Donald Trump said Thursday that he would "meet with the Pope anytime he wants" in light of the Pontiff saying that the Republican front-runner's views on immigration were "not Christian."
"I have a lot of respect for the Pope," the developer told host Anderson Cooper at a CNN town hall in Columbia, S.C. "I think he has a lot of personality. He's very different."
While he said that he did not think that Pope Francis' comment "was a good thing for him to say," he added that he believed that the Pontiff's comments "were much softer than originally reported."
"I don't like fighting with the Pope, actually," he said. "I think it was probably a little nicer statement than what you folks reported in the media.
"After I read it, it was a little softer," Trump added. "The bottom line is that we have to have a border, we have to have security. We have tremendous illegal immigration."