ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) — There is an odd sense of isolation when you are covering Pope Leo XIV from inside the Vatican’s traveling press pool: Escorted from venue to venue with police motorcades that clear even the most congested of traffic jams, it’s a membership that has many privileges.
But during Leo’s epic four-nation trip to Africa, being inside the Vatican “bubble” has been an almost surreal experience, as an unprecedented back-and-forth plays out between U.S. President Donald Trump and history’s first American pope.
Every morning this week, waking up to developments in Washington from the evening before, the questions have abounded: Will Leo bite? How will he address the latest criticism, if at all, while focusing on the Africa program he has planned?
That was certainly the case on Wednesday, as Leo, the Vatican delegation and a pool of around 70 accredited reporters boarded the ITA Airways charter for the second leg of Leo’s 11-day odyssey — the flight from Algiers, Algeria to Yaounde, Cameroon.
Much to the reporters’ delight, Leo had responded head-on to Trump at the start of the trip when he gamely came to the back of the plane and greeted journalists traveling April 13 from Rome to Algiers. He responded to those who asked him about Trump’s Truth Social post a day earlier, in which the U.S. president had accused him of being soft on crime, cozy with the left and owed his papacy to Trump.
Trump was responding to Leo’s calls for peace, in reference to the Iran war, and comments that Trump’s threat to annihilate Iranian civilization were “truly unacceptable.”
Stopping to chat as he made his way from row to row that first day, Leo had told journalists that he was merely preaching the Gospel when he called for peace and criticized war, and that he didn’t fear the Trump administration.
A comment about peace
On Tuesday, on the short flight f …
