Some conservatives are accusing CBS’s “60 Minutes” of purposely airing interviews with anti-war Catholic bishops to bait President Trump into his recent tiffs with Pope Leo XIV. The show featured a segment with three Cardinals who the show presented as “influential” in the Catholic church. The Cardinals- Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago;  Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C.; and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, NJ- criticized the Iran conflict as well as ICE policies.

Cardinal Robert McElroy said the conflict is “not a just war.” “You can’t go for a variety of different aims. You have to have a focused aim, which is to restore justice and restore peace. That’s it,” he said. While admitting that the Iranian regime is “abominable,” he expressed his concern that the US’s approach would result in “the possibility of war after war after war.” Cardinal Cupich took issue with how the White House has presented the conflict on social media. “We’re dehumanizing the victims of war by turning the suffering of people and the killing of children and our own soldiers into entertainment,” he said.

Appearing on Fox News’s “The Prayerful Posse” with Raymond Arroyo, Father Gerald Murray and author Robert Royal pushed back on whether the three men’s views really reflected the overall opinion of the Catholic church. “The three of them are billed as so-called influential, but none of them hold offices in the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, and they have never been elected,” Royal said. He compared them to the so-called “Squad,” a group of left-leaning politicians in US politics, calling the men “a very definite and pretty left-wing group of just three.” Murray pushed back against the claim that the war wasn’t just. “I think it is a just war precisely because the nuclear threat from Iran is a proven danger to us. It’s not an imaginary, ‘Maybe it’ll happen’ thing. If they have a nuclear weapon, they’re [going to] use it,” he said. Arroyo suggested the show manufactured the situation to get a reaction from the President. “They were trying to get Trump to overreact, and he did,” he said.

Relations between the Pope and President Trump have continued to be tense. Pope Leo XIV made comments that “[Jesus] does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood,’” during a mass reading before Easter. Although he did not name President Trump specifically, the President’s critics jumped on the comments as a rebuke from the Pope.

The President has responded by calling the Pope “weak.” “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. He talks about ‘fear’ of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside, and being ten and even twenty feet apart,” President Trump wrote in a long response on Truth Social. He criticized Pope Leo XIV for meeting with “Obama sympathizers” and that he needed to “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” The Pope has responded that he does not fear the President.

The rift is putting Catholic Trump supporters in an awkward position. “I like Donald a lot, but he needs to calm down,” Lola Reese told CNN. “I am disheartened that the president chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father,” said Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the pope a politician.”