Pope Leo Distances Himself From Trump Feud Mid-Tour

Pope Leo moved Saturday to de-escalate his public dispute with President Donald Trump, telling reporters aboard his flight to Angola that coverage of his Africa remarks had not been 'accurate in all its aspects.' The pope clarified that his Cameroon speech, in which he said the world was being 'ravaged by a handful of tyrants', was drafted two weeks before Trump publicly attacked him, not in response to it. 'It was looked at as if I was trying to debate the president, which is not in my interest at all,' Leo said. The sequence matters: Trump called Leo 'weak on crime, and terrible for foreign policy' on Truth Social as the tour began Sunday, separately posting an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure that was deleted Monday after bipartisan backlash. Leo had signaled earlier in the week he would continue speaking out on the US-Israeli war against Iran, which appears to have triggered Trump's initial post. The first American pope is midway through an 18-flight, 11-city, four-country tour, one of the most logistically complex papal trips ever arranged, and has used it to introduce a markedly more combative public voice on war and inequality than he showed in his first 10 months in office.