilization will die tonight," the pope called the rhetoric against the Iranian people "truly unacceptable."
Trump responded on Sunday, April 12, with a long Truth Social post accusing Leo of being "Weak on Crime, Weak on Nuclear Weapons" and "terrible for Foreign Policy." He went further: he suggested the American-born pope was only elected because the Church wanted someone who could "deal with" him, and said he did not want a pope who criticizes the President of the United States. Later that evening, speaking to reporters, he added, "I'm not a big fan of Pope Leo."
By Tuesday, April 14, Trump had escalated, falsely claiming that Leo had said Iran could have a nuclear weapon. CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins pushed back on camera; PBS News and CNN fact-checked the claim as false. The pope has repeatedly called for nuclear disarmament, including in a July 2025 statement marking the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Pope Leo's response, delivered to reporters aboard the papal plane as he departed for an 11-day apostolic journey across Africa, was calm and unflinching.
A Decade of Discord: From "Not Christian" to "Weak on Crime"
The rift did not begin in April 2026. It runs back at least a decade.
In February 2016, Pope Francis said that any politician whose policy is to build walls instead of bridges is "not Christian." Trump, then a candidate, called the remark "disgraceful." In September 2024, returning from a trip through Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and Singapore, Francis was asked what American Catholics should do when choosing between Trump and then–Vice President Kamala Harris. His answer became one of the most widely quoted lines of the 2024 campaign: both candidates, he said, were "against life" — one for deporting migrants, one for supporting abortion — and Catholics would have to "choose the lesser evil."
Then came April 21, 2025. Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, at the age of 88. Seventeen days later, a dark-horse Chicago-born missionary was pope. Trump attended the funeral. Vance, an adult convert to Catholicism, had met with Francis at the Vatican the day before the pope's death. And within months, the conflict between the American administration and the American pope had a new axis: migration, deportation, the war in Iran, the operation in Venezuela, and the administration's habit of invoking divine favor for its foreign policy.
What makes April 2026 historically extraordinary is not that a U.S. president is at odds with a pope — that has happened before. It is that both men are American, that the dispute is being carried out in English on American social media platforms, and that the pope is, as Vatican analyst Elise Allen told CNN, "emerging as a stronger figure on the international scene" precisely at the moment the administration wants fewer moral counterweights, not more.
The Filipino American Catholic, By the Numbers
There are, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 4.1 million Filipino Americans in the United States — the third-largest Asian-origin group in the country and the single largest community of Asian American Catholics. Pew Research's 2022–23 Asian American Survey found that about 74 percent of Filipino Americans identify as Christian, with 57 percent specifically Catholic. Older Pew data pegged the Catholic share as high as 65 percent in 2015. Either way, Filipino Americans are the most Catholic major Asian American group by a wide margin.
They are also geographically concentrated in ways that matter politically: roughly 38 percent live in California, with the largest clusters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, and sizable populations in Hawaii, Nevada, Washington, Texas, Illinois, and the New York–New Jersey metro area. Many of these are swing states or swing counties. And Filipino American Catholics are not monolithic.
In the 2024 presidential election, Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters nationwide, according to AP VoteCast — a significant rightward shift from the roughly 50/50 split of 2020. There is no clean, published breakdown of the Fil-Am Catholic vote specifically, but anyone who has scrolled through the comment threads on a Filipino American parish's Facebook page since the inauguration knows the split is real. "MAGA titos" and Vatican-loyal nanays can share the same pew.
The American Pope Paradox
Pope Leo XIV was not supposed to be the first American pope. Vatican insiders had long treated the idea of a U.S.-born pontiff as unthinkable — precisely because of the outsized political power of the country he came from. What changed the math, in the minds of the cardinal electors, was that Robert Prevost had spent more than half his ecclesial life outside the United States, primarily in northern Peru. He had led the global Augustinian order for two terms. He spoke Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French as comfortably as English. When Pope Francis made him prefect of the powerful Dicastery for Bishops in 2023, the world's bishops began to know him.
What they discovered is what we are now watching play out on the world stage: an American who does not sound like "America First." A pope whose first public words from the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica were, in Italian, "Peace be with you all" — and whose papal name is a deliberate invocation of Leo XIII, the pope of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical that founded modern Catholic social teaching on labor, the poor, and the dignity of work.
For Filipino American Catholics, much of this feels familiar. The Philippine Church has long been a Global South church, with a bias toward the poor, the migrant, the marginalized. Cardinal Tagle built his ministry on exactly those themes. Pope Francis earned the nickname "Lolo Kiko" in the Philippines because his instincts matched what Filipinos already believed their faith was about. Pope Leo XIV, shaped by decades in Chiclayo, sounds more like a Philippine bishop than like an American culture warrior — and for many Fil-Am Catholics, that is the point.
The Tagle Bridge
Among the four Filipino cardinals who entered the May 2025 conclave, the name Filipinos and Fil-Ams carried in their rosaries was Luis Antonio Tagle. Many Filipino Catholics had quietly hoped he would be the first Filipino pope — "Asia's Francis," raised in Imus, Cavite, trained at the Loyola School of Theology, pastoral, fluent in Tagalog, Bisaya, English, Italian, and Spanish. He was not chosen. The cardinals picked Prevost on the fourth ballot, and Tagle — as Pro-Prefect for the Section for First Evangelization and New Particular Churches — returned to his desk at the Dicastery for Evangelization.
What happened next mattered. On May 18, 2025, at Pope Leo XIV's inauguration Mass in St. Peter's Square, it was Cardinal Tagle who placed the Ring of the Fisherman on the new pope's finger. Six days later, on May 24, the Vatican announced that Leo had assigned the title of the Suburbicarian Church of Albano — the very see Leo himself had held as cardinal for the three months before his election — to Tagle.
In Vatican signaling, this was not subtle. The seven suburbicarian sees are the highest-ranking dioceses in the College of Cardinals, historically reserved for the most senior cardinal bishops. Giving Tagle his own former title was a public declaration of trust, and a visible reminder that the first American pope intended to keep the Asian Church — and the Filipino voice within it — close to the center of his papacy. As the Asian Journal put it, the appointment sent "a clear message: the future of Catholicism includes — and is being shaped by — the voices of the Global South."
For the Filipino American diaspora, Tagle is now a bridge in the most literal sense. He is the senior Filipino figure inside the Vatican's inner circle during a moment when the American pope is being attacked by the American president. He is, to use the word that will come back to us in a moment, the embodiment of a certain kind of paninindigan — quiet, patient, principled, and impossible to unseat.
MAGA Catholic vs. Vatican-Loyal: The Divide Inside Fil-Am Households
The Bilyonaryo News Channel out of Manila aired a report in mid-April on how the Trump–Leo feud is splitting Filipino American Catholic households — sometimes along generational lines, sometimes along regional ones, sometimes right across the dining table at a Sunday salo-salo.
The faultlines are recognizable to anyone who has grown up Fil-Am. First-generation immigrants, particularly those who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s under the Marcos-era exodus of nurses, engineers, and military families, often carry a conservative instinct inherited from the Philippine Church: pro-life, pro-family, suspicious of "progressive" moral politics, grateful to the country that gave them a green card. Many voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. When they hear him say he will keep America safe and deport the undocumented, they hear a promise they want to believe.
Their children — 1.5-generation, second-generation, U.S.-born — often hear something else. They hear mass deportations that sweep up their kababayan. They hear an administration that calls the pope "weak" for preaching peace. They hear scripture being invoked to justify bombing runs. And they ask, quietly or loudly: since when is our faith supposed to sound like that?
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City, the current president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he was "disheartened" by Trump's comments, adding that Pope Leo is "not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ." The Italian Bishops' Conference issued its own rebuke. Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — a conservative leader who has tried for years to serve as the European bridge to Trump — called the president's remarks "unacceptable." Inside the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, the rebuke was swift.
Inside Filipino American parishes, it has been messier — as it always is when family is involved.
Voices from Home: Cebu, Manila, and the Hierarchy's Response
The sharpest voice from the Philippine Church came from Cebu. On April 14, Archbishop Alberto Uy — a soft-spoken pastoral figure, not known for political fireworks — called Trump's remarks against Pope Leo XIV "deeply saddening," and wrote that the pope was "a voice of conscience for the world." Uy's full statement, carried by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines and reprinted across CBCP News, Inquirer.net, Sunstar Cebu, and Interaksyon, refused to treat the fight as a political dispute at all. The pope, he said, "does not speak as a politician" but as "a humble servant of God — one who carries the burden of reminding the world of truths that are often inconvenient, yet necessary: the dignity of every human person, the sacredness of life, and the urgent call to peace."
It was the kind of pastoral reframe that Filipino bishops excel at — a refusal to let the conversation be dragged onto the president's preferred terrain. It was also the kind of statement that lands differently in a Fil-Am household than in an editorial page in Washington, because it is delivered in the register of a pastor, not a pundit. And Filipino Catholics, in the homeland and in the diaspora, are trained to listen to pastors.
The timing mattered too. The same week Trump was attacking the pope, Philippine churches were still in the fresh memory of Holy Week. Good Friday in Manila's Quiapo. The Black Nazarene. The Visita Iglesia. The long, quiet Easter Vigils. For Filipino American Catholics who had just driven home from a Simbang Gabi–style family Easter, the image of the Pope of Peace standing on a tarmac in Algiers saying "I have no fear" felt less like a geopolitical story and more like a homily.
The "Lesser Evil" Echo
If there is one sentence from the Francis papacy that will not stop reverberating through Filipino American households in 2026, it is the one he delivered on that papal flight from Singapore in September 2024: choose the lesser evil.
Francis refused, that day, to tell Catholics which of the two 2024 candidates was the lesser evil. He said each voter, in conscience, had to decide. The ambiguity is what made the line useful to both sides. MAGA-leaning Fil-Am Catholics heard: abortion is grave, and the pope is not endorsing Harris. Vatican-loyal Fil-Am Catholics heard: deportation is grave, and the pope is not endorsing Trump. The same sentence, two gospels.
In 2026, that ambiguity is no longer tenable. The Iran war is not a campaign-year hypothetical. The deportations are not a policy paper. The pope is not speaking from a thousand-mile remove in Rome; he is speaking as an American, to Americans, in English, on the record, from the papal plane. The "lesser evil" doctrine was workable in September 2024. Eighteen months later, Filipino American Catholics are being forced to do what Francis asked them to do — examine their conscience — on a week-by-week basis.
The Weight of Paninindigan
Which brings us back to the word. Paninindigan.
It is not, in Tagalog, a casual word. It does not mean "opinion." It does not mean "preference." It does not mean "belief" in the watered-down English sense of something you agree with in principle. Paninindigan is built from tindig — the verb to stand. To manindigan is to stand firm, to take a position in public, to be willing to be counted. Paninindigan is the noun form: the stance itself — the ground you are willing to occupy when it costs you something.
It is the word Filipinos use when they talk about Andrés Bonifacio refusing to accept the Pact of Biak-na-Bato. It is the word they use when they talk about Jose Rizal writing Noli Me Tangere knowing it might cost him his life, and then going home anyway. It is the word they use when they talk about Corazon Aquino walking into EDSA in February 1986 in a yellow dress, against tanks. It is the word they use when they talk about the OFW mother in Riyadh or Dubai or Milan or New Jersey who has not seen her children in seven years, but sends every peso home, because her paninindigan is that her children will eat, go to school, and build a life that she herself could not.
And it is the word — though he does not know it — that Pope Leo XIV embodied on April 13, 2026, when he boarded that papal plane to Algiers, knowing the American president had spent the weekend trying to publicly humiliate him, and said, simply, "I have no fear."
That is paninindigan. That is what it sounds like in English, filtered through an Augustinian missionary formed in Chiclayo, speaking in Italian on a papal plane. It is not bravado. It is not defiance for its own sake. It is the calm declaration that this is what I stand for, and I will not be moved off it by the loudest voice in the room.
Cardinal Tagle knows this word. He was formed by it. Archbishop Uy of Cebu reached for it — in English — when he said: "I stand firmly with Pope Leo, not because of position or obligation, but out of conviction." That is paninindigan in translation. It is the ancient Filipino insistence that a position is only a position if you are willing to stand on it.
Paninindigan and the Filipino Catholic
The Philippine Church was not built by popes or presidents. It was built by catechists in barangays, by widows praying novenas, by ordinary Filipinos whose paninindigan was that God saw them even when the Spanish friar, the American teacher, the Marcos-era general, and the Trump-era Border Patrol agent did not. Filipino American Catholicism in 2026 will not be defined by cable news. It will be defined, in the end, by what 4.1 million Fil-Ams decide they are willing to stand on — and at what cost.
On This Day, in Tarlac
There is one more thing worth remembering today, April 17. On this date in 1898, in the province of Tarlac, Central Luzon, General Francisco Makabulos — poet, playwright, Katipunan leader — convened a provisional assembly and established what Filipino history would remember as the Makabulos Republic. It lasted barely a month. On May 19, when General Emilio Aguinaldo returned from exile in Hong Kong, Makabulos dissolved his government and folded his revolutionary committee into the larger national effort. He went on to sign the Malolos Constitution. He went on to fight the Americans. He went on to surrender to General Arthur MacArthur in 1900 under terms of amnesty. He went home to La Paz, Tarlac, and died there in 1922.
The Makabulos Republic is not remembered because it succeeded. It is remembered because, for one month in 1898, a group of Filipinos in Central Luzon stood up and said: in the absence of a legitimate national government, we will constitute one ourselves. They did not wait for Aguinaldo. They did not wait for permission. They established a provisional constitution, a central executive committee, and a set of moral principles — and then they bent the knee to the greater national project when it returned.
That is also paninindigan. It is also what the Filipino American diaspora, in its quieter way, has always been about: the conviction that you can claim your ground, hold it faithfully, and still recognize a larger whole. On the anniversary of the Makabulos Republic, at a moment when two American fathers are fighting over the soul of the American Catholic Church, Filipino American Catholics might do well to remember that they come from a people who have been here before. Caught between empires. Caught between altars. Caught between loyalties. And still — somehow, stubbornly, quietly — standing.
Final Thoughts
I grew up Catholic in Marikina in the early 1970s, the kind of Catholic where Lola Rosita said the rosary every night, and the saints and the Virgin Mary in her bedroom outnumbered the family photos. For kindergarten, I went to St. Scholastica Academy — the all-girls Catholic private school that let boys in only for that one year — and I still remember the nuns in full habit, moving down the hallways the way nuns move, which is a way no one else moves. From Prep through third grade, I was at Marist School in Marikina, the exclusive Catholic school where the rich kids went. My family wasn't rich. But Marist was the Catholic school to go to, and my parents found a way.
We came to the United States in August 1976, by way of Chicago first and then Vallejo. I was nine. In Chicago, I attended St. Sebastian and served as an altar boy until we moved to California. Then, for the first time in our lives, my sister Joy and I attended public schools. But we did not drift from the Church — we found it again in the Teen Club at St. Catherine of Siena in Vallejo. I was confirmed there. And in 10th grade, our parish priest, Father Kelly, asked me if I had ever thought about joining the priesthood. He told me to come by the rectory if I ever wanted to talk. Senior year, for a class assignment, I did exactly that — I sat with Father Kelly for a few hours and interviewed him on the subject of how to become a Catholic priest.
I have three kids now, so clearly that conversation went a different way. But I have watched Filipino American Catholicism grow into one of the quiet pillars of American Catholic life — in Daly City, in Vallejo, in West Covina, in Jersey City, in Waipahu, in Chicago's northern suburbs where the Augustinian Formation House sits, the very house where a young Robert Prevost once lived and studied before he was sent to Peru.
I am not here to tell Filipino American Catholics how to vote. Pope Francis himself, in September 2024, refused to tell us that. What I am here to do — as a 1.5-generation Fil-Am, as a widower who buried his wife in a Catholic Mass in December 2020, as a father of three children trying to raise them with enough of their heritage to know the word paninindigan when they hear it — is ask the question that this moment puts in front of every Fil-Am household:
What is your paninindigan? Not your opinion. Not your party. Not your preferred news channel. Your actual, cost-bearing, publicly-testable ground — the thing you would still stand on if the president of the United States attacked you for it from the White House lawn.
Pope Leo XIV's answer, from an airplane in the Algerian sky, was: "I have no fear." Archbishop Uy's answer, from Cebu, was: "I stand firmly with Pope Leo." Cardinal Tagle's answer, by the quiet evidence of his entire ministry, has always been: the poor, the migrant, the stranger — these are who the Gospel is for. General Makabulos's answer, in April 1898, was: we constitute a government, here, now, in Tarlac.
Filipino Americans have been answering this question for more than a century. We answered it in the vineyards of Delano in 1965. We answered it on the wards of American hospitals in the 1970s. We answered it at Bataan and Corregidor and in every U.S. Navy uniform sewn with a name that ends in -ez, -oza, -eda, or -anda. We will answer it again, in 2026, the only way our people have ever really known how.
By standing.
Sources
- Associated Press / NPR, "Pope Leo says 'I have no fear of the Trump administration' after president blasts pontiff" (April 13, 2026)
- CNN Politics, "Pope says he has 'no fear of Trump administration' after president slams his Iran war criticism" (April 13, 2026)
- CNN Politics, "Fact check: Trump falsely claims Pope Leo said Iran can have a nuclear weapon" (April 16, 2026)
- PBS News, "Fact-checking Trump's claim that Pope Leo supports nuclear weapons in Iran" (April 2026)
- Euronews, "Trump refuses to apologise after clash with Pope Leo XIV over Iran war" (April 14, 2026)
- Inquirer.net, "Cebu archbishop saddened by Trump's tirade vs Pope Leo XIV" (April 15, 2026)
- CBCP News, "Archbishop calls Trump remarks on pope 'deeply saddening'"
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Leo XIV — Pope"
- Wikipedia, "Pope Leo XIV"
- Vatican News, "Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday aged 88" (April 21, 2025)
- Radio Veritas Asia, "Pope Leo names Cardinal Tagle as the new titular of Albano" (May 2025)
- America Magazine, "Pope Francis: Trump and Harris are 'both against life' but Catholics must vote and choose 'lesser evil'" (September 13, 2024)
- Pew Research Center, "Filipino Americans: A Survey Data Snapshot"
- National Historical Commission of the Philippines, "Remembering the Zenith of Tarlac Nationalism: A Tribute to the Valor of Gen. Francisco Makabulos"
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What is your paninindigan? Not your opinion. Not your party. Not your preferred news channel. Your actual, cost-bearing, publicly-testable ground — the thing you would still stand on if the president of the United States attacked you for it from the White House lawn.
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