Then came this week’s visit by Pope Leo XIV to France, which has been marked by the Bishop of Rome’s constant, special solicitude for those whom medicine once branded “retarded.” Will it spur Christians, and perhaps others, to return the R-word to the realm of taboo? And would such a social shift have any wider positive effect, besides marginally curbing the coarseness of daily language? 

Let us pray. And not just for the sake of being decent. But because in the age of AI and “agentic” machines, a culture that mocks and denigrates human frailty — that reduces worth to intelligence and agency — may soon target many people, including those who today consider themselves gifted and use the R-word with abandon.

Much has been made of the surprising resurgence of French Catholicism, amply on display in the 800,000 souls who attended the Roman pontiff’s Mass at the Place de la Concorde and the long lines of penitents waiting to pour out their troubled consciences to priests in open-air confessionals. Yet if there is a unifying theme to Leo’s French trip, which continues through Monday, it is the inviolable dignity of the vulnerable, including the elderly, the infirm, and people suffering from mental and intellectual disabilities.

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On his way through the streets of Paris, Leo stopped the pope-mobile to bless a severely disabled girl, creating what is likely to be one of the defining images of his reign. At his Paris Mass, the altar servers included six young men with Down syndrome. And speaking at Lourdes, where an apparition of the Virgin Mary has long drawn those seeking healing beyond what medical science can achieve, Leo launched a jeremiad (in the true sense of the word) against abortion and assisted suicide. The former, selective abortion, has all but eliminated people with Down syndrome from some jurisdictions. The latter, assisted suicide and euthanasia, increasingly ensnares people with intellectual disabilities like autism.

“No human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity,” the pope told the patients and their carers at Lourdes. “You are not a burden. You are the beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church.” He added: “It is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion. It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal.  What is legal is not necessarily moral.”

Defending vulnerable life is, of course, nothing new for Catholicism. The Didache — one of the earliest compilations of Church teaching, generally dated to the late first century — includes the injunction: “do not abort a fetus or kill a child that is born.” In modern times, that consistent, maddeningly unbending ethic of life has occasioned some of the Church’s most morally heroic moments, even and especially amid its failures. 

In the Nazi period, for example, when too many of the German bishops kept mum about the Holocaust and otherwise failed to resist Hitler, one prelate stood tall for the cause of life. I’m speaking of the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, who, on Aug. 3, 1941,  delivered a homily condemning Aktion T4, the Third Reich’s program of involuntary euthanasia targeting the physically and neurologically disabled and mentally ill. 

A massacre of the innocents was afoot, von Galen charged, “because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become ‘unworthy to live,’ because they are classed as ‘unproductive members of the national community.’ Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive?”

That productivity aspect is the heart of the problem today. In the postwar period, overt eugenics and overtly coercive euthanasia were out of the question, having been tainted by association with the Nazis. But the Church now detects the same impulses lurking under the guise of “choice” and “compassion” and the obscene phrase “death with dignity,” used to describe doctors dealing death. Scratch through such cant, the recent pontiffs have argued, and you find the same ideas: that worth lies in productive intelligence, the capacity for autonomous choice or “agentic” activity (to use today’s parlance). The distance isn’t far from that premise to the conclusion that some lives just aren’t worth keeping around. 

In his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis warned against a “dominant technocratic paradigm” that only finds value in “a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” People with intellectual disabilities frequently fall short of this paradigm, but so do many others. So do babies in gestation and young children. So do the elderly. And so do people undergoing chemotherapy. All of us spend great stretches of our lives in various states of vulnerability and incapacity and unproductivity.

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Which brings us to Leo XIV. The new pontiff has so far devoted the lion’s share of his teaching to the moral challenges posed by AI. He and the Church aren’t opposed to automation. On the contrary, emancipating man from “arduous, repetitive, or dangerous” labor, as his encyclical on AI put it, has long been an aspiration of classical and Christian civilization. Insofar as AI achieves this emancipation, it is to be welcomed — but not when it intrudes upon distinctly human activities or if it recasts our conception of human worth.

That last danger is already present in practices like selective abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide, and is likely to be greatly magnified in the age of AI. Indeed, during his visit to France, Leo explicitly linked the two. Speaking on Friday at a gathering of UNESCO, he commented, “The paradox has become increasingly evident: while ‘intelligence’ is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognize the inalienable dignity of human persons, whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded.”

A large language model can never replicate human intelligence, which, as Leo has noted, includes wisdom and other depths that are impenetrable to the machine. Yet in terms of raw computation and recall, my Claude app is already far more capable than I. Compared to it, I am a “retard.” Is it that hard to imagine a not-too-distant future in which an LLM in the employ of my insurer decides I should no longer receive medical care in light of my mental shortcomings?

Renouncing the R-word won’t forestall such a future, of course. That will take collective political action. And there are plenty of people who are perfectly polite in ordinary discourse, even as they pursue monstrous ends in politics or business. But each time we do use that word, we not only trample the dignity of some of the most defenseless people among us, but strengthen the technocratic paradigm that, left unchecked, could soon discard many or even most of us.

Yet Magnifica Humanitas only incidentally concerns the promise and peril of the AI revolution. A closer examination reveals that Leo’s ultimate project is nothing less than a defense of moral and political universalism — the collective struggle for “a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason,” as the pope puts it — just when universal reason is menaced on every side by various irrationalisms.

Put another way: amid the ruins of modernity’s great emancipatory universalisms — liberalism, socialism, “positive science” — Leo is reminding us that there is a much older mode of universal reason, blending revelation and classical philosophy, preserved by the Catholic Church. And that Rome, with its “dynamic approach to the Gospel,” isn’t afraid to acknowledge the achievements of exhausted modernity, nor to collaborate in its renewal today.

That collaborative element — Leo’s tipping of his mitre to the United Nations, multilateralism, abolitionist and labor movements, and the like — renders the encyclical supremely unfashionable. Not least among neo-traditionalists within the Church, for whom the document harks back to the heyday of Vatican II and the midcentury moment that saw theologians and hierarchs embrace projects like global governance.

The Christian malcontents are already tsk-tsking the document for a supposed failure to cite Aquinas (there are several citations to the Angelic Doctor, in fact). They are labeling the pope a UN-besotted “Boomer” (is there a worse epithet today?) and griping that he isn’t radically anti-modern enough.

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The pope appears to have anticipated the backlash. Blind faith in markets and technology, he suggests, is far from the only latter-day irrationalism. Others include “fundamentalist, identity-based, and nationalistic reactions” that have been stoked by the failure of capitalism and technocracy since the end of the Cold War to “generate prosperity, democracy, and stability.” It isn’t hard to imagine Leo classing ultra-trad Catholics — the type who use the latest iPhone to post online laments about such “modernist” innovations as the Luminous Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary — as one more species of insurgent fanatic.

Yet like it or not, the pope’s approach — combining a classical and Christian account of the human person with openness to modern means for social emancipation — goes back to the previous Pope Leo, Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching with his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

For starters, Leo XIII recognized that the organization of social and economic life implicates the salvific mission of the Church and therefore the Church can’t stand neutral in relation to it. Writing in the teeth of the Industrial Revolution, that earlier Leo beheld around him “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses” and a resulting “moral degeneracy.”

More fundamentally, Leo XIII saw modern market societies as characterized by a constitutive antagonism: “social antagonism [that] erupted not in spite of, but as a result of people acting rationally within the rules of the game,” as I’ve written elsewhere. Under industrial conditions, a handful of firms dominated most sectors, giving employers nearly all the bargaining power, with the result that workers didn’t enjoy the freedom promised to them on paper. 

On paper, the employee could always find a better wage or better working conditions elsewhere. In reality, most workers found themselves coerced and cornered as a result of the disparities in power generated by markets. “The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves,” Leo observed, “whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”

Here Leo XIII’s classical and Christian anthropology came in: workers aren’t just another production input, but human beings with rights due them as a matter of “justice.” These rights, not least the right to a family wage, must be upheld by the state and promoted by associations, the “most important” of which are “workingmen’s associations” — i.e., labor unions. 

Note: a living wage under Catholic Social Teaching is not a matter of charity or the personal virtue or feudal honour of the employer. I mention these other possibilities — charity, virtue, honour — to highlight the way in which the Leonine teaching combines classical and Christian anthropology with modern politics. 

It’s classical in its anthropology: the worker is a human being with a family to maintain and the natural imperative to participate in civil society; if he’s materially desperate, his family falls to immorality and he can’t take part in other societies like church and politics. 

It’s modern in that Leo XIII notably didn’t decry industrial production as such. He didn’t hanker for the restoration of feudal relations or a return to the land or small-producerism or other such fantasies of the Tweed Jacket Class. At some level, he accepted that there is no “going back behind” of modernity. 

The answer for Leo XIII, rather, lay in just wages enforced by the state and in labor organizations mounting what he called “united action” (what we now call “collective action”). In this way, Leo XIII, decades before Vatican II, brought the Catholic Church into conversation and collaboration with modern universalist emancipatory movements: the US New Deal, the British Labour party, and social and Christian democracy in continental Europe all bear his imprint.

His later successor Benedict XVI, often inaccurately framed as an arch-conservative, would bring this synthesis of the classical and the modern to its culmination with his famous 2006 assertion that “in many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

Leo XIV is perhaps more cautious. Nevertheless, the same general pattern — an insistence on the human person as possessed of divine dignity; a willingness to engage with modernity in protecting that dignity — is easily discernible in Magnifica Humanitas. 

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Citing Leo XIII, the American pope begins with the insistence that “the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people.” While there is an “autonomy of worldly affairs” and two distinct communities — the secular and the ecclesiastical — nevertheless the people of God are called to “promote structural reforms.” Why? Because the Church can’t extricate her activities from “social relations,” nor “consider herself a stranger to the forces shaping society.” In short: “There is no authentic evangelisation that does not also affect the structures of human society.”

Scanning the social horizon of the 21st century, Leo XIV doesn’t see only horror and decline. He doesn’t think that ours is a uniquely accursed age: “I am convinced that the concrete way of living out social relationships in the light of the Gospel is not established once and for all, but remains a task entrusted, from generation to generation, to the Christian community. . .  For this reason, I encourage all members of the Church not to be afraid of the present challenges.”

The present challenges, to his mind, are AI and what he calls the “normalization of war” (a geopolitical phenomenon he worries might be exacerbated by AI and other developments in so-called defence-tech). AI, he warns, could lead to the logics of efficiency and profit crowding out all others — a radical acceleration of the “technocratic paradigm.” The symptoms include screen addiction, the potential for mass joblessness, and the imposition of tech bosses’ worldview on the masses under the facade of “objective” information.

At the deepest level, he fears, AI could strengthen an “anti-human vision.” Meaning one in which “the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty, and exerting total control.” The problem with this is that weakness, uncertainty, and finitude are central to what makes us human. They are a source of creativity and of empathy for the vulnerable other (who is finally vulnerable, as we ourselves are).

“A technology that merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can … become an obstacle to change and growth,” he notes in my favourite passage. “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.”

In the face of these threats, however, you won’t find any calls for a general ban against AI in this encyclical, no fatwas launching a Butlerian Jihad. On the contrary, Magnifica Humanitas is full of praise for AI’s potential to eliminate “arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity.” In this, Leo XIV follows Pope Francis, who in one of his final statements as pontiff, was hopeful that AI might “introduce important innovations in agriculture, education, and culture, an improved level of life for entire nations and peoples, and the growth of human fraternity and social friendship.”  

As with manufacturing in Leo XIII’s time, the question is how to orient these “new things” to the dignity of the human person and the common good of the whole. Here, just as Leo XIII didn’t rest content with the virtue of the factory owners, so our Leo insists that a few men in California can’t have unchallenged say-so. Rather, Leo XIV envisions a role for the states as well as the “transnational institutions” that took shape in the wake of the last century’s horrors. The Catholic principles of subsidiarity holds that when a problem is too large for national authorities, it must be addressed at a higher level by some sort of “world authority,” as Saint John XXIII envisioned it in his Cold War encyclical Pacem in Terris.

Such a problem, Leo XIV feels, is AI. Hence, the new encyclical’s unfashionable emphasis on transnational governance and political universalism. Contrary to his critics on the American Catholic Right, neither is a quaint relic of the pope’s Boomer generation. Both, rather, go to the heart of his Catholic political rationality. This is the Church, as Augustine described her: tam antiquam, tam nova!

Trump responded with a long Truth Social rant, in which he slammed the Roman pontiff as “WEAK on crime”, as if he were addressing the Democratic mayor of a coastal city, and fulminated about Leo’s opposition to the Iran War. He followed that up with an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure, miracle-healing an ailing man; the image was later deleted, even as Trump maintained that it was supposed to portray him as a “doctor” (the internet didn’t buy it).

Superficially, this is a disagreement between an unprecedentedly tactless president, on one hand, and the sovereign of a tiny city-state who also happens to be the spiritual leader of some 1.4 billion people, on the other. With his ill-defined Iran War petering out, Trump is lashing out wildly — including at the pope, whom he views as just another politician and, therefore, fair game for the sorts of insults he might fling at (say) the “Palestinian” Sen. Chuck Schumer or the “failing” New York Times.

But one needn’t accept the maxim that all conflicts are theological to notice the deeper theological dimensions of this one: the apparently considered decision of Leo XIV to cast off the hawkish brand of conservative Catholicism that once bridged Washington to Rome. In doing so, the Pope has forced an uncomfortable choice on conservative Catholics: do they stand with the successors of Peter, who’ve imposed increasingly stringent moral limits on warmaking? Or do they stick with a Republican Party that can’t do without wars in the Middle East, even under its supposedly populist guise? The more fundamental problem behind these questions: how should Catholics relate to a country that is presumptively skeptical (at best) of apostolic or historic Christianity?

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Back in the Seventies, and especially in the Reagan-Bush years, the Catholic conservatives supplied one answer to this persistent set of problems: they furnished highbrow Catholic justifications for Republican foreign and domestic policy; presented Catholicism as, in essence, “safe” for the Right’s conception of American order; and even sought to remake Roman thought in the American image.

The impulse was understandable. A century earlier, America’s protestant majority scoffed at the Catholic Church for its pompous, “foreign”-language liturgies; spurned the extra-biblical reasoning of Catholics, with its admixtures of pagan and heathen philosophy; and treated with suspicion a group whose highest loyalty lay with a man in a funny hat in Rome. Those were the days when The Atlantic would publish editorials stating forthrightly that a “loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic could never be the US president, for the simple reason that Catholics are beholden first to the man in Rome” (this was in 1927, and the presidential contender in question was New York’s Al Smith).

Things began to change mid-century. That was when the Catholic Church found common cause with American power in the face of a common foe, Soviet Communism. Alongside Mainline Protestantism and Reform Judaism, Catholicism came to form one of the pillars of a stolid cultural consensus. It was left to the Catholics, for example, to draw up Hollywood’s censorship codes: no mentions of abortion; bad behavior must always be shown to lose by the end of the plot, and so on.

A pivotal figure in this transformation was John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit priest and Vatican II peritus, or expert, who attempted a reconciliation between the faith and the American civic religion of liberal nationalism. Murray argued that when the popes in the 19th century condemned “liberalism”, they had in mind the high-handed, militantly anticlerical liberalism of Continental Europe, and not the American model, which emphasized pluralism and comported with Catholic notions of natural law.

Murray’s maneuver wasn’t without precedent. In the early 19th century, a gathering of the American Catholic bishops in Baltimore had declared that the Founding Fathers had “built better than they knew”: meaning, that although the framers of the Constitution may have been inspired by erroneous liberal doctrines, they had in practice brought forth a regime in which the Church could survive and even thrive. And so it did, throughout the 19th century, notwithstanding the assaults of Know-Nothings and the Klan, but especially in Murray’s day — a high watermark for the American Church in terms of vocations, educational and philanthropic expansion, and sheer cultural influence. Murray said, in effect: They knew and built well.

The conservative Catholics I speak of here are best seen as Murray’s intellectual heirs. These, to be clear, weren’t traditionalists. The “trads” stuck to the old-line anti-liberalism, and some of them fell into schism in reaction against the reforms of Vatican II. The Murray-ites, by contrast, sought to synthesize the faith with American (neo)liberal order, and to help strengthen that order with Catholic scaffolding.

Thus, in his 1982 book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, the writer Michael Novak brushed aside longstanding Catholic anxieties about market systems to herald a brand of Catholic neoliberalism. Much as Murray had distinguished (good) Anglo-American liberalism from (bad) Continental liberalism, so Novak argued that the popes’ concerns about market society had been limited to the “industrial tyrannies” of the 19th century. These were far from the “equal opportunity and open social mobility” that supposedly characterized “later” capitalism, ensuring that it was free of coercion.

Novak, however, merely recapitulated the shop-worn arguments that the previous Leo pope — Leo XIII — had confronted in Rerum novarum, his landmark 1891 encyclical that inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching. In Leo XIII’s time, too, defenders of the unrestrained market insisted that the elements of choice and consent meant that no one was coerced under capitalism. Leo disagreed. Given the lopsided distribution of power and wealth generated by markets, “the richer class have many ways of shielding themselves… whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”

The “freedom” touted market fundamentalists in his time — and by Novak nearly a century later — was thus illusory. Real freedom and justice, Leo XIII taught, would be found in “united action” of the kind promoted by “workingmen’s associations”, and by the government promoting “balance in the social body” between labor and capital.

Novak barely mentioned organized labor in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism; when he did, it was to lament the corruption of union leaders. Of course, there have been corrupt union leaders. It was shocking, all the same, for a book on Catholic political economy to offer such a pinched account of labor and its rights.

In translating the Catholic tradition for Reagan-era America, Novak rendered it perfectly inoffensive. There was nothing wrong with an individualistic system that couldn’t be fixed with more individualism, bootstrapping enterprise, and a robust “public moral culture” — a pet phrase of the Murrayites. Yet in their telling, the culture or morality was completely innocent of political-economic and other structural dynamics. They were loud about restricting abortion, as Catholic doctrine insists, but refused to notice how a ruthless, efficiency-maximizing order might come to treat the unborn (and the disabled and the elderly) as disposable. More than any other sector of elite opinion, they contributed to the development of a conservatism that would police the bedroom, but never the boardroom.

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Novak and his confrère played an equally important role in applying a Catholic veneer to GOP belligerence in the twilight years of the Cold War and, especially, in the wake of 9/11. Toiling in Right-wing think tanks, and later clustered around the religious journal First Things, they attacked a “presumption against war” that had taken hold among the Catholic bishops, as the writer George Weigel put it. Read that again. Weigel was unhappy that the successors of the Apostles — followers of the author of the Sermon on the Mount — had developed an undue presumption against war.

Weigel’s deeper critique, in fairness, was that the Church’s just-war tradition must be viewed as a public normative framework for the upkeep of peace, understood as the “tranquility of order”, rather than the mere absence of conflict. Under such a framework, he argued, the determination of a just war can’t be reduced to a check list or a matter of private conscience alone (since the public magistrate is under obligation to his public to secure them against threats).

Perhaps this had some salience in the Eighties, when Weigel first floated his hawkish theories. He did so in response to a statement of the American bishops that called for nuclear disarmament and the reconsideration of Washington’s first-use posture, while declaring nuclear attacks on cities to be immoral. Such statements, Weigel warned, ignored the reality that nuclear deterrence can make war less likely. More than that, they risked collapsing the Catholic position on war and peace into an outright pacifist one, and that couldn’t have been right: if the Church has cultivated a just-war tradition over centuries, it must follow that some wars are … just.

But by the early post-9/11 years — when Weigel had reached the apogee of his influence, thanks mainly to a blockbuster biography of John Paul II — his position had hardened into an undue presumption for war. In a 2004 essay for First Things, the author contended that the same “presumption against war” had also animated the “many warnings of catastrophe from religious leaders that preceded the … the most recent Iraq war.”

The “most recent Iraq war” was in reference to George W. Bush’s misadventure, which indeed proved catastrophic, and for which Weigel, Novak, and First Things founding editor Father Richard John Neuhaus campaigned vigorously. Their efforts even reached the Apostolic Palace, where they repeatedly sought a papal blessing for the war. John Paul II refused. More than that, the pope in the leadup to the Iraq invasion urged world leaders to “extinguish the ominous smoldering of a conflict which, with the joint efforts of all, can be avoideds”. Afterwards, his successor, then-doctrinal chief Josef Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), insisted: “It was right to resist the war and its threats of destruction.” And on another occasion: “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq.”

Weigel would go on to gripe about the American bishops over their supposedly insufficient enthusiasm for the Iraq War. Just-war theory, he asserted in the early days of the Iraq War, “lives more vigorously … at the higher levels of the Pentagon than … in certain offices at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.” This made it seem as if the bishops were in rebellion against the magisterium — subtly eliding the fact it was Weigel himself who dissented from John Paul II’s and Ratzinger’s stance against the war.

In years to come, Weigel would explicitly criticize a magisterial document — Saint John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris — for insufficient hawkishness and an overly expansive account of human rights. The cohort represented by Novak, Weigel, and Neuhaus — only Weigel is still alive — thus nurtured a conservatism with clear purposes: to safely position Catholicism within the matrix of GOP hawkism and neoliberal political economy; to clear the air of any lingering doubts that the faith might pose a moral challenge.

The populist uprisings that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic beginning in the mid-2010s offered the chance for a rethink. The scale of voters’ discontent with the pre-populist consensus was an index of the intellectual opportunity. Why not reach deep inside the Church’s repository of ideas for sources of renewal? And indeed, there were some gestures in this direction. I should know. It was right at this moment of flux that I entered the Catholic Church. Having launched my career within conventional, Weigel-style conservatism, I was at first unsettled and then enrapt by the possibilities: new journals; a new-old language for discussing culture and society; group manifestos outlining new politics; the thrill of iconoclasm.

This was still, technically speaking, the world of conservative Catholicism: the same tweed jackets, the same boozy galas, the same literary coordinates, the same closet cases. But in those years, they — we — were permitted to question free trade and call ourselves “pro-life New Dealers” or “anti-abortion Catholic socialists” or even “integralists”. We could even admit that George W. Bush’s wars had turned out disastrously and that “domestic reconsolidation” should be the order of the day, as current First Things editor R. R. Reno repeatedly did.

Yet, with about a decade in the rear-view mirror, it’s doubtful that a true renewal will arise in these quarters. Although today’s Catholic conservatives have differences with the Weigels and Novaks, the mold those men cast has finally proved too rigid to reshape. Too many of the figures in this sphere spent the past decade opposing Pope Francis, thoroughly alienating the late Argentine pontiff from the Right. This, when Francis’s critiques of Enlightenment rationality and soulless capitalism might have fortified their mental armories. That attitude habituated yet another generation of conservative Catholics to bend their faith to GOP imperatives, rather than the other way around. Hence, the convert JD Vance’s recent admonishment that Pope Leo “stick to morals” — as if his boss’s talk of erasing a whole civilization didn’t implicate the gravest moral concerns.

Further proof: as of this writing, more than 48 hours after the fact, First Things has yet to raise a critical peep about Trump’s anti-Leo harangue. More significantly, Reno was quick to defend the Iran War in just-war terms, even if with much less enthusiasm than Weigel mustered for Iraq. “When Trump announced ‘major combat operations’ against Iran,” Reno wrote, “he was not so much declaring war as recognizing the failure of the most recent tacit ceasefire.” Which is only a slightly more highbrow version of the Fox News talking point that “Trump didn’t start a war; he ended one.”

Likewise, many of the Catholic Republicans in my social networks appear more anxious about their relationship with the party, the White House, and the conservative world in the wake of the Leo spat than they are about the honor of the Roman pontiff. Indeed, MAGA Republicans are alienated from Roman authority to a degree that would have been unthinkable to the Murray-ites in their heyday.

Those men were solidly in the ecclesiastical mainstream, especially during the reign of John Paul II, even if they couldn’t bring him onside over the Iraq War. And they took pains to align themselves with papal and conciliar teaching, while carefully distinguishing away the inconvenient bits (just as liberal and progressive Catholics sometimes do). The characteristic MAGA posture, by contrast, is open rebellion, importing the populist and paranoid style into their relations with the Church: “not my pope!” “Leo is a communist!”

Again, all this is at least partly understandable as a sort of compromise formation for Catholics caught between Rome’s claims and American order. But is the compromise as necessary today as it was in the 20th century? Mid-century Catholics like Murray, after all, were responding to a highly coherent American order whose counterpoint was Communist totalitarianism. Today’s American order, by contrast, is far more messy and internally incoherent.

Is it necessary to compromise with a pro-Israel hawkism that that faces a negative-47-point favorability deficit among men under 50? Doesn’t it make sense, rather, to offer a Catholic conceptual framework and practical cooperation to rising progressive forces whose economic and geopolitical vision is more congenial to Rome’s? Why should disagreements on some issues prevent such collaboration, when differences with the Right didn’t prevent the formation of an alliance that lasted some 70 years?

Leo can’t force a rethink of the Iran War in Washington. But he has already sounded the death knell for Catholic conservatism of the kind which flourished in the late 20th century and, especially, the post-9/11 years; and which still guides a narrow but influential corridor of Right-wing Catholic punditry and the donors who maintain it. It’s up to American Catholics to figure out how to replace the old compromise.

Leo has been increasingly explicit, over recent weeks, about condemning the conflict in Iran. His Palm Sunday words have been interpreted as a rebuke specifically to those within the Trump administration who seem keen to accord the conflict a religious edge. I can see how people might think so when Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, was recently reported praying: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation”, and imploring God to grant his soldiers “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.

Was this what prompted the Pope to tell the crowd in St Peter’s Square, on Sunday, that “Christ, King of Peace, cries out again from his cross: ‘God is love! Have mercy!’”? In other contexts, the Pope has been happy to address military personnel, such as Italy’s Military Ordinariate; Roman Catholicism also has a lengthy and well-developed theory on what comprises “just war”.

But several notable Catholic Americans, considerably more Right-aligned than Pope Leo, have also expressed concerns over the justice of this war: either reserving judgment, or outright condemning it. What, in turn, this points to is a fairly recent but important change, internal to a bloc that American secular liberals used to treat as monolithic and also, they hoped, moribund: conservative Christians. Specifically, the growing influence of Catholics on the American Right — and in particular, theological differences that risk widening into real-world political fissures, catalyzed by the war in Iran.

The relationship between Roman Catholicism and America has never been entirely comfortable. The original Pilgrim Fathers were Puritan radicals, and the newly founded United States inherited their aversion to papal authority. Tensions reached boiling point in the 19th century, with a large influx of Catholic migrants to the USA from Germany and Ireland, leading to animosity and some anti-Catholic violence. Though this later eased, an era of relative indifference to Catholic Americans arguably just reflected their largely working-class status, and hence comparative lack of political clout.

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More recently, though, elite conservative America has grown steadily more Catholic, both in its politicians and also its intelligentsia. Vice-President JD Vance is a Catholic convert; Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a cradle Catholic. Six of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices are Catholic. A number of the influential New Right thinkers whose ideas have powered the Trumpist caucus, such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, are also Catholic.

And as highly educated, politically agentic Catholics have grown more numerous and influential in the USA, so the most influential Catholic of all is now also American: Leo XIV. But this sense of tentative rapprochement between the Church of Rome and the most constitutively Protestant of modern polities is now showing signs of tension — especially as it encroaches on the political instincts of the nation’s heartland Evangelical Christians.

This faultline has been thrown into relief by the war in Iran. From the outset, that conflict has been a joint US-Israeli operation, founded on the longstanding alliance between these nations. And while this is driven partly by resource and security concerns, in the view of many Evangelical Christians it also has a religious dimension. The secular liberal press has been keen to play this up, publishing pieces highlighting the religious views of Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, presumably with the aim of painting him as an irrational fanatic. But there’s also a grain of truth to it, in the sense that many Evangelical American Christians view Israel as having a special prophetic significance.

The suggested real-world corollary of this varies accordingly, but has often helped to underpin American support for Israel. Perhaps most prominently, the Dispensationalist method of Biblical exegesis, popularized in the 19th century by John Nelson Darby, interpreted the nation of Israel as a key centerpiece in the prophetic narrative of Jesus’ second coming. 

There are variations on dispensationalism, but the core of it is that Scripture should be interpreted literally, and God’s plan for the world is twin-track: one destiny for the elect of the church, and another for the nation of Israel, which will unfold once the elect are taken up in the Rapture. After this, a great struggle will ensue with Antichrist, in which the existing geopolitical nations will play an important role — especially Israel. This epic final struggle will end in the return of Jesus, with his already-raptured saints, to lead a thousand-year earthly reign as prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

It’s hard to say how many American Christians hold to some part of this worldview. The prophetic sensibility, and the millenarian feel, has arguably been baked in since the pilgrim days of Protestant radicalism. But, importantly, for the most part this broader strain of Christian thought tends to view Israel as both a legitimate state and people, with a right to exist, and also as having sacred significance.

A great many real-world political consequences flow from this. For example, in 2018, Hegseth suggested that a Jewish temple might one day be rebuilt on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was statement clearly referencing prophecies in both Jewish and Christian traditions — but challenging to Muslims given this is currently the site of Al-Aqsa mosque, a sacred site in Islam. Prophecies concerning the destruction and reconstruction of temples in this location form an ongoing religious backbeat to conflict in the region. Hegseth has reportedly moved away from dispensationalism, toward more “postmilennial” views, but is likely to be aware of such narratives.

By contrast, the Roman Catholic view on Middle Eastern geopolitics tends to take a less prescriptive, or literalist line. As formalized in the Catechism published after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), a special theological link exists between the historic peoples of Israel and the Catholic Church. But, importantly, within Catholic thought the theological descent from Judaism has not generally been taken to imply specific political obligations, or prophecies concerning events in the temporal world. The modern Church is emphatic about condemning any policy that might legitimize antisemitic bigotry, but stops short of the prophetic account of Israel embraced, for example, by dispensationalists.

Thus, there is often more reticence among Roman Catholics than Evangelicals on the matter of active political involvement in the Middle East. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, for example, that JD Vance is widely viewed as the most skeptical voice in Trump’s administration as regards ongoing American involvement in Iran.

This is where Pope Leo appears to be coming from when he speaks out against the war. Explicitly: that Christians ought to aspire to peace and brotherhood, not war. And, perhaps, implicitly: that there is nothing of special Biblical significance about this war. It’s just a war, and peace is better.

The challenge for faithful Catholics in this context is treading the acutely politicized line between prophetic accounts of real-world politics, and allowing reticence to slip, due to crude thinking or lack of charity, into hostility toward Jewish people. In the case of the commentator Candace Owens, a Catholic convert, this appears to have become highly conspiratorial, albeit by now at best ambivalently Catholic (Leo XIV has spoken out repeatedly against giving harbor to antisemitism).

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Recently, too, the former Miss USA Carrie Prejean Boller was removed from Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission after a heated argument with a Jewish commission member on Zionism. Boller is a recent Catholic convert from Evangelical Christianity, but was later taken to task by the conservative American bishop Robert Barron, also a member of that commission, for her intemperate behavior.

Perhaps in a spirit of seeking to resolve these tensions, not long after the Boller brouhaha Jay Richards, a Heritage Foundation fellow (and another Catholic convert) published a careful effort at disambiguation, in a DC Catholic publication, on the various types of Zionism. If this all sounds too inside-baseball for words, the takeaway should be that an American Right that was once overwhelmingly Evangelical or WASP is now adapting, on the hoof, to the presence and considerable influence of homegrown American Catholics, whose perspective on long-settled matters interacts in sometimes surprising ways with existing currents of American Christian belief.

Careful bridge-building of Richards’ kind may yet achieve a new accommodation. But one thing that seems likely as a consequence of this is ongoing internal disagreement within the American Right on how literally, or indeed militarily, Biblical prophecy should be pursued in the Holy Land. In his article on Zionism, Richards suggests the apocalyptic account of Israel that emerged from dispensational cultures is viewed among other Christian denominations as “over-reading, if not misreading, of often cryptic biblical texts”. This careful phrasing, by a seasoned Washington philosopher-politico, is the kind of muted admonition that can translate down the line into substantial differences of view on the best course of action.

Historically, as a majority-Protestant nation, America has not accorded much weight to what the Pope says. Should Catholic influence continue to rise within the Land of the Free, might that change? Would this even count for much, set against the calculations on resources and trade routes empires have to make to preserve their might? Who knows.

But it’s not impossible that, should the balance of power continue to shift between Catholic and Evangelical decision-makers, so too in time the American diplomatic stance in relation to the Middle East may also become less interventionist. In the meantime, the bombs keep falling; and I dare say, in Rome, Leo XIV will continue to pray for peace.

 JD Vance: Yeah. 

 SA: Where are we with the process, and whom do you view as the main obstacle to getting across the finish line? Is it the Russians, the Europeans, or the Ukrainians themselves?

 JDV: Well, look, there are challenges with all three groups. I mean, I actually got an update from our negotiators this morning. So the breakthrough that I do feel that we’ve made is that all of the issues are actually out in the open. There’s [initially] a little bit of a game of obfuscation, of hiding behind fake issues, not actually revealing your hand. And you see that with everybody in tough negotiations. And what we’ve seen from the Ukrainians [and] the Russians over the past couple of weeks is there is this real sense of what’s non-negotiable [and] what’s very negotiable. 

I think the Russians really want territorial control of the Donetsk. The Ukrainians understandably see that as a major security problem, [even as] they privately acknowledge that eventually, they’ll probably lose Donetsk — but, you know, eventually: it could be 12 months from now, it could be longer than that. So that territorial concession is a significant hold-up in the negotiations — that terrible territorial concession, I should say. 

I think that there were other somewhat more minor issues. Who controls the [Zaporizhzhia] nuclear facility? Can it be jointly controlled? Does it need to be controlled by one or more side? What ultimately happens with with ethnic Russians who are still in Ukraine? What happens with the ethnic Ukrainians who are still in Russia? Ukrainians who are currently in [Russian-occupied] territory but want to live in Ukraine? How do you facilitate that? And many of the Russians have asked similar questions. 

And then there’s, of course, a question about reconstruction, which I think, the Ukrainians are understandably very focused on, and the Russians are somewhat less focused on. And we’re just trying to work through all these things. And so I would say that any particular group right now is a barrier. I do think that everybody has participated, at least in the last few months, in the negotiation in good faith. Obviously, some of this stuff gets played out in the press because people are trying to push their PR leverage. I tend to see that as just the nature of the game, I don’t hold that against anybody for selectively leaking or sort of saying, ‘This provision is too pro-Russia’ or ‘This provision is too pro-Ukraine.’ I just sort of see it as inherent in the nature of the negotiation. 

We’re gonna try to get this thing solved. We’re going to keep on trying to negotiate. And I think that we’ve made progress, but sitting here today, I wouldn’t stay with confidence that we’re going to get to a peaceful resolution. I think there’s a good chance we will, I think there’s a good chance we won’t. 

SA: Pope Leo made some remarks, using pretty harsh rhetoric, suggesting that President Trump wants to break the Western Alliance structure or to sideline the Europeans? What would you say to that?

JDV: Look, especially as a practicing Catholic, I always try to be respectful to the Vatican. It is a diplomatic force for good, completely aside from its religious role. But look, I disagreed with what the pope said there. I think that that’s a particularly Euro-centric view of these negotiations. We’re not trying to destroy the European Alliance, we’re not trying to divide Europeans against one another. What we’re actually trying to do vis-à-vis Europe is to encourage them to be a little bit more self-sustaining. 

I think their economic policies have produced very broad-based continental stagnation. Their immigration policies have caused a significant backlash from the native population. I think that Europe doesn’t have a very good sense of itself right now, and you see that reflected in various measures of economic and cultural stagnation. We want Europe to reinvigorate itself. We want it to be much more self-sufficient, much more self-reliant. And look, the reality is, America sprang out of European civilization. We are fundamentally descended from a lot of European ideas. . . . That’s why we want a stronger Europe. We don’t want a weaker Europe. And we think that our views and our policies are, hopefully, trending in that direction, helping the Europeans where we can help them, but a lot of this is something I think the Europeans have to do themselves. 

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SA: But there’s a bit of a paradox there, isn’t there? Because on the one hand, the administration says that America in the past too often lectured the world on moral values and so on. And yet the National Security Strategy document that was recently published made certain claims about what Europe should be like civilizationally. So even to get them to be where we want to be, we still have to lecture them.

JDV: We have much greater cultural, religious, and economic ties with Europe than we do with anywhere else in the world. That is just the nature of things. And so I do think that we’re going to have certain moral conversations with Europe that we might not have, for example, with a Democratic Republic of the Congo, because there is this sense of shared history and shared cultural values. To tie it back to a more specific or direct American interest, France and the United Kingdom have nuclear weapons. If they allow themselves to be overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas, then you allow nuclear weapons to fall in the hands of people who can actually cause very, very serious harm to the United States. 

SA: What sort of ideas?

JDV: I think there are, for example, Islamists-aligned or Islamist-adjacent people who hold office in European countries right now. Right now, maybe at an extremely low level, right? They’re winning mayoral elections, or they’re winning municipal elections. But it’s not inconceivable to imagine a scenario where a person with Islamist-adjacent views could have very significant influence in a European nuclear power. In the next five years? No. But 15 years from now? Absolutely. And that is very much a very direct threat to the United States of America. So I do think there are ways in which the moral conversation does absolutely bleed into America’s national-security interests. 

I just think that we want Europe to be strong and vibrant. I want Europe to be a place where Americans can go and visit, where there’s cultural sharing; Europeans are coming to American universities; Americans are going to European universities; where our militaries are fighting together, training together. That is impossible without some sense of a cultural foundation. The United States and Europe have that, but there’s a risk of losing it over the long term. 

SA: Turning to domestic politics and this tangle of issues around immigration and American belonging: it’s really sharply dividing the American Right. Just recently, as you know, a pair of dueling visions was presented at TPUSA by Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. . . . 

JDV: I’ve heard, though I haven’t seen their speeches yet. 

SA: . . . And a lot of people want you to weigh in on one side of that, and they want you to denounce directly the Groypers and maybe Tucker Carlson for entertaining the Groypers. Will you?

JDV: First of all, I don’t think Tucker Carlson is a Groyper. 

SA: No. 

JDV: Tucker’s a friend of mine. And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus. I can express substantive disagreements with them, but I find the idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it. 

I think that there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping where people are trying to settle their own ideological scores, and that’s what’s really going on here. 

On some of the broader issues, anti-Semitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred, have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting, and we should call that stuff out. 

SA: So you disavow Fuentes?

JDV: On Fuentes, I’ve criticized him in the past, but let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat shit. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States. And my attitude towards anybody, again, who is calling for judging people based on their ethnic heritage, whether they’re Jewish or white or anything else, it’s disgusting. We shouldn’t be doing it. [That said,] I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated — and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel. 

Now, I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, [and] that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on. But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes instead of on: why is Nick Fuentes gaining popularity or gaining notoriety? . . . Because 99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we already had that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans aren’t anti-Semitic. They’re never going to be anti-Semitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate. 

[On Fuentes’s racism,] let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity. Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family. Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the last five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good. Sometimes South and East Asians get caught up in this, too. If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.

That same political movement, the Left, has also promoted wide open borders that necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love. Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence of what the Left has pushed for years.

Let’s bring it back to the personal: if you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power. It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids “jeet,” and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.

SA: How do you define what it means to be an American? Obviously, you and I both reject the economic-zone account of America, and that has not brought us to a great place. But how do you react to a term like ‘Heritage American’?

Well, one, is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century? I think that it’s like a lot of these things, there are questions of definition. But, I mean, look, let me say a few things about this. 

Number one, do I think that there is something credal at the heart of the American identity? Absolutely! We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project, a project that is a very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being. That’s one of the reasons why I think Americans are just not a racist people. Black people don’t hate white people, white people don’t hate black people — that’s a good thing. 

That said, do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for ten generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it. That happens multi-generationally. It happens over time. And so I guess my own view is a fusion of the two: it’s to recognize that human beings are inherently creatures of their time, of their place, of their family, of their community. And so we should expect that people who have a longer connection to the United States of America are going to understand it differently than somebody who came here on a tourist visa 15 minutes ago. We should also understand that believing certain core things, being able to express certain core democratic values is part of being an American. 

One last thing I’ll say about this is, I think there’s a tendency to try to over-intellectualize this stuff. When I talk about shared cultural traditions, shared practices, living in a country and sharing it with your neighbors and your community members, a lot of that is not stuff that you can teach in a book, right? It’s about: which sports teams do you follow? And what do you eat for dinner? And how do you communicate with your neighbors? It’s the cultural lingo that is dominant among certain generations, but not in other generations. It’s music, it’s art. There’s a whole host of things that make it. And I think the credal nationalists, the mistake that they make is thinking that you could absorb American culture just because you have the right ideas in your head. And I think that the racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants —  what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendant of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s also not consistent with American practice, either. 

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SA: But in terms of legal treatment, the person who got their passport yesterday versus the one who does trace ancestry back 10 generations — they don’t get different treatment, right?

JDV: No, no! Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally. I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants, even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people, you do change the country in some profound way. And so, so much of the immigration debate, I think we try to create these very firm categories. And the reality is that America does pretty well assimilating people, so long as it’s a small number of people, and they’re given an amount of time to assimilate. The problem with American immigration . . . over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ 

Somebody said to me recently that Gordon Wood — who’s sort of a famous historian [and] a credal nationalist — he thinks that we should cap the number of foreign people in the United States of America at 15%. Well, if you believe that, you’re acknowledging that there’s something about the American identity and character that has to be formed over time. You can’t just drop tens of millions of people into the country, expect them to believe the right things, and think that America won’t be changed for the worse because of it. 

SA: Can Christianity ease some of today’s identity tensions?

Yeah. Well, I think that, look, this is a much longer conversation, but I do think that when I talk about America having some common culture, I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians, and particularly, the people who were influential in each of the individual states were incredibly devout Christians. And that’s an important part. And I think there’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity. I think that it gives us a way to actually understand our own sins as a nation, but also have forgiveness and grace towards one another. I think it’s very hard to have a concept of forgiveness and grace that is not rooted in some Christian idea. 

And so I think a lot of the woke wars of the early 21st century are because we had a sort of Christian moral language that was completely divorced from actual Christian moral practice. And, you know, the wokesters, they got a lot wrong. But the thing that they got most wrong is they had no account of grace and forgiveness, and that was completely deranging to American culture. 

SA: How do you balance the demands of your faith and your public responsibilities. We talked about how the pope has disagreed with you on Ukraine, and also on immigration. It must be incredibly difficult to navigate these tensions. It can’t be easy.

You know, I guess that I don’t think that it is that difficult, the balancing. When you ask yourself, what should America’s immigration policy be? Well, that’s a fundamentally moral judgment. Because I’m a Christian, Christianity influences that. And you have to ask a bunch of prudential questions, too, about how many people your country can absorb, who should be here, who shouldn’t, what’s in the best interests of the people who are already here in the United States of America? So you just have to balance a number of prudential and moral considerations, but that’s true in almost any vector of any person’s life, right? I mean, I think a person who’s a business leader or a worker at a factory or a mom or a dad, you’re constantly balancing the moral and the prudential and trying to ensure that you’re making smart judgments, but also moral judgments. That’s how I try to live my life, and when there are tensions, like, for example, when the Church criticizes our immigration policy, I try to remember that the Church has one moral perspective. I don’t think it’s right, by the way, to say, ‘Oh, you know, they should stay out of politics.’ I think unless your politics is informed by some moral judgment, it’s going to be very, very broken. 

[But] the pope in the Vatican, in Rome, is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on. Yes, we have to treat people with humanity and dignity. Yes, we have to protect our borders. I’m also trying to protect the wages of workers. I’m trying to protect the social cohesion of the United States of America. I’m trying to ensure that we don’t have the rise of balkanization and ethnic hatred, which can happen when you have too much immigration too quickly. And so, yes, I take my Christian faith and moral teachings [seriously], and I also try to apply them in a very messy, real world that I live in. 

Read Sohrab Ahmari’s account of his interview with JD Vance here.

Two weeks earlier, the pope instructed the American bishops to take a stronger stance in defense of migrants caught in the Trump administration’s dragnet. The pontiff suggested that he would “love” to see a statement from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, according to one bishop who attended a meeting with him. Another attendee reported that the pope would like to see the US church speak “forcefully and in unity” on migrants’ rights.

Already, many individual US bishops and Catholic groups are doing just that. Yet for such interventions to prove fruitful, the Church must take a more holistic, nuanced, and, indeed, Catholic approach: one that takes into account not just the needs of people moving out of the Global South, but also the limitations of the Global North; not just the dignity of the migrant, but also that of workers and the poor in recipient countries; not just the threat of Western xenophobia, but the imperative to ensure a decent baseline of cultural cohesion.

To be sure, there is much to object to in Washington’s stance: the White House posting photos on X (formerly Twitter) of  “deportation porn” of rows of men being flown out in shackles; the government’s foot-dragging when ordered by the courts to facilitate the return of a man who had been mistakenly deported to El Salvador; the difficulties in getting pastoral care to illegal immigrants being held at the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida; and much else of the kind. These are among the excesses for which the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts can justly be criticized.

But with immigration enforcement as in other areas, abusus non tollit usum — the abuse of a thing does not negate its proper use. And when we neglect the proper use in order to avoid abuse, we risk falling into an opposite extreme error. 

As the bishops themselves sometimes acknowledge at least in passing, the general policy of enforcing immigration laws is legitimate. And while the Trump administration’s efforts have been excessively harsh at times, the surge in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden was so massive that any attempt to reverse it was bound to seem draconian by comparison. It is contrary to reason and justice to speak as if only Trump’s critics have a moral leg to stand on.

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It is also contrary to the Church’s own longstanding teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that prosperous nations are obliged “to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.” But it qualifies this by adding that such nations are obliged to do so only “to the extent they are able.”  

And the Catechism goes on to say: “Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”

The Church acknowledges, then, that a nation may put conditions on immigration, that it need not take in all those who want to enter it, and that those it does allow in must follow the law. 

The Catechism reflects the longstanding teaching of the popes. For example, Pope Pius XII, while commending the United States for its generosity toward immigrants, observed in 1946 that “it is not surprising that changing circumstances have brought about a certain restriction being placed on foreign immigration. For in this matter, not only the interests of the immigrant but the welfare of the country also must be consulted.”

The economic needs of its own citizens are among the considerations a government may weigh when determining how many immigrants to let in. In a 1996 address, Pope St. John Paul II affirmed that “illegal immigration should be prevented” and that “the supply of foreign labor is becoming excessive in comparison to the needs of the economy, which already has difficulty in absorbing its domestic workers.” Likewise, in a 2011 address, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged that host countries also have a “legitimate concern for security and social coherence” so that “states have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers” and “immigrants … have the duty to integrate into the host country, respecting its laws and its national identity.”

And in a 1988 document from the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, we read that “it is up to the public powers who are responsible for the common good to determine the number of refugees or immigrants which their country can accept, taking into consideration its possibilities for employment and its perspectives for development, but also the urgency of the need of other people.” Overly heavy migration waves, the document warns, can lead to “rejection,” especially when “another culture is perceived as directly threatening the identity and customs of the local community that receives them.”

Note that the Church here explicitly affirms that it is not churchmen, but rather “the public powers who are responsible for the common good” who have the right and responsibility to determine how many immigrants to let in. Note, too, that the Church acknowledges that in making this determination, public authorities may take account of economic considerations, as well as those having to do with social and cultural cohesion.

The legitimacy of this concern for national identity is something that has been affirmed repeatedly in the Catholic tradition. In his book Memory and Identity, first published in 2005, John Paul II affirmed that the duty of patriotism is an extension of our obligation to honor our parents, and writes: “Patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius. Every danger that threatens the overall good of our native land becomes an occasion to demonstrate this love.” 

Several popes have been quite frank about the social problems that can develop when a minority cultural group fails to assimilate to the larger culture in which it resides. For example, in the encyclical Pacem in Terris, Pope St. John XXIII observed that “these minority groups, in reaction, perhaps, to the enforced hardships of their present situation, or to historical circumstances, frequently tend to magnify unduly characteristics proper to their own people.  They even rate them above those human values which are common to all mankind, as though the good of the entire human family should subserve the interests of their own particular groups.” He went on to call for such groups to associate themselves more closely with the majorities among whom they live, and not to harness their identity to separateness.

Pope Francis, too, acknowledged the problem. In a 2016 press conference, he noted that while “hearts must not be closed to refugees … those who govern need prudence … A political price can be paid for an imprudent judgment, for accepting more than can be integrated.” Non-integration, Francis warned, leads to migrants becoming “a ghetto. A culture that does not develop in relationship with another culture, this is dangerous.”

Most recently, Pope Leo XIV, in an address in which he praised Italy’s generosity to migrants, immediately went on to underscore “the importance of constructively integrating those arriving into the values ​​and traditions of Italian society.” 

Yes, there are yahoos and jingoists who go beyond a healthy love of country to a sinful hostility towards people of other nations. But it is unjust and uncharitable to accuse all of those who are concerned about the cultural cohesion and economic needs of their own country of harboring this dishonorable motivation.

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How American is the Pope?

By Alexander Lucie-Smith

For its part, the Church has treated immigration as it does every other major question of public policy: not just a matter of individual rights and dignity — though these are indeed important — but also of duties to the common good of the whole. Thought of this way, the Catholic position on immigration doesn’t lend itself well to simplistic “pro” or “anti” posturing.

The truth is that there are two, equally Catholic sides in the debate over immigration. One side thinks that the imperative to welcome the migrant is what most needs emphasis today. The other thinks that preserving law and order, and the economic well-being and cultural identity of the nation is what is currently most urgent. Both can appeal to moral premises rooted in the Catholic tradition. Their dispute is about how best to balance the various relevant considerations under contemporary circumstances — a matter of prudential judgment about which reasonable people can disagree.

In the 21st century, that prudential determination must take into account new realities: such as the fact that many of today’s newcomers are economic migrants relying on strained asylum systems to get through borders; and the fact that developed economies are already bereft of high-wage, reliable manufacturing jobs, pushing many native-born workers into service sectors buffeted by even cheaper migrant labor; and the identitarian turmoil wrought by decades of high migration and failed assimilation. 

The bishops have a pastoral obligation to acknowledge the concerns of both sides, rather than speaking as if only one side is truly Catholic. It is precisely when people think their legitimate concerns are not being taken seriously that they are most tempted to fall into extremism. In his essay “A Defense of Patriotism,” G. K. Chesterton warned that when a nation does not cultivate a sober “patriotism of the head and heart,” it will sink instead into a thuggish chauvinism “of its fists and its boots.” 

The remedy to this excess is not to retreat to the opposite error, but to insist on holding the middle ground — the true patriotism described by St. John Paul II as a part of the Fourth Commandment to honor father and mother. “What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous jingoism,” advised Chesterton, “is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly.”

What makes the case of Carlo Acutis so remarkable is the combination of youth and speed. The first millennial saint would be only 34 years old if he were alive today, the 19th anniversary of his death. His parents were in the congregation yesterday. “Carlo met Jesus in his family, thanks to his parents Andrea and Antonia,” said Pope Leo. That was a generous form of words. When Carlo was born, his father Andrea was working in London for the investment bank Lazard; neither he nor his wife Antonia were practicing Catholics, and it was only the piety of their son that drew them back to the Church. At the time, Carlo was the wealthy couple’s only child. On the fourth anniversary of his death, Antonia gave birth to the twins Francesca and Michele; the latter gave the first reading at the canonization Mass, speaking in natively fluent English. A popular image on Instagram shows Carlo, halo shining, with his arms around the siblings he never met.

The notion of a millennial saint, photogenic in his polo shirt and Ray-Bans, has proved irresistible to the secular media. Most Catholics are delighted. But, like every major event in a shrinking Western Church scarred by scandal and online factional warfare, it is tinged with controversy. The convergence of modernity and tradition in Carlo’s life has created a legacy that is unsettling as well as exhilarating. Many Northern European Catholics are unenthusiastic about the permanent exhibition of saints’ dead bodies; Carlo lies in a glass tomb in Assisi, at first glance incorrupt, though in fact his apparently flawless complexion is a silicone mask concealing what the Church admits are “normal signs of decay”. And some Italian Catholics, though accustomed to such exhibitions, think it was disrespectful to dress the boy in jeans and Nike trainers. But, honestly, it is difficult to get these things right. There is no precedent for the cult of a style-conscious computer geek.

A more fundamental controversy has been generated by the new saint’s personal faith — which, unlike his sartorial tastes, was impervious to fashion. Carlo Acutis’s Catholicism was rooted in the Eucharist: not just the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass, which is common to all flavors of Catholic spirituality, but the practice of kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. The modernists who seized control of the Church’s liturgy after the Second Vatican Council regarded Eucharistic Adoration as a superstitious relic of the Middle Ages or, worse, sugary 19th-century piety. They and their successors have watched incredulously as a new generation of Catholics have embraced Adoration, falling to their denim-covered knees as the sacrament, encased in a richly ornamented monstrance, processes through the streets. Sales of mantillas or “Mass veils” for young women are through the roof; engaged couples, chaste until marriage and hoping for large families, cross themselves every time they pass a Catholic church.

Even before yesterday, Carlo Acutis, who coded websites celebrating the Eucharist and its associated miracles, was an unofficial patron saint of Generation Z traditionalists, many of whom attend the traditional Latin Mass that Pope Francis unsuccessfully tried to stamp out. St Carlo did not: he died the year before Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, later torn up by his successor, liberated the old rite for young people bored by the dreary folksiness of “youth Masses”. Yet the liturgical civil war that followed Francis’s 2021 document Traditionis Custodes, which attempted to drive the Latin Mass out of parishes, nonetheless cast a shadow over last weekend’s celebrations.

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The age of nihilism is over

By Mary Harrington

Andrea Grillo, a professor at the Pontifical Academy of St Anselm in Rome, was an influential lay advisor to the Argentinian pope; he is often described as “the mind behind the motu proprio” – that is, Francis’s brutal, and brutally enforced, restrictions on the old rite. Grillo has often written savagely against the traditional Mass. But last June he found a new target: the then Blessed Carlo Acutis. Writing in the journal Munera, he asked: “How is it possible that a young Blessed can communicate a Eucharistic theology so old, so heavy, so obsessive, so focused on the inessential …?” This “young ardent communicator”, he wrote, had a deficient, defective and one-sided understanding of the sacrament. A visit to Carlo’s website confirmed him in his view that the teenager manifested a “distorted fixation on Eucharistic miracles”.

The significance of Grillo’s polemic lay not so much in its venom but in his exalted position at the court of Pope Francis. This is not to say that the late pontiff shared his contemptuous view of Carlo Acutis. After all, it was Francis who — appreciating his popularity and reassured that he was untainted by the old Missal — would have canonized Carlo in April if he had not himself gone to meet his maker. What the Munera diatribe illustrated was the grip of the hard Left on the Bergoglio pontificate. Put bluntly, Francis knew that Grillo was a nasty piece of work, and it did not bother him.

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The battle for John Henry Newman

By Damian Thompson

In the act of canonizing Saints Piergiorgio and Carlo, Pope Leo displayed a perfect dignity that may yet develop into much-needed papal charisma. What remains to be seen is whether he grasps the extent to which, over the past 12 years, the institutions of the Church have been infiltrated by secular lobbyists. In this respect, it is not Sunday’s ceremony that matters so much as what happened on Saturday, when gay activists wearing T-shirts reading “Fuck the Rules” processed into St Peter’s Basilica as part of a papally-sanctioned LGBT pilgrimage. The contrast between the two events could not have been greater.

Leo can hardly attribute the scandal caused by the activists to homophobia; if he ponders the sequence of events that led up to it, and he is a deeply reflective man, perhaps he will realize that his own naïvety is partly to blame. In private he has promised to “bring peace to the Church”. Despite the joyful mood yesterday, there are frustratingly few signs that the healing has begun. Perhaps a prayer to St Carlo Acutis is in order.

His nationality is two things at once: not important, but crucial. In recent times, the Vatican has turned to America in financial desperation, no longer able to rely on funding from the German-speaking lands, now that increasing numbers there avoid paying the Church tax. The Americans have obliged. But it has not been a happy relationship. The American Church has bankrolled the Vatican, while the Italians and their allies have continued to use the cash in ways that are hardly transparent. American patience has run out. The election of an American Pope means that from now on, at long last, the Italian way of doing things in the financial sphere, that has led to innumerable scandals, is over. Expect no more stories of the type that involved Italian bankers swinging from under Blackfriars Bridge; rather expect the intervention of corporate America, backed by an American Pope. If this works, and the Italians have ways of fighting back, it will be a new era. And, relatively young in Papal terms, the 69-year-old Leo XIV has perhaps 20 years ahead of him in which to bring this about.

He is American, and yet he is not American: he has a Peruvian passport, and has worked in that country for decades as a missionary. He is in no way aligned to the MAGA Catholicism of JD Vance. Far from it, as their recent spat on X revealed. Leo XIV is pro-immigration, speaks of  bridges not walls, and is all the things that Trump isn’t and Pope Francis was. As he spoke from the balcony he spoke good Italian, and he also spoke in Spanish, mentioning his former diocese in Peru. He is American, but he is firmly rooting himself in the Latin American experience. It has often been said that there could never be a Pope from the world’s only superpower. Well, there is now, and Leo XIV shows how it is done: an American by birth, but one with a very international outlook. In the eyes of MAGA Catholics, he will seem a terrible political Lefty, but in the eyes of most Catholics, of which there are 1.4 billion around the world, this won’t matter. Most of them live in grim circumstances and in challenging countries and are deeply attached to those who speak of the Church’s love for the poor. Mother Teresa of Calcutta remains the most important Catholic of the age. Various photographs have emerged of Leo, as a diocesan bishop in Peru, wading through flood zones in Wellington boots, riding a horse in a country with no roads, and helping out in a soup kitchen. He has actually lived with and worked with the economically disadvantaged: that marks him out, when you think of some of the very grand prince bishops of the Church in the USA, as distinctly un-American. But it is pure Catholic gold.

He was a missionary, and at the same time he has been an administrator; here too, he spans two worlds. As Prior General of the Augustinian Order for two six-year terms, he travelled the world, and ruled a disparate body of men, and no doubt had some tough decisions to make. His most recent job in the Vatican was presiding over the dicastery that appoints, and in some cases disciplines, bishops. In his two years in post, he won respect for the way he did his job. The Vatican machine, the Roman Curia, is widely seen as not fit for purpose, and in need of leadership and reform. Leo XIV, the cardinals must be hoping, is the man to deliver reform.

In his opening speech he name-checked Pope Francis twice. He will not undo his legacy, whatever that legacy was, which is still hard to discern. Leo will continue with the synods on synodality (conferences about having conferences, as they have been called). But he might take the project in a somewhat different direction. Several cardinals, who are not noted conservatives, such as Vincent Nichols and Timothy Dolan, spoke before the Conclave about the need for greater doctrinal clarity and here Leo may well deliver. He name-checked Saint Augustine too, the great theologian and saint who, 1,500 years ago, laid down the parameters of the Church’s relations with the world — in it, but not of it. An Augustinian Pope means an intellectually grounded Pope, a Pope rooted in theological tradition and suspicious of innovation.

There were other signs as well in that opening speech. He gave a special greeting to the people of Rome, to huge cheers, for he is their bishop after all, and to the Italians. He was signaling his intention (John Paul II did it as well) to be a Roman and an Italian by adoption. Rome and Italy will appreciate that hugely. He is theirs, a source of immense pride; he showed he wanted to be theirs and he understood the importance of being theirs. And to underline the point, he mentioned the supplication to the Madonna of Pompei, a traditional prayer to be uttered at noon on that very day. To most, maybe all, people outside Italy, Catholics included, Pompei means ruins, but to Italians it is also an important shrine to Mary. And he concluded with the Hail Mary, the most popular prayer to the Madonna. A Leftist Pope? Sure, but a traditional Italian Pope as well, a Pope of two worlds.

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The Vatican’s moral decay

By Alexander Lucie-Smith

He is the successor to Pope Francis, the great disruptor, the man who said hagan lio, “make a mess”. Those who were expecting someone to undo the Francis years, at least directly, were always doomed to disappointment: there were not enough votes for that in the Conclave, and besides, it’s awkward trying to explain away the last 12 years as a blip or a mistake in a Church that values consistency of doctrine. But at the same time, there were clear indications that a more orderly way of doing things has returned. He wore the traditional garb of a newly elected Pope, the Apostolic stole and the scarlet mozzetta. Francis refused the latter, saying, according to some, “The carnival is over”: or more likely “I prefer not”. But by donning the mozzetta, Leo indicated that he will be the sort of Pope traditionalists can love. He looks like a Pope — there is a bit of a resemblance to the bespectacled Paul VI — he smiles, he is confident but diffident, and he seems to understand that peace and unity are his mission. The relief, for traditionalist Catholics, is palpable, and came with the first sight of that mozzetta. Never has a piece of silk counted for so much.

How political a Pope will he be? He is worried about climate change and the plight of immigrants, as well as the conflicts around the world; so was Pope Francis, but Pope Leo may handle these themes with more subtlety, with more guarded interventions. One thing already apparent, from the first speech, and the sermon the next day in the Sistine Chapel, is that he does not want to be a nakedly political Pope. The peace he mentioned on the balcony was the peace of the Lord, the peace that comes from faith in God. In the Sistine Chapel he spoke about Jesus Christ and the need for faith, to offset “the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society”. He continued: “Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.” These words have political implications, but what is apparent is the bridge he is trying to build between faith and life, the project of Saint Augustine. He may be a political Pope, but he will be so for religious reasons, and religion will not be obscured by politics.

It is too early to tell what will happen, but the indications are good. He is eirenic, even soothing, perhaps a little boring as well; after the excitement of Pope Francis, this is to be welcomed. “Leone! Leone! Leone!” chanted the excited crowd when they heard the name he had given himself. Were they all thinking of the great Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903 after a term of 24 years and who was also elected at a similar age? Or were they thinking of Leo the Great, who saved Rome from Attila the Hun? The more recent Leo steered the Church towards reconciliation with the modern world, and wrote the encyclical De Rerum Novarum (“Concerning New Things”) which dealt with social questions, among them industrialization, poverty and trade unions. Leo XIII led the Church into the modern world, while not forgetting the world from which it came. May Leo XIV, the Pope of two worlds, do the same.