Ankur Desai

And so that's a different level.

The Pope during the war years, Pius XII.

The Pope, who remained in the Vatican City during the hard-fought battle for Rome, granted an audience to Allied troops after the occupation and gave them his blessing.

What would you point to in terms of how he interacted with politicians?

Because it's a pretty controversial legacy he has, isn't it?

It is.

And that's the problem that every pope wants to avoid, meaning the question of how silent a pope can be in the face of war crimes and genocide.

And so here you had a church that was very much in between Soviet communism on

on one side, and fascism and Nazism on the other side.

But everything was dealt at the level of ideology, of we Catholics, we communists.

Of course, what we have now is an American pope and an American president locking horns.

And I just wonder, looking back to more recent times, when we have a Polish pope, John Paul II, being seen as a real beacon in the fight against communism.

That's true.

The big difference is that in 1979, when John Paul II visited Poland just a few months after his election...

He knew he had almost the entirety of the Polish people behind him.

That cannot be said for Pope Leo because America is very polarized.

How unusual is it for the Pope, the current one, to very specifically saying, look, I'm not afraid of what the Trump administration is going to say, being quite direct in standing his ground against, well, specifically the riposte from the White House?

It's very unusual.

Pope Leo spent 20 years in Peru at the time when Peru was a very dangerous place.

A civil war, armed gangs, killing priests.