Daily Wire host Michael Knowles took the stage at Villanova University, Pope Leo’s alma mater, on Tuesday night and addressed the ongoing feud between the president and the pontiff.
Knowles acknowledged that the fight between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo has placed “MAGA Catholics” such as himself in a “tricky position.” Trump ripped Pope Leo earlier this week after the pope condemned the president’s immigration policies and the war in Iran.
Knowles warned that any lasting division between Trump and the pope would affect the whole country, not just American Catholics, and benefit the “dark forces” that oppose Christianity and conservative political principles.
Even in America’s modern society dominated by secularism, there are moral and spiritual authorities competing for influence over politics, Knowles argued. The Daily Wire host highlighted leftist organizations that act as religious authorities, such as Planned Parenthood and LGBTQ activist centers.
“We will have rulers and we will have priests of one sort or the other,” Knowles said. “In an age of intensifying political and spiritual struggle, the president and the pope need to work together to illumine the earthly sphere because the alternative is that they work against one another to the sole benefit of the many dark forces that oppose us all.”
WATCH: MICHAEL KNOWLES AT VILLANOVA
For Trump and the pope, there are far more issues that bring them together than divide them, the Daily Wire host told students at the Catholic university near Philadelphia. Besides the pope’s more Left-leaning position on immigration, the pontiff’s views on nearly every social issue are to the Right of many Republicans, Knowles continued.
He pointed out that America remains the most religious country in the West, and its Catholic presence is only growing.
Knowles said that even if there wasn’t a Catholic influence in the United States, there would still be “a tension between the spiritual and the temporal authority, between the president and whatever pastor, preacher, or layman stood in inevitably to make spiritual claims.”
Even in the middle of a spat between the White House and the Vatican, conservative Catholic Americans can balance support for President Trump’s policies with respect for Pope Leo, Knowles said, citing a passage from Dante, who revered the papacy but was a political enemy of Pope Boniface VIII.
“You might say, in fact, that Dante found himself in exactly the same tricky position that MAGA Catholics find ourselves in this week,” Knowles said. “And with characteristic subtlety and sophistication, Dante offers us an example of how to deal with this dilemma in the very last lines of ‘Monarchia.”
In that passage, Dante wrote, “Let Caesar honor Peter as a first-born son should honor his father, so that, refulgent with the light of paternal grace, he may illumine with greater radiance the earthly sphere over which he has been set by Him who alone is Ruler of all things spiritual and temporal.”
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