DAKAR, April 15 (Reuters) - With his previous insults towards African countries and his gutting of foreign assistance, U.S. President Donald Trump has offended the continent's Catholics more than once before, but his spat this week with Pope Leo has raised eyebrows nevertheless.
"I was utterly shocked to read President Trump's remarks about the pope. Nowhere in modern history have we witnessed such verbal recklessness against an institution as revered as the papacy," said Blaise Bebey Abong, 38, a Cameroonian
diplomat in Yaounde, where Leo arrived on Wednesday for the second stop of his four-country Africa tour.
Since late March, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born leader of the Catholic Church, has been an outspoken critic of the war that began with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Trump on Sunday called Pope Leo "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy" in a post on Truth Social. Trump also posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure, drawing widespread criticism even from some religious conservatives who typically support him. The post was removed on Monday morning.
Calling Trump's comments "unthinkable," Abong said the pope represented "high moral authority" even for non-Christians and that the dispute would damage the perception of Trump in the region, even among those who previously backed him.
DISAGREEMENT OVER IRAN WAR
Pope Leo told Reuters on Monday that he would keep speaking out about the war, and Trump reiterated his criticism on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Leo, flying from Algeria to Cameroon, did not respond to Trump directly, instead urging respect for all the peoples of the world.
Kwaku Amoah, who worships at Ghana's St. Peter's Cathedral Basilica, located in the city of Kumasi, said he understood why Leo would opt not to engage.
"Public insults is not the way to go," he said on Wednesday.
"The Church often encourages responding to hostility with restraint rather than escalation, and I commend the pope for exercising restraint."
Trump seemed to take a different approach. On Wednesday, he posted another apparently AI-generated image, this one showing a depiction of Jesus embracing him.
The original post had the caption: "I was never a very religious man .. but doesn't it seem, with all these satanic, demonic, child sacrificing monsters being exposed ... that God might be playing his Trump card!"
Regardless of whether the dust-up continues, African Catholics have suggested it would colour their view of Trump for the long term.
"The church has endured emperors, revolutions, and ideological storms. It will endure this moment as well," Cardinal Stephen Brislin, the Archbishop of Johannesburg, wrote in an op-ed in the Daily Maverick newspaper.
"But endurance is not the same as indifference."
(Reporting by Amindeh Blaise Atabong and Robbie Corey-Boulet in Dakar and Emmanuel Bruce in Accra; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
