How Pope Francis’ history of criticizing Trump and embracing LGBTQ rights rankled conservative Catholics

Pope Francis was was no fan of President Trump — or other conservative world leaders, a position that divided many conservative Catholics both in the US and around the globe.

Francis’s outspoken views on refugees and illegal migrants, as well as LGBTQ people in the church and women potentially serving as ordained deacons could spark a retrenchment by the next pontiff.

Francis died Monday at age 88, just one day after Easter Sunday.

The Argentine-born Francis’s nearly 12 years in the Seat of St. Peter were marked by repeated swipes at Trump, who won the U.S. presidency twice during his papacy. In early February, just months before his death, the pope wrote to American bishops saying Trump administration policies removing criminal undocumented aliens “will end badly.”

That followed a Jan. 19 pronouncement to Italian television — hours before Trump was sworn in for his second term — that mass deportations of illegal aliens from the U.S. would be “disgraceful.”

Neither Trump nor Vice President J.D. Vance, the latter a convert to Catholicism, appeared fazed by the pronouncements — nor did Francis’s pleas change policy.

Bill Donohue, president of the Manhattan-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, told The Post that Francis’s papacy will be eyed as a “net minus” because of his uneven approach to US leaders.

“I mean, Trump hadn’t been in office a couple of weeks, and the Pope is lecturing him about immigration, and he never lectured Biden about transgenderism, or about abortion, or about school choice, about a whole range of things, bioethics and the like,” Donohue said.

Francis “admitted in his recent autobiography that the person who had the greatest effect on him, on his politics going up, was an atheist, communist woman. And for him to admit that is rather remarkable,” Donohue noted.

Last July, Francis took on right-wing governments as a whole, telling believers at an event in italy, “Democracy is not in good health in the world today.” He decried “ideological temptations and populists,” saying, “Ideologies are seductive. Some people compare them to the Pied Piper of Hamelin: they seduce but lead you to deny yourself.”

Progressive stance on LGBTQ right, women deacons rankled

Inside the 1.4 billion-member Church, the late pope’s moves to increase acceptance of LGBTQ Catholics and weigh an expanded clerical role for women brought howls from traditionalists.

He encouraged outreach to LGBTQ Catholics, welcomed transgender sex workers to the Vatican, and approved a document saying priests could “bless” — but not marry — same-sex couples. Intense backlash from the blessing document forced the Church to issue two “clarifications” in the 14 days after its release that dramatically restricted the practice.

Francis also encouraged discussions that could lead to women being ordained as deacons, a step one level below the priesthood, which has been all-male for millennia.

Those discussions didn’t yield change by the time the pope died, a turn that disappointed Phyllis Zagano, senior research associate-in-residence and adjunct religion professor at Hofstra University.

Zagano believes the Church under Francis has ignored 50 years of historical research showing women being ordained to the diaconate and other positions and stalled reforms.

“I do not think Francis [was] a misogynist, but it seems there are enough in his orbit and elsewhere in the church to make him look like one,” Zagano told The Post via email.

Francis is to be lauded for his “significant” administrative appointments of women to head the Dicastery for Consecrated Life and as Governor of the Vatican City-State, she said, since cardinals traditionally held those roles.

Others were less sanguine about Francis’s progressivism.

Frank Pavone, for years a parish priest in Staten Island who worked to end abortion as the head of Priests for Life, was dismissed from the clergy by Francis. He said in an interview the late pope is “going to be known as a failed pope, a pope of confusion.”

Pavone said Francis’s great failure was not being a “center of unity” within the church. Instead, the ex-priest slammed the late pontiff’s moves on gay Catholics.

But, Pavone said, the damage of those liberal moves was done, evidenced by five cardinals sending a “Dubia,” or letter requesting official clarification of the Vatican’s actions.

“When you have Cardinals asking the Pope to clarify whether there are moral absolutes, that’s not because there’s any question that there are moral absolutes,” he told The Post. “That’s because they’re challenging him to do his job and to confirm this with the people who might be confused about that in the world, and he refused to answer their question.”

A ‘parish priest’ pope with a ‘mixed bag’ legacy

The Rev. Patrick Mary Briscoe, OP, editor of the Catholic magazine “Our Sunday Visitor,” said Francis was the only pope he’s known in nine years of ordained ministry. He praised the pontiff’s “insistence” on marrying both “spiritual mercy and the works of mercy” in the life of the Church.

The priest said Francis’s style was “very much, frankly, like a parish priest”. He said he suspects a successor will lead “a movement of orthodoxy” and promote “a renewed clarity of doctrine, of Catholic teaching.”

Raymond Arroyo, host of Catholic satellite network EWTN’s “The World Over Live” and a Fox News contributor, said Francis’s legacy “inevitably will be a mixed bag” because while some have cheered the late pontiff’s moves, others despaired.

Francis, he said, “took a jackhammer” to many things predecessors Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II did to implement the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, popularly known as Vatican II. Restricting the Latin Mass, for example, did not sit well with many of the faithful.

“Seminary enrollment is down, ordinations are down, church attendance is down,” Arroyo said. “These markers are demonstrable evidence that something is amiss.”

According to Joseph Capizzi, the Catholic University of America’s School of Theology and Religious Studies dean, “I think, to some extent, his legacy will be dependent upon which lens a person is looking through.”

Those “lenses” will vary if one sees Francis through the polarizing issues he raised, or in terms of the modern papacy and its use of media, or the late leader’s theological pronouncements.

Capizzi said, “A colleague of mine once told me, when I was a young faculty member, there’s nothing better than a dead Pope,” because “the next guy” will come in with a different agenda and leave his predecessor to the historians.