A Thousand-Year-Old Fight

From Napoleon to Trump, powerful men have tried to bring the papacy to heel. It rarely works.

Detail from a portrait of Napoleon and Pius VII (Museo Napoleónico)

How it starts

Imagine this: the most powerful man in the world refuses to see the pope in Rome as a moral counterweight, but instead considers him an impediment -- out of touch, meddlesome. Then the pontiff fires back, warning against the vice of pride, the seduction of power, and the belief that military strength alone cannot settle questions of right and wrong.

It quickly escalates beyond a war of words, with accusations that the pontiff is clinging to outdated values and “a policy, which, while good in other centuries, is no longer appropriate to the century in which we live.”

But the pope doesn’t back down. He doesn’t have his adversary’s armies, resources, and his knack for humiliating adversaries, but the leader of the world’s Catholics is convinced he has the moral high ground.

That political leader was Napoleon Bonaparte; the pope, Pius VII. Their standoff was in 1809. And if the story sounds familiar, that’s the point.

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The familiar script

The current clash between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV has so far been mostly rhetorical -- aside from an apparent Pentagon threat that reopened a 700-year-old wound about when the papacy was forced to abandon Rome for 68 years (more on that below).