VATICAN CITY — As President Donald Trump leads a pride-swelling celebration of America’s — and his own — greatness on the 250^th birthday of the United States, the first U.S.-born pope will offer a quiet, deliberate counterpoint to the nativism of “America First.”

Like his predecessors, Leo XIV has played down his nationality to reach a global flock, avoiding celebrations of U.S. holidays, embracing a multilingual papacy and, if anything, surrounding himself with more aides from his adopted country of Peru than from the United States.

Vatican officials say Leo’s decision to stage his trip precisely on the Fourth of July is sending an “unofficial” message — about looking outward, welcoming strangers, and rejecting overt nationalism. It is a message directed, at least in part, to Washington.

The trip is also a nod to a historic visit by Pope Francis to the same island on July 8, 2013 — a trip that underscored a pillar of his ministry: the plight of migrants.

“An American pope — the first in history — who on July Fourth, the national holiday of the United States, chooses not to celebrate the birth of a nation and its borders but to stand on the wounded threshold of the Mediterranean,” said the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. “This, in itself, is already an unofficial statement.”

“This journey comes at a moment when the United States has made the closing of its doors to migrants a banner, and an American pope knows this all too well,” Spadaro added. “His choice is not a head-on polemic — Leo does not point fingers — but a counterpoint. He reminds everyone that the dignity God gives to every person comes before the border.”

Tensions between Trump and Leo, touched off during the pope’s vocal denunciations of the Iran war, have elevated the stakes of the Lampedusa trip.

That is especially true as some liberal-progressive blogs circulate claims that the pope, who has decried the administration’s migrant crackdown as “inhuman,” is purposely snubbing Trump’s Washington event and staging a de facto protest by going to Lampedusa instead.

The White House has denied that Leo was invited or expected at the D.C. event. The Vatican, which said in February that Leo would not travel to the United States this year, has declined to comment.

One senior Vatican official with knowledge of the pope’s schedule, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, said he was unaware of any invitation.

Snub or not, the optics will be unmistakable as Leo’s trip sets up a split-screen moment: of a U.S. president ebullient during a “Tribute to America” that he has called “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all” and the first American pope stoically laying flowers at the tombs of migrants who drowned on quests for better lives.

Some conservative American Catholics are smarting at Leo’s decision, seeing it as the wrong message on Independence Day.

“I think it’s more hurtful than helpful,” said John Yep, president of Catholics for Catholics, a U.S.-based group that actively supports the Trump administration.

Yep added, “Rather than having the Holy Father visit Lampedusa, which is a symbol of illegal migration, we should have the Holy Father at Ellis Island [to honor] the hundreds of thousands of people who came to the United States legally to make this country what it is today.”

Leo’s views on migrants are being interpreted by some conservatives as more moderate than those of his predecessor.

Leo has said that “dignity has no passport,” but also stressed that migrants should integrate and reconsider pursuing “easy paradises” in the West. Francis often voiced similar reasoning. But he coupled them with grand gestures — such as bringing a group of Syrian refugees to Vatican City on a papal fight — that Leo has yet to replicate.

As Washington’s exercise in patriotism unfolds Saturday, observers see Leo presenting another way of being an American. On Friday, Leo, for instance, will receive the Liberty Medal from the Philadelphia-based National Constitution Center for promoting “ideals enshrined by America’s founders” — including “religious liberty and freedom of conscience and expression around the world.”

“He’s now the first or second most visible American in the world, and whatever he says and does is seen by many as a new chance for America in the eyes of many,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University, the pope’s alma mater.

“He shows an American who can be a strong believer, but not in a nationalistic or ideological way, someone who has seen the world, other cultures,” Faggioli said. “Someone who has become inoculated against monolingualism, monoculturalism, ethnocentric views. This is quite different from a certain model of national Catholicism that we see in some of the United States today.”

One thing is certain: For Leo, the Lampedusa trip will showcase the burden and benefits of being the first U.S.-born pope.

Before his ascendancy to the papacy last year, which stunned the world, it was long said an American would never fill the role, that a superpower nation should not be allowed to amplify its power by also having one of its own occupy the Throne of St. Peter.

Vatican officials have said privately that Leo broke that barrier for myriad reasons, including a growing sense within the Holy See that in an age of American hegemony, the voice of a Chicago-born pontiff could not be dismissed so easily by the American faithful.

And yet, the conclave of cardinals, one senior Vatican official said, also avoided a “high-profile” cardinal of a prominent U.S. city who might be viewed by the rest of the world as overly associated with the U.S. church.

Rather, they picked Cardinal Robert Prevost — a relatively new Vatican bureaucrat who had recently served as bishop in the Peruvian outpost of Chiclayo, in a Latin American country where he had long served as a missionary and became a naturalized citizen.

“Yes, he’s American,” said that official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “But not too American.”

Leo seems to go out of his way to prove that point — launching his first international trip, to Turkey and Lebanon, on Thanksgiving Day and treating it as any other.

He presented his first encyclical on Memorial Day in the U.S. He might pine for Chicago’s Aurelio’s Pizza, but insiders say his mouth waters just as much for Peruvian ceviche and Chiclayo-style goat stew. In a theoretical faceoff between Peru and the U.S. in the World Cup, he has said he would “probably” root for Peru.

“I never would call Leo an American pope. I would call him a pope from the Americas,” said Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Czech Canadian who serves as head of the Vatican ministry in charge of migrants.

It is not unusual for popes — who preside over a borderless flock that today numbers 1.4 billion Catholics — to sidestep overt references to their nationality. But to varying degrees, they have harked back to home.

John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in more than 450 years, staged repeated pilgrimages to his native Poland, championed opposition to communism, and revived the tradition of Corpus Christi processions — alive and well in his native land — in Rome.

The Pope Benedict XVI, a German, celebrated birthdays with Bavarian-themed events in the Vatican gardens, including beer and pretzels.

The Argentine Francis, meanwhile, slurped the yerba mate of his homeland, dined on empanadas, deployed Buenos Aires slang, and openly rooted for his beloved San Lorenzo soccer club.

Though he never returned to Argentina, he brought Argentina to Rome through a hands-on style of pastoral outreach mirroring the culture of Buenos Aires priests who ministered in the city’s slums.

Leo, too, is showing his Americanness in quiet, subtle ways. He has live-streamed with American youths, is a proud White Sox fan, twirled a basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters in St. Peter’s Square and has foisted a measure of English on the Italian-speaking grandees within the high walls of the Holy See.

His American imprint, observers say, has been more about efficiency and purpose. In speeches and asides, he is more concise than many previous popes, and, last year, he presided over the Vatican’s first publicly released financial report since 2023.

“If you look at the man, he’s very systematic. He’s very organized. He’s like your classic Type A personality,” said Elise Ann Allen, a Vatican journalist and Leo biographer. “The way he thinks in his structured mind, his very systematic and organized way of doing things. And he’s brought that to the Vatican. He is, I think, very American.”

Stefano Pitrelli contributed to this report.