Poking the Pope
He's weak on crime
President Trump posted an all-timer at Pope Leo XIV, calling him among other things "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy" referencing the US and Israel's war on Iran, and claimed Leo owes his papacy to him. The post came hours after Leo presided over a prayer vigil for peace at St. Peter's Basilica, in which he denounced the "delusion of omnipotence" fueling the war and told the leaders of nations: "Stop! Enough of war!" (It also came just two hours after 60 Minutes aired a joint interview with Cardinals Cupich, McElroy, and Tobin calling the Church "a voice of moral opposition" to the administration,
“He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.”
Trump is actually probably right about this though a way. Villanova’s Massimo Faggioli told Religion News Service he believes Trump’s reelection is what made a U.S.-born pope possible, giving the cardinals a way to counter the rightward shift he set in motion, which is a claim I buy, and it’s a move that is completely reasonable for the liberal faction of cardinals in Rome to have made.
Political theologian Steven Millies compares what happened last year to 1978, when the conclave chose Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II) from behind the Iron Curtain to challenge the Soviet bloc. A declassified CIA report predicted Pope John Paul II would pose “a serious challenge to Soviet authority.”
An American pontiff neutralizes the nationalist framing of American Catholic dissent. Trump can’t dismiss him as a meddling foreigner.
Pope Leo XIV is from the South Side of Chicago.
Though it’s not completely unfair to say that the arc of Catholic social thought (especially since Medellín) stands in direct opposition to Trump, American conservatism, and reactionary politics writ large.
The church has changed, especially due to the rise of liberation theology from Latin American base communities to the Chair of Peter in Rome. The preferential option for the poor, the insistence that sin is structural, and the theological tradition of arguing that the Gospel demands the dismantling of unjust systems were ideologically suppressed under John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, who silenced theologians like Leonardo Boff. Francis rehabilitated liberation Theology as pastoral praxis. Leo, who chose his name in honor of Rerum Novarum and spent two decades in ministry in Peru, has, as of now, shown little intention of moving off the path that Francis had paved for him.
The American Catholic right has struggled to abide by this trend, and the reactionary figures pushing grievances with Rome are not marginal. Cardinal Burke, evicted from his Vatican apartment in 2023, is still the traditionalist wing’s de facto leader despite the eviction. Bishop Strickland, removed from Tyler, Texas, podcasts on LifeSiteNews. Behind them stands a well-documented network of dark money: Timothy Busch’s Napa Institute, the EWTN media empire, and Koch-adjacent foundations funneling millions through DonorsTrust, which is a dark money clearinghouse that, as NCR reported, also funded groups linked to January 6th.
These are the material structures sustaining a movement with no canonical standing but enormous reach across the American laity. On the other side, Cardinals Cupich and McElroy have reinforced Leo’s condemnation of actions of the Trump administration, with Cupich calling it “sickening” to treat real suffering like a video game.
This conflict will outlast Trump. Figures like Nick Fuentes, whose Groyper movement RNS reported can be argued to be “reshaping Catholic identity” among young men, Taylor Marshall, and Church Militant’s media apparatus are building a pipeline that funnels young American Catholics toward a tradcat framing that schismatically argues for the outsized importance of the Latin Mass against Rome, and that the Church is or ought to be a vehicle for white Christian nationalism, and that lex orandi is indistinguishable from political LARP.
The liberation theologians are at least transparent about the political dimensions of their theology. The tradcat movement mystifies its politics under aesthetics and appeals to tradition, but the project is no less ideological for being dressed in Latin. While these catholic reactionary figures in/from the United States hold no ecclesial office, as diocesan newspapers are shuttering and online “platform Catholicism” displaces institutional authority of Catholic Media, many online American Catholic figures wield more formative power over young Catholics than most bishops.
For American Catholics, especially those in these tradcat adjacent ecosystems, Trump’s post is a genuine quaerendum: to cheer his attack on the Holy Father is, by the Church’s own teaching, to flirt with schism. Yet many of these same tradcats, Fuentes included, have also broken with Trump over Iran. The schism fractures in multiple directions: against Rome, against the White House, against the USCCB. And there are material stakes beyond the theology: the vast network of Catholic colleges, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham, Boston College, already caught between Trump’s funding threats and their mission commitments, will find it ever harder to serve two masters.
No one embodies these contradictions more than VP JD Vance. The convert “baby Catholic” who told the Vatican it was “wrong” on immigration is now leading failed ceasefire talks in Islamabad for a war he never wanted. The New York Times reported Vance was the only senior official to oppose the strikes, warning Trump of “regional chaos,” but once Trump committed to going to war in Iran with Israel, Vance fell in line.
As The New Republic noted, the maneuver for Vance seems to be to oppose the war early to claim prescience, support it loudly to keep standing with Trump, all while building a Catholic brand for 2028 (new book).
But the “math” on this is getting publicly much harder. It is difficult to build a Catholic brand for the presidency when your boss walks you into a constant series of public contradictions, opposing a war you then champion that your Pope opposes, defending an administration that attacks said Pope, which effectively asks you to humiliate yourself in front of the roughly 51 million Catholic adults whose votes you’re gunning to get.
You cannot be the Catholic candidate for president while your administration attacks the Pope and wages a war the Church's just war tradition condemns. And the generational trend is not on his side: Trump's approval among Americans under 30 has plummeted to 24% since the war began, with 63% of young voters opposing it outright. Among young Republicans, Israel is now about as popular as Saudi Arabia, and nearly two-thirds of Americans under 34 view Israel negatively. Forcing the next generation of American Catholics to choose between a dying MAGA at war for Israel and the Vicar of Christ is not a bet that ages well.
Archbishop Coakley reminded the president in a rare late Sunday night statement: “Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.”