Vatican visitors slam Trump over attacks on the US-born pope's message of peace

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Vatican visitors slam Trump over attacks on the US-born pope's message of peace

2026-04-15 00:06 Last Updated At：00:20

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Inappropriate. Ridiculous. Absurd. Visitors to the Vatican on Tuesday had some choice words for U.S. President Donald Trump after his harsh criticism of Pope Leo XIV for his calls to soften the rhetoric of war.

The world has buzzed at the extraordinary clash between the U.S.-born pope and the American president. Trump called Leo “weak” and captive to the “radical left’’ on social media this week, after the pope called Trump’s threats toward Iran “truly unacceptable.’’

At the Vatican, visitors had Leo’s back while he's away on a 10-day trip to Africa.

“It’s just ridiculous, because if the pope is not speaking about peace, and is not taking care about every people in the world, he’s not the pope,’’ said Joerg Soler, who was visiting the Vatican from Switzerland.

“It’s completely inappropriate,’’ said Mariella Acciaioli, a French tourist. “Things are getting too much. We need to mobilize everyone, especially our leaders, to deal with this behavior that is going beyond every limit.”

U.S. tourist Paul Sarauskas expressed disbelief at Trump’s unprecedented broadside, calling it "absurd.''

“I think he needs to keep his nose out of religion. He’s telling the pope what to do. He’s telling the pope how to do his job,’’ Sarauskas said. “Where the pope just wants to do good things, right? He wants to talk about peace, about helping other people, whereas the current administration is doing something completely opposite. They’re just tearing people apart. They’re talking about division and war and hate.”

Trump clearly expected the American pope to be “subservient” to the United States, said Italian journalist Massimo Franco, who has a new book, “Popes, Dollars and Wars,’’ about U.S.-Vatican relations.

“A pope must be a pope. He must respond to a wider community. And if he sees that Trump’s policy risks to give a distorted view of the United States, I think the pope is helping the United States as well, not just the United States, to find the right path,'' Franco said.

The Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a prominent Italian Jesuit theologian and undersecretary to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, said Trump’s fury “against a moral voice” shows that “the president is powerless.”

“He can’t bring the pope to the same terrain where he has brought everyone else, where he can dominate with language,’’ Spadaro told Italian Radio 24.”In this sense, the moral force of the church is evident. It is not a counter-power but a space in which power is being judged by criteria that power itself cannot control.”

Wall Street rises toward the edge of its all-time high as oil prices ease

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market is nearing its all-time high Tuesday, and oil prices are easing as hopes climb that the United States and Iran may try again on talks to end their war and avoid a worst-case scenario for the global economy.

The S&P 500 rose 1% after rallying the day before back to where it was before the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran in late February. It's just 0.4% below its record and on track for its ninth gain in the last 10 days.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 313 points, or 0.6%, as of noon Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.6% higher.

They followed gains for stock markets worldwide as Pakistan said it was trying to bring the United States and Iran together for more talks. Such prospects also helped lower the price of oil, whose production and transportation has been snarled by the fighting.

The price for a barrel of Brent crude oil, the international standard, fell 3.8% to $95.56. That’s still above its roughly $70 level from before the war, but it’s well below its peak of $119 reached a couple times when worries about the war hit their heights.

To be sure, hope has often quickly swung into doubt in financial markets since the war began, which has caused extreme and sudden reversals. Much of the stress has been due to the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that’s the main avenue for crude oil produced in the Persian Gulf area to reach customers worldwide. Blockages there have kept oil off the global market, which has in turn driven up its price.

And that has meant a blast of higher inflation. In the United States, inflation at the wholesale level accelerated to 4% in March from 3.4% the month before, according to the latest data released Tuesday. That was actually better than the 4.6% rate economists expected, but it could filter down to U.S. households if businesses fully pass on the increases.

The effect is worldwide. Global inflation this year looks set to accelerate to 4.4% from 4.1% in 2025, according to the International Monetary Fund, which had earlier thought inflation would slow to 3.8%.

The IMF on Tuesday also downgraded its forecast for global economic growth to 3.1% this year from the 3.3% it had forecast in January.

On Wall Street, strong profit reports from several companies and expectations for more helped make up for such worries. At their heart, stock prices tend to follow the path of corporate profits over the long term.

BlackRock gained 4.5%, and Citigroup rose 2.9% after the financial companies reported stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

JPMorgan Chase also delivered a better-than-expected quarter, but its stock dipped 0.7% as CEO Jamie Dimon said bank officials cannot predict how the “increasingly complex set of risks” will play out given so much uncertainty.

Amazon climbed 3.3% after saying it would buy Globalstar, a mobile satellite services company, for $90 per share in either cash or Amazon stock. Globalstar jumped 10.7%.

Software companies also rallied for a second day, recovering more of their sharp losses from earlier in the year taken on worries that they could be made obsolete by artificial-intelligence technology. AppLovin rose 3.1%, and an ETF from iShares tracking the software industry added 1.4%.

That in turn helped private-credit companies rebound. These companies have lent money to software businesses and others that may be under threat from AI, and they've seen investors rush to try to pull their money recently.

Blue Owl Capital rose 8% to trim its loss for the year so far below 39%. Ares Management climbed 5.8%, and Apollo Global Management rose 3.7%.

They helped offset a 4.8% drop for Wells Fargo, which reported weaker revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia. South Korea’s Kospi jumped 2.7%, and Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 2.4% for two of the bigger gains.

In the bond market, Treasury yields ticked lower as the fall for oil prices took pressure off inflation. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.27% from 4.30% late Monday.

AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Matt Ott contributed to this report.