Trump’s decision to share an AI-generated photo that depicted him as Jesus and his subsequent attack on Pope Leo XIV has continued making headlines going into the weekend, now with Bill O’Reilly offering up his mediation services to bring the two world leaders back together.
In a segment Saturday that began as a criticism to CNN and other mainstream media outlets for denouncing Trump and siding with the Pope through the scuffle — one CNN commentator he pulled up slammed the Truth Social posts as “sloppy and frankly disrespectful” — O’Reilly parsed out both perspectives and said he could find some common ground.
The Pope, O’Reilly said, “is a good guy.” But he took issue with how he believes “the media came out and said, ‘Yeah, the Pope is right and Trump is wrong and Trump is disrespectful.’”
He pointed to segments from “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” “The Ingraham Angle” and elsewhere as an example, showing one clip of Vatican reporter Christopher White saying that Trump’s “remarks certainly were offensive to many Catholics and generally people of goodwill.”
“OK — weren’t offensive to me, and I’m a Catholic and I think I’m a person of goodwill because I understand where the president is coming from,” O’Reilly responded. “And I understand where Pope Leo is. I can mediate this myself. I can go to Rome and mediate the two sides, and the reason I can do it is I understand both sides.”
The Pope, he continued, is required to “promote peace. He’s a pacifist and he doesn’t really come at it from a political point of view. So, logically, my question as a Catholic is, ‘OK, Your Holiness, you saw Iran kill tens of thousands of its own people just a few weeks ago in the streets. [The] Catholic Church didn’t say anything … not a word.”
“And now, because this is what the war is all about, that the West, at least Israel and the United States, believe that Iran is close to having a nuclear weapon which it would use to kill hundreds of thousands of people,” he added. “And is that OK with the Vatican?”
O’Reilly insisted such questions need to be asked “if Pope Leo is going to inject himself into this war, which he has. But he’s done it passively.”
Watch the full segment below:
The president, on the other hand, is not required to be a pacifist, O’Reilly added. His job is “to be a protector of his people. We, the American people, and the world to some extent, although we have divorced ourselves from NATO.”
Trump’s job is to”protect people from terrorist states like Iran.” The two men have different jobs, which are “exclusive,” O’Reilly continued. “There is no common ground, but there could be.”
“And the key is people of goodwill,” he also said. “So I assume the United States wants to vanquish Iran because it is a theocracy that kills people. It’s as simple as that. And the Pope should want Iran vanquished for the same reason. There’s your common ground right there.”
The Pope disputed suggestions of a feud with Trump while speaking to reporters Saturday.
“There’s been a certain narrative that has not been accurate in all of its aspects, but because of the political situation created when, on the first day of the trip, the president of the United States made some comments about myself,” he said. “Much of what has been written since then has been more commentary on commentary, trying to interpret what has been said.”
