A new Reuters-Ipsos poll finds that more Americans view Pope Leo xiv favorably than approve of President Donald Trump’s job performance.

• The survey, released Tuesday, polled 4,557 U.S. adults and showed 60 percent of respondents holding a favorable opinion of the pope, compared with 36 percent who approve of how Trump is doing his job.

The contrast comes amid a public disagreement between Trump and the first U.S.-born pope over the ongoing war with Iran.

• Pope Leo xiv has criticized Trump’s rhetoric, calling the president’s threat to “destroy Iran’s whole civilization” “truly unacceptable.” He has repeatedly emphasized peace, stating that “God does not bless any conflict” and urging dialogue over military escalation.
• Trump and some advisers have pushed back, arguing the pope should stay out of U.S. foreign policy and military decisions.

A separate mid-April Economist-YouGov poll found that 48 percent of Americans agree more with the pope’s comments on the Iran war, while 28 percent side with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

These numbers should trouble us. For years, Iran’s leaders have openly said they want to wipe Israel off the map. They call Israel the “Zionist entity” or a “cancerous tumor.” When Pope Leo pushes for peace with such a regime, it sounds too much like the silence of Pope Pius xii during Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach put it powerfully on April 15:

As 6 million Jews were marched into gas chambers, as Europe became a graveyard of civilization, the Vatican’s voice—the one voice that could have thundered moral clarity across continents—remained muted. What would have happened had Pope Pius xii stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and declared: “This is evil. This must stop”? We will never know. But we do know this: Silence, in moments of moral catastrophe, is not neutrality. It is complicity. … Today, we are confronted not by Nazi Germany but by the regime of the Iranian ayatollahs—a government that has, for decades, brutalized its own people, funded global terrorism, and openly called for the destruction of Israel and America.

The Bible warns that peace at any price can lead to greater evil. True leaders must have the courage to call evil by its name and stand with those who face destruction—not offer comfort to those who threaten it. The fact that half of Americans agree with Pope Leo is a serious moral failure.