MAGA Flips Out Over Pope Leo’s Love-for-the-Poor Tweets
It’s the latest entry in the annals of absurd outrage: Pope Leo XIV tweets about God’s love for the poor, and MAGA world loses its mind
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Over the past week, Leo’s official X (Twitter) account posted a series of messages extolling God’s special concern for the impoverished — messages so basic to Christian teaching you’d think they were uncontroversial.
Instead, certain right-wing influencers erupted in fury, as if caring for the downtrodden were some radical new heresy.
One commenter mockingly captured the hysteria: he was “heartbroken to learn the Pope sympathizes with the poor. How can I continue to believe in God?” — a perfect eye-roll at those acting betrayed by a pope who preaches the Gospel.
The irony is that Leo’s tweets weren’t off-the-cuff at all — most of them quoted verbatim from Dilexi te, his recent apostolic exhortation on God’s love for the poor.
For instance, one tweet reminded the world that “the poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice,” pointedly rejecting the idea that all poverty stems from personal failings.
Another noted that “God shows a preference for the poor: the Lord’s words of hope and liberation are addressed first of all to them”, assuring that even in their hardship, “no one should feel abandoned.”
These statements come straight from Catholic social teaching and Scripture — hardly revolutionary stuff.
In fact, the Church has spoken of a “preferential option for the poor” for generations, echoing Jesus’ own proclamation, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” and his identification with the least among us.
Nonetheless, MAGA Twitter (pardon, “X”) reactions ranged from outrage to despair. Leo’s post about poverty not being a personal choice garnered roughly 2,600 angry replies within hours. Some users even claimed they were now done with Catholicism over this boilerplate pope stuff.
“I no longer support you as my Pope. You have betrayed the Catholic faith,” one irate commenter fumed.
Another bizarrely insisted “the Bible is anti-welfare,” misquoting St. Paul’s dictum that “he who won’t work shall not eat” as if Jesus never preached mercy.
Still others fell back on the old bootstraps narrative — proclaiming that in the U.S. “everyone…has the same exact opportunities to rise above” and anyone who remains poor is “lazy… a victim BY CHOICE.”
It’s the kind of rhetoric that practically rewrites the Beatitudes to say “Blessed are the comfortable, for they must be holier than the poor.”
For everyone outside this echo chamber, such reactions were equal parts baffling and darkly comic.
Writer Derek Guy sarcastically observed that he was “questioning my faith in God after learning the Pope wants to help the poor, feed the hungry, and heal the sick.”
The fact that basic Christian duties — caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, healing the sick — could be cast as a faith-shaking scandal perfectly underscores the absurdity.
If anything, the vitriol from these self-styled pious defenders shows how far their politics have drifted from the Church’s actual teachings.
This social media tempest comes on the heels of other recent faux outrages. Just last week, far-right agitator Laura Loomer melted down because Pope Leo allowed a small prayer room for Muslim visitors in the Vatican Library — screeching that “we have a WOKE MARXIST POPE… letting the Muslims take over the Vatican!”
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In reality, Leo’s interfaith courtesy was perfectly in line with the gestures of respect toward Muslims by John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.
And earlier this month, MAGA partisans raged when Leo pointed out that being truly “pro-life” means more than opposing abortion. He noted, for example, that “someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life… someone who [supports] the inhuman treatment of immigrants… I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
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This eminently Catholic point — that a consistent ethic of life spans from the womb to the border to death row — prompted fury from those who prefer to narrow “pro-life” to a single issue.
In each case, Leo reaffirmed long-standing Church teaching, and in each case, the MAGA wing responded with panic and name-calling (branding the pope “heretic,” “Marxist,” or worse ).
If anything, the current brouhaha might be premature — Leo hasn’t even tweeted some of the spicier lines from Dilexi te yet.
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In that document, he declares that stark inequality “is the root of social ills” and decries a “throwaway culture” that indifferently lets millions go hungry in a world of plenty.
He even blasts as “pseudo-scientific” the notion that free-market economics alone will magically cure poverty.
One can only imagine the sputtering Twitter threads if those gems hit the Pontifex timeline.
The truth is that Leo XIV is unapologetically challenging every distortion of the Gospel — whether it’s the idea that the poor deserve their lot, or that our social duties end at charity’s door.
Through it all, Pope Leo appears unfazed. It’s increasingly clear that Leo is immune to his critics’ uninformed opinions of him. He’s not governing by Twitter poll, and he’s certainly not trimming the Gospel to fit partisan agendas.
In fact, every flashpoint so far has only underscored how committed Leo is to preaching the Good News in its fullness.
He is simply reminding the Church that we cannot love God while ignoring the poor, because as Leo argues, “if she wants to be Christ’s Church, [the Church] must be a Church of the Beatitudes, one that makes room for the little ones.”
God’s love extends especially to those on the margins — and no amount of MAGA rage will make this pope shy away from that truth.
Leo XIV will let the critics fume; he has a Gospel to proclaim, and the poor — whom Jesus called blessed — to lift up.
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The "catholics" that say they can hardly be catholics after Pope Leo spoke about the poor, that they are there because of the failure of our lack of empathy and understanding, were never Catholic to begin with!!
In reading the comments on the pope and his message, it is clear some people calling themselves Christian have no idea who Christ is. The gospels tell you. People searching the Old Testament or Paul's letters are looking for a different message to follow than Jesus'.