WASHINGTON (AP) — The day before he died, in his final public address, Pope Francis expressed an Easter Sunday message of unity and an appeal for the marginalized and migrants. “All of us,” he proclaimed, “are children of God!”
In a dramatically different message Sunday, President Donald Trump issued an insult-laced post wishing a happy Easter to his opponents, including “Radical Left Lunatics,” “WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials,” and former President Joe Biden, “our WORST and most Incompetent President.”
Some of the fundamental differences between the U.S. president and the late pope — not only their divergent styles but their positions on migration, the environment and poverty — will come into sharper focus with Trump in Rome to attend Francis’ funeral, to be held Saturday morning in St. Peter’s Square.
Trump, as he prepared to leave Washington on Friday, said Francis “loved the world, actually, and he was just a good man.”
“I thought he was a fantastic kind of a guy,” Trump said.
David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University in New York, put it this way: “Obviously, it’s been a fraught relationship.”
The relationship eroded
Things weren’t great between Trump and the pope during Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021. But, says Gibson, “Trump II was even worse with the Vatican because of how much more aggressive it has been on every level, against migrants, against international aid.”
The Argentine pontiff and the American president sparred early on o …