Trump’s defenders challenged geographically about Vatican

Supporters of Donald Trump were quick to suggest Thursday that Pope Francis was being hypocritical to criticize as un-Christian Trump’s proposal to build a wall between the United States and Mexico because the pontiff himself lives in Vatican City, a small state with sturdy walls of its own.

“Amazing comments from the pope — considering Vatican City is 100% surrounded by massive walls,” Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media director and senior adviser, said on Twitter after the pope suggested Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, was “not Christian.”

Scavino tweeted a picture of Vatican City with an outline around its border that suggested walls stood on some territory where no walls, in f act, stand.

Similar criticisms could be found on news media outlets like Fox News and TMZ and MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough.

But scholars who study Medieval Italy and the history of the Roman Catholic Church dismissed those criticisms as the product of a basic misunderstanding of both the geography and the history of Vatican City, a roughly 100-acre enclave in Rome that is the seat of the Holy See.

“The rhetoric from Trump’s team is misinformation, and it is not true,” said Gerard Man- nion, a professor of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington. “It isn’t all surrounded by walls, and it’s not like you need a separate visa or a passport to enter,” he said.

“You wouldn’t know, almost, when you even entered Vatican City. There is a white line painted on the ground in St. Peter’s Square, but that kind of thing is not obvious everywhere.”

There are, to be sure, formidable walls in Vatican City, and much of the site, including the gardens and the modest guesthouse that is home to Francis, is set behind them.

But the walls do not entirely enclose the citystate, and in the modern era they are not meant to, historians said.