In an attempt to reduce the amount of people entering the US illegally, President Trump announced he would “build a wall” and he aims to have the project completed by the end of 2020. The policy that played a big part in Mr Trump’s successful 2016 Presidential campaign was slammed by Pope Francis, who described the plan as “not Christian”. He said in April 2019: “Those who build walls will become prisoners of the walls they put up. This is history.”
This echoed his statement in March 2019 when he said: “If you raise a wall between people, you end up a prisoner of that wall that you raised.”
Earlier in the same year while speaking in Panama, Pope Francis said: “Builders of walls sow fear.”
He also said in 2016: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”
But in response to those comments, President Trump snapped back in 2016.
He responded to the Vatican chief, saying: “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.”
Francis has made caring for migrants a hallmark of his papacy, traveling to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa in 2013 in his first trip as Pope to comfort would-be refugees who survived shipwrecks and smugglers to reach Europe.
He brought 12 Syrians home with him when he visited a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, three years later, and he has turned over Vatican apartments to house new arrivals to Italy.
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A senior Lega insider with knowledge of the meeting said: “Bannon advised Salvini himself that the actual Pope is a sort of enemy. He suggested for sure to attack, frontally.”
After the meeting, Salvini became more outspoken against the Pope, claiming that conservatives in the Vatican were on his side.
One tweet from Salvini’s account, in May 2016, said: “The Pope says migrants are not a danger. Whatever!” and he was also pictured in 2016 holding a shirt saying “Benedict is my pope.”
Pope Francis may have come under fire right-wing figures over his immigration stance, but his sympathetic approach to the issue hasn’t waned.