“I don’t think the Pope really understood in terms of the crime problem and the problems of illegal immigration”, he said.
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“For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful”, Trump said in a statement delivered on a campaign stop in SC. “I leave that to your judgement, to the people to judge”, he said.
“This man has brought more sense of hope and more about the do’s in life than the don’ts”, Kasich said, referring to Francis.
Mr Trump has promised throughout his campaign to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and to deport some 11 million immigrants living illegally in the US. In the heat of the United States presidential primaries, Pope Francis weighed in when asked about Trump’s policies during his Mexico visit.
The 79-year-old Argentinian, a fervent critic of the freewheeling capitalism espoused by Trump, also said he was proud to have been branded a politicised pontiff by the tycoon. It also underscored the popular pope’s willingness to needle US politicians on hot-button issues. The property mogul and reality TV star retorted that his comments were “disgraceful”.
Flying back to Rome from a pilgrimage that included Mass at the Mexican side of the border with the United States, Francis, answering a reporter’s question, had said that a person who advocates building walls is “not Christian”.
Trump also raised the prospect of the Islamic State extremist group attacking the Vatican, saying that if that happened, “the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened”.
While the Pope said he would “give the benefit of the doubt” because he had not heard Mr Trump’s border plans independently, he added: “I say only that this man is not a Christian if he has said things like that”.
The Mexican-US border stretches more than 3,100 kilometres (1,950 miles), but only around a third of it is now covered by high-security fencing. An October poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that most Americans had no strong opinion on the pope’s approach to immigration issues, though he was overall viewed favourably.
But by Thursday evening, the GOP front-runner was doing something unusual: de-escalating a fight.
The pope said he did not want to advise American Catholics on whether or not to vote for Trump, and it was not immediately clear what impact his remarks would have on Republicans likely to vote in the November 8 election.
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“The clergy – Protestant and Catholic – needs to stick to saving souls”, said DePass, a conservative activist going back to his stint as executive director of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in SC in 1976.
