“He loved the world, and he especially loved people that were having a hard time — and that’s good with me,” Mr. Trump said, announcing that he was ordering flags at the White House and federal and military facilities to be flown at half-staff.
Asked if he agreed with the pope’s tolerance toward migrants, Mr. Trump said, “Yeah, I do.” But moments later, in response to a question about a legal case over his administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants, Trump railed against the “millions and millions” of migrants who have entered the United States.
After Mr. Trump’s first election, the two met — for the only time — at the Vatican in 2017. The photos quickly went viral. Standing side by side, the president smiled broadly as the pope appeared stern.
The Pope gave the president, a known skeptic of climate change, a set of English-language translations of his papal writings, including a 2015 encyclical on climate change.
Mr. Trump, seemingly star-struck, told reporters: “He is something. We had a fantastic meeting.”
But in 2018, Pope Francis condemned Mr. Trump’s separation of migrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, calling the policy “immoral” and “contrary to our Catholic values.”
And in 2019, in another criticism of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, the pope warned that those who close borders “will become prisoners of the walls that they build.”
The pope’s tone with Mr. Trump was markedly different from the one he had struck with former President Barack Obama, whose White House he visited and with whose goals he was often aligned, on issues including an easing of tensions with Cuba and the Iran nuclear deal.
The Obama-Francis relationship had symbolized what many liberals believed was the coming of a progressive era on the world stage.
“There was a meeting of minds,” said John Kerry, Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, who met repeatedly with Pope Francis. “The pope had enormous admiration for President Obama’s journey and what he represented and his efforts as a peacemaker.”
That sense of overlapping missions allowed Democrats to claim the pope as one of their own — even if they didn’t agree on every issue, including abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But it also set the stage for Republican backlash and for the conflict with Mr. Trump, who aggressively courted disgruntled conservative Catholics.
“For Donald Trump, Pope Francis looked like an enemy because he’s been friendly with Obama and with Biden,” said Steven P. Millies, the director of the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and an expert on the Catholic church’s relationship to politics. “There was not going to be much chance of a personal relationship between Pope Francis and Donald Trump. What we can call personal tensions have been visible very publicly.”
Indeed, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the White House, becoming America’s second Catholic president, the Pope called him “to tell me how much he appreciated the fact that I would focus on the poor and focus on the needs of people who are in trouble,” Mr. Biden later recounted.
