A top aide to Donald Trump sought Thursday to further push back on Pope Francis’s criticism of the GOP presidential front-runner’s proposal to build a wall along the nation’s southern border.
Trump senior advisor Dan Scavino suggested the pontiff was being hypocritical regarding Trump’s wall proposal, tweeting about the walls that surround the Vatican.
The image appears to include a drop shadow overlaid on a map of the borders of the roughly 100 acres in the Vatican City. Critics have previously pointed to the centuries-old walled portions of the Vatican to call out the pope’s push for open borders.
Asked about Trump, Pope Francis told reporters Thursday that “a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”
While concluding his trip to Mexico, the pontiff laid a wreath on the U.S. border to honor those attempting to pass into the U.S.
Trump ripped Francis’ remarks, saying it was “disgraceful” for a religious leader to question someone’s faith, adding in a statement that if the Vatican were attacked “the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened.”