Millie LaFontaine is a retired physician who lives in Concord.

Leaders of many nations sat together in St. Peter’s Square in Rome to honor the passing of Pope Francis this past weekend. Among those present, occupying a front row seat and appearing bored and isolated in a sea of dignitaries, sat our own president.

Speaking to reporters just before he left, deal-maker Trump said he planned to meet with some of those leaders while in Rome, assuring us, as the helicopter rotor blades whirred above, “We’re going to make America very rich.”

The contrast between our president and the Pope, whose funeral he attended, could not be more stark. Despite the grandeur of the Vatican, Pope Francis preached and lived with humility, and in so doing, he was able to deliver powerful messages that made a transformative impact on those who listened to him.

Our president talks and acts with arrogance. His messages are designed to divide us and to strike fear in our hearts. Translate “We’re going to make America very rich” as, “My cronies and I will be very rich. Too bad for the rest of you losers.”

Francis chose his name to honor St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century mystic who lived a life of poverty and believed that nature itself is the mirror of God. Francis wrote in one of his papal letters to bishops throughout the world that, like St. Francis, he was “concerned for God’s creation, and for the poor and the outcast.” He also wrote that the saint “shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society and inner peace.”

Francis was outspoken throughout his papacy about his concern for the downtrodden. He traveled more widely than other popes, less to seats of power than to remote places in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans or Central and South America. Always, he visited the poor and spoke on behalf of immigrants. He established a homeless shelter and outreach center within the confines of the Vatican for those close to home. He reminded his listeners repeatedly of Christ’s explicit instructions to love and care for our neighbors as ourselves.

He spoke out publicly about the cruelty of our own administration’s treatment of immigrants. At the very end of his life, he held a private audience with our own vice president. We don’t need to see a transcript to have a strong sense of the message he delivered. We will only know how that message was received by the actions of the administration in the future.

To our president, people now seeking the chance for a better life, just as his own forebears did in the not-too-distant past, are vilified and condemned as rapists and criminals. Instead of regarding them as human beings who have suffered and have hopes and aspirations, he relentlessly hunts them down, flatly defying the rule of law and the right to due process set forth in our Constitution and affirmed by our Supreme Court.

To our president, everyone in this country who benefits from a government program is ripe for swindling. He and his sycophants have taken the Humpty Dumpty approach to these programs: Smash them first, then leave them in an unholy mess for the next administration to try to deal with, or not.

Unlike the Pope, our president likes to visit only the best places, sit only in the front row and surround himself only with the wealthiest among us. He openly admires autocrats and dictators and is bent on joining their ranks.

Nowhere is the difference between the Pope and the president more clear than their approach to the existential threat now facing us, the climate crisis. Pope Francis chose his name in honor of the patron saint of the environment. He spoke frequently and explicitly about the looming threat of global warming. He stressed that the path we are on desperately needs to change. He said we need to “replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing.”

Instead, our president calls the climate crisis “a hoax.” On Day One, he withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement. He directs his minions to drill and mine our Earth and oceans, aim for maximal timber extraction from our forests, abandon our clean energy initiatives, weaken or remove our protections against pollution, ignore the importance of endangered species and wild lands and pave the way for the degradation of our National Parks.

In the same week Pope Francis died, Earth Day was taking place here in America. To me, the celebration was muted. Somehow, it feels like the barrage of issues raised in the first 100 days of this administration has buried this most important of issues. Reflecting on the words of Pope Francis can remind us of the urgency of the need to protect ourselves, our neighbors and our Earth.