Here’s what fascinates me. Leo’s triumphal progress has been greeted with rather subdued delight by two opposing wings of the Church: hardline liberals and ultra-conservatives. In front of the cameras, they’re all smiles. In private, and reading between the lines of their social media comments, not so much. For different reasons, both were disconcerted by the ferocity of the Pope’s attack on France’s assisted dying law and its constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, which has led to an epidemic of “terminations” of supposedly imperfect babies. Not for nothing did Leo choose six altar servers with Down’s syndrome for his Paris Mass — a gesture more beautiful than any liturgical finery. He doubled down on this in his sermon, in which he said that deciding an embryo’s future by test result was like assisted dying; that it’s thoroughly sinister “programmed death”.

You can understand why liberal Catholics, especially American members of the Democratic Party, were uncomfortable with this. They wanted the first pope from the United States to take a swing at Trump in time for the midterms. They failed. And they wanted him to steer clear of issues such as abortion, on which even Catholic Democrat candidates defy Church teachings. But why were some hardline traditionalist Catholics so disconcerted by both Leo’s statements and the sea of humanity surging around him in France?

I emphasize that we’re only talking about a fanatical rump. Most conservative Catholics were overjoyed by the papal visit, the pro-life exhortations, and Leo’s unexpected homage to the Catholic martyrs of the French Revolution.

And yet, it was precisely these things that wrong-footed the militant “trads”. Leo had deviated from the script they have written for him. Ever since he took office, they have insisted that he’s just Francis in nicer vestments. They look away when he behaves like an old-style pope, singing the Salve Regina until he’s hoarse, or weeping when he celebrates the Eucharist. Instead, they obsess over an ancient grainy photo of the then Fr Prevost praying in front of a indigenous statue in Peru; over an environmental stunt in which he blessed a block of ice; over the continuing (if rare) cancellation of Latin Masses; and over his enthusiasm for “synodality”, which under the last pontificate was shorthand for the hijacking of the Curia by liberal control freaks.

Last weekend’s tour de force undermined the Right-wing caricature of Leo as a mediocre or even malevolent liberal nonentity. Now we can all see that it’s false. And yet even the mean-spirited trads aren’t wrong about everything. The true state of the Catholic Church is always difficult to assess, especially after a papal public relations triumph. Pope John Paul II attracted crowds of more than a million in Poland, the Philippines and Ireland, while Francis’s 2025 Mass in Manila was the largest in papal history — attended by some six million people. Even so, both pontiffs presided over a devastating crisis of morale and, in Europe, collapsing church attendance.

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Do we make too much of open-air spectacles? How many bystanders cheering the Holy Father in the streets, or at a one-off mega-Mass, then sat through a service the following Sunday (as the Catholic Church demands on pain of mortal sin)? I suspect the answer would be hard to reconcile with the florid talk of “spiritual hunger” during papal visits.

The truth is complicated and unsatisfactory, if not entirely depressing. Pope Leo is hard to read. He alternates between joyful assertions of the divinity of Christ and synodal jargon that lingers like a bad smell from the Francis era. He simultaneously favors brilliant young orthodox bishops and the greasiest bureaucrats of the ancien regime. Is this any way to run a Church? Until recently it was relatively easy to make the case that the less the new American pope intervened, the sooner he could narrow the factional divide deliberately widened by his Argentinian predecessor. But Leo is no longer a new pope and, a year and a half in, his diplomacy looks increasingly like inertia.

To allow the Traditional Latin Mass to be revived in one place and crushed in another does nothing to promote unity. Likewise, it’s all very well for the Pope to insist on covering up the artwork by the accused serial nun-rapist Fr Marko Rupnik at Lourdes. But scars will not be healed while, inexcusably, the canonical proceedings against Rupnik are bogged down and he remains a priest.

Unfortunately Leo is as hard to read literally as well as metaphorically. He has just published Freedom Under Grace, a collection of his addresses to his fellow Augustinians when he was head of the order. A page-turner it ain’t, and you wouldn’t expect it to be. But it’s still a curious mixture: encouraging and discouraging in roughly equal proportions.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The former Fr Prevost was, to put it politely, politically naive. His “global south” rhetoric was supported by clumsy swipes at neoliberalism, the favored bogeyman of most Catholic clerics ordained in the Eighties. But, since his political views didn’t matter at the time, and still don’t count for much even now he’s pope, we can let that pass. More disturbing is the lack of interest in the numinous aspects of worship that Benedict XVI understood so well. I have no doubt that Leo always celebrated Mass with reverence, and once he was in Latin America there would have been no demand for the liturgical aesthetics that have nurtured the faith of young Westerners. It’s also true that now that he is pope we see fewer of the ceremonial atrocities encouraged by Francis. But decades of attachment to the mind-numbing post-Vatican II liturgical consensus are still a problem.

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Why traditionalists love the Millennial saint

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Leo thinks of the ancient Latin rite as a personal preference rather than as a source of regeneration. And so he permits fanatical liberal bishops to persecute traditionalists, while also allowing trad-friendly bishops freedom to liberate the old Mass. It’s a mess.

On the other hand, the good news found in the formulaic prose of Freedom Under Grace is more significant than those disputes over the liturgy. Robert Prevost’s faith in Jesus is as potent as that of any successor of St Peter. The book blows apart claims by conservative fundamentalists that he is a syncretist or, worse, an indifferentist who believes that all religions lead to salvation. The latter charge could be leveled at Francis, though like a true Peronist he adjusted his orthodoxy to suit his audience or his mood. This pope is unquestionably a Catholic.

Again and again Leo reminds us of, and revels in, the salvific majesty of Christ, and as we saw in France, he does this with a quiet charisma that has already converted some unbelievers. What I don’t think he can do is succeed in his self-declared mission to bring “peace to the Church”. But, sad to say, that would be asking too much of any pope.

Still, the Augustinians never asked for the painting to be removed. They had survived a lot worse. Their order risked being suppressed in the 13th century. It was nearly wiped out by the Black Death. And it again risked extinction in the 18th century. Along the way, the Augustinians gave the world Martin Luther, which is scarcely a claim to distinction in the Catholic Church.

However eventful their past, the Augustinians today occupy a relatively uncontentious space in a Church which, like much of the rest of society, has become acrimoniously polarized in recent decades. They are neither as thoroughly liberal as the Jesuits nor as staunchly conservative as the quasi-monks of Opus Dei. If you were looking for a pope capable of bridging the divisions in the Catholic Church, which became painfully obvious during the stormy papacy of the populist-progressive Francis, you could do worse than elect an Augustinian friar. Which is exactly what the cardinals who gathered to elect Francis’s successor did a year ago when they opted for Cardinal Robert Prevost, the American head of the Vatican department that advises popes on the naming of bishops.

The reasoning, and maneuvering, that led up to that decision is wrapped in a mist far denser than the white smoke that gushed from the Sistine Chapel’s rickety-looking chimney, announcing to the world that a new pope had been chosen. The cardinals swear an oath of secrecy and, although from time to time in the years that follow a papal election titbits of information leak out, the full story never emerges.

By electing the man who chose to be known as Leo XIV, the cardinal-electors (those below the age of 80 at the end of the previous papacy) tossed out of the Sistine Chapel’s windows a supposed taboo: that an American could never be, to use a charming Italian term, papabile (literally, “pope-able”). 

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The Pope versus the President

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The view widely held in the Vatican until last year was that it would be unthinkable for the Catholic Church to ally itself to the United States. You only had to imagine the effect a ‘‘gringo pope” would have in Latin America, where tens of millions of devout Catholics had suffered the consequences of CIA-engineered coups and other instruments of American foreign policy: an approach that was seldom less than condescending and all-too-often undemocratic and indifferent to human rights. And how would tens of millions of other pious Catholics in the poorest states of Africa and Asia react to seeing their Church governed by a citizen of a country in which wealth was celebrated, even worshipped? Among those convinced of the taboo was the then-Cardinal Prevost. “I’m an American, I can’t be elected,” he wrote to a fellow Augustinian just days before his election.  

So why did those concerns suddenly count for so little? There are three discernible reasons. None are mutually exclusive and they all have a bearing on the current, tempestuous dispute between Leo XIV and Donald Trump. 

The first has to do with Leo’s own character and biography. By any measure, he is an unusual American. He may root for the Chicago White Sox, but he has spent much of his life outside the United States, first as a missionary and later traveling as head of the Augustinian Order. He is fluent in Spanish and Italian, holds Peruvian citizenship and was the bishop of a Peruvian diocese. He has signally un-WASPish ancestry that even includes a touch of Creole. And his demeanor could scarcely be less like that of the brash, swaggering Americans who inhabit the collective imagination of the poor South.

A second factor, and one known to have weighed on the minds of the cardinals in Conclave, is the parlous state of the Vatican’s finances. One of the cardinals said as much before they were locked away for the vote. Asked if politics might play a role in their choice, Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, the Archbishop of Tokyo, replied: “I don’t think so. But perhaps money…”. The year before Pope Francis’s death, the Holy See ran a deficit of more than €80 million. Its pension fund has a shortfall of as much as €1 billion.

In a recent book on America’s relations with the Vatican, Papi, dollari e guerre, Massimo Franco, a columnist for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, writes that there was so much talk of money in the discussions that preceded the Conclave that Cardinal Gerhard Müller had lost patience. “We’re meant to be electing the successor of Peter, not of Judas!”, he is said to have exclaimed. Traditionally, the biggest contributions to the Holy See came from Germany and the United States. But they fell off as the Catholic Church was immersed in scandals over the sexual abuse of minors by priests and the misuse of Vatican funds. An American pope would stand a better chance than most of loosening the purse-strings of his rich compatriots.

But the third, and simplest, way to explain the election of Leo is that the cardinals wanted a unifier and a period of tranquility after the turbulent papacy of Pope Francis and found in their mild-mannered American colleague a man only too happy to walk peacefully down the middle of the road. If that was the deciding factor, nothing much happened in the first 11 months of his papacy to suggest the cardinals got it wrong. It was a period of exceptional calm — free of scandal and controversy.

Leo delighted progressive Catholics by repeatedly quoting Francis and articulating many of the liberal views associated with him. But if the words were progressive, the symbolism was traditional. That was clear from the moment he walked out onto the balcony of St Peter’s wearing a red satin mozzetta, a shoulder cape that had long formed part of a pope’s garb, but which Francis dispensed with. He moved back into the grand papal apartments his predecessor had eschewed, and even gave permission for a mass to be said in Latin in St Peter’s. None of this earned him the approval of the most diehard conservatives like Steve Bannon. But symbolism counts for a lot in Catholicism and, at the very least, traditionalists could no longer feel, as many did under Francis, that they were being victimized.

On 7 April, though, the calm was shattered. Pope Leo clashed head-on with President Trump. A point that has been largely overlooked is that, if this was a fight, then it was Leo — not Trump — who threw the first punch. Asked about the President’s melodramatic threat to put an end to Iranian civilization, Leo could have used any one of the many ways in which popes avoid calling out individual politicians. Instead, he described Trump’s warning as “truly unacceptable”. The President hit back, describing Leo as “WEAK” (his capitals) on crime and “terrible” at diplomacy. The man whom more than a billion Catholics believe is God’s representative on Earth needed to “get his act together”, the President wrote on Truth Social. For a while, it seemed as if the row was over after the Pope said he had no interest in debating with Trump. But then, this week, the President had another go at Leo, claiming “he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon”. That stung the pontiff into another retort. “If anyone wants to criticise me for proclaiming the gospel, let them do so with the truth,” Leo said. “The Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years.”

The clash — the way it started and the way it is continuing with Leo refusing to let Trump’s claims go unanswered — raises an intriguing thought. Insiders say that, in the discussions that precede a conclave, the cardinals first try to agree on the biggest challenge, or opportunity, facing the Catholic Church, and then move on to considering which of their number would be best suited to deal with it. That, it is said, is how a cardinal little known outside his native Poland came to be Pope John Paul II: his peers concluded that communism in Europe was structurally unsound and that a pontiff was needed who could help topple it.

The vast majority of cardinals — 108 of the 133 who filed into the Sistine Chapel on 7 May 2025 — owed their red caps to Francis and, with few exceptions, viewed the world in much the same way as the late pope. Might they have believed that the biggest single threat the Catholic Church faced was Donald Trump? The MAGA movement sees eye-to-eye with the Church on abortion. But Trump himself stands for much else that Catholics, and not just liberal Catholics, fear and disdain: the destruction of a rules-based world order, use of the death penalty at home and aggressive warmongering abroad, indifference to human rights, climate denial, harsh anti-immigration measures and — of particular concern to Leo — an apparent lack of concern for the dangers posed by the rapid development of artificial intelligence. What is more, Trump has come to be aligned with a section of the evangelical movement that is opposed, and in some cases actively hostile, to Catholicism.

Might the cardinals have sought in Francis’s successor something other than just an ability to reconcile the opposing wings of the Church? Might they have accepted an American not just because he might replenish the Vatican’s coffers, but because he could stand up to the US President, speaking to him in his own language and with a native understanding of the American political environment?

Soon after Leo was installed, a theory circulated in Rome that has since failed to gain much traction: that his election was orchestrated by the then-archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, a conservative openly favored by Trump. Among those who still believe in it is the President himself. At the height of his row with the Pope, Trump said Leo would not have been chosen but for him. Perhaps he was right, just not in the way he meant.

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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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.

That wasn’t because people didn’t think Newman deserved to become one of only 38 saints — out of more than 10,000 recognized by the Catholic Church — whose writings receive the ultimate papal imprimatur. Pope Leo’s announcement was almost universally welcomed. But what did it mean?

St John Henry (1805-90) will join the ranks of Saints Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux. He will be the first native English Doctor of the Church since St Bede, born in Northumbria in 672 AD. And Newman — who was canonized in 2019 — will be the first former Protestant to be granted this exalted title.

Newman was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, at the age of 21 in 1822. Three years later, he was ordained an Anglican priest. By 1828 he was Vicar of St Mary’s, the Oxford University church. Soon he developed a cult following among undergraduates, who would skip meals in order to hear him preach. His sermons — couched in exquisite prose laced with sarcasm — were the most glittering product of the Oxford Movement, which sought to reintroduce the Church of England to the pure apostolic faith of the early Fathers.

Then, in 1845, swayed by study, Newman sensationally went over to Rome, eventually becoming a cardinal. The decision cost him his teaching post at Oxford and many friends. The Victorian public was horrified. Even Newman’s enemies — of which he had many, since he was both outspoken and thin-skinned — realized that the dreaded Papists had poached the finest mind in Anglicanism.

But the point-scoring that followed Pope Leo’s announcement wasn’t inspired by Protestant sour grapes. Anglicans long ago came to terms with Newman’s defection. They argue that his most celebrated insights — above all, his notion that doctrine of the Church “develops” as successive generations uncover fresh truths — are derived from his Oxford sermons, whose brilliance was perhaps unsurpassed by anything he wrote as a Catholic. If Pope Leo wants to make him a Doctor of the Church, then they accept the implied compliment. It is rarely mentioned that Newman went to his grave believing that the Church of England was a heretical body that should submit to Rome.

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No: last week’s infighting was between Roman Catholics, who are mostly united in their devotion to St John Henry, but at loggerheads over his legacy. Both conservative and liberal Catholics want to “own” Newman, and in a Church scarred by the partisan liberal pontificate of Pope Francis they are ready to fight it out. To quote one prominent traditionalist, “Now that Newman has been declared a Doctor of the Church, it’s important that those who have actually read his works take control of the narrative before the Woke brigade hijacks him.”

The problem for conservatives is that plenty of liberal Catholics have read Newman and believe that he foreshadowed the innovations of the Second Vatican Council, which for that reason has been called “Newman’s Council”. And it’s true that Newman believed that lay Catholics could play a role in safeguarding doctrine. He noted that, during the fourth-century Arian conflict, bishops disavowed the divinity of Christ but their faithful flocks held on to it. Also, while accepting the doctrine of papal infallibility, he was dismayed by its triumphalist definition by the First Vatican Council in 1870.

Yet the constant invocation of Newman by modernizing Catholics is hard to square with the savagery of his attacks on the liberalism of his own era. As an Anglican, Newman lampooned Victorian progressives who believed that moral truths could be uncovered by science. He returned to the subject with renewed ferocity nearly half a century later, in an address when he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.

Liberals were guilty of believing that “one creed is as good as another”, he said, and that “it is the right of each individual to make [revealed religion] say just what strikes his fancy”. This would lead to the ruin of souls. To quote Dr Samuel Gregg of the conservative Catholic Acton Institute, “Today, I suspect, the sheer force of Newman’s critique of what he called ‘liberalism in religion’ would make him persona non grata in most Northern European theology faculties.”

Of course, conservative and liberal Catholics are simply indulging in guesswork when they transport an eminent Victorian into the 20th or 21st centuries. What we do know, however, is that John Henry Newman was persona non grata in certain Anglican circles before he even considered converting, and also among powerful Catholics after he sacrificed everything to join their Church.

Partly this was his own fault. Professor Eamon Duffy, doyen of English Catholic historians and a huge Newman enthusiast, writes that as an Anglican the young theologian was “far from fastidious” in advancing his agenda, orchestrating “an anonymous campaign of denigration and protest” against a liberal churchman. (Perhaps he would have felt at home on X.) Decades later, as Provost of the Birmingham Oratory, Newman ministered selflessly to the poor while nurturing ancient grudges and ghosting friends who had offended him. That isn’t saintly behavior — but, on the other hand, it isn’t uncharacteristic of many saints who have temporarily lost sight of human decency in their crusades against “error”.

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A more fundamental problem was that, in both his Churches, Newman was looking for a via media — a middle way. As an Anglican he tried to reconcile the apostolic teachings of Rome with the insights of the Protestant Reformers before deciding that he was wasting his time. As a Catholic he criticized liberals while trying to moderate the dogmatism of Pope Pius IX and his ally Cardinal Henry Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, a fellow ex-Anglican convert who wanted to impose papal authority on every aspect of English Catholic life.

Manning privately thought Newman was a heretic — an absurd notion. When the new Pope Leo XIII offered the old man a red hat, Manning played a really dirty trick, spreading anonymously authored false reports that Newman had declined the honor. Fortunately, a message from Birmingham reached Rome just in time.

Such are the perils of trying to find common ground in a fractured Church. This year the first American pope took the name Leo in order to honor the pope who, in making the great English theologian a cardinal, implicitly conceded that Pius IX had dragged the Church into unnecessary controversies. Newman was more explicit. Pius had suffered the fate of any pope who reigns for too long: “He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”

Does that ring a bell? Pope Francis reigned for only 12 years, but it seemed longer. He was a liberal, not an ultra-conservative in the mold of Pope Pius; indeed, he sometimes flirted with the notion, so scandalous to Newman, that “one creed is as good as another”. But, like Pius, Francis tolerated no contradiction, displayed little intellectual curiosity, and did cruel things to Catholics who attended the Latin Mass celebrated by St John Henry. He issued encyclicals that merited the latter’s verdict on Pius’s “Syllabus of Errors” – in Duffy’s paraphrase, “a theological mess, made up of scattergun denunciations of matters in which the Church had no real expertise.” Above all, despite the pantomime of “synodality”, he centralized the government of the Church in the despotic fashion that Newman deplored.

Leo XIV has, so far, given us few hints of specific policy initiatives. But most commentators agree that he is looking for a middle way between conservatives and liberals, and already we can see trouble ahead: both hardline liberals and paranoid conservatives are determined to cast him in the role of Pope Francis II. My guess is that there is a via media out there, but that Leo will find it only if he displays the sort of courage that enabled St John Henry to cross the Tiber, and walks away from the path to chaotic secularism mapped out by his predecessor.

But for Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, the faith’s social teaching inspired his turn against conventional GOP orthodoxy (free trade, low taxes, deregulation). Before Donald Trump tapped him as his 2024 running mate, then-Sen. Vance’s major legislative initiatives bore a distinct Catholic imprint, from railroad reform to the fight for lower insulin prices and a proposal to claw back CEO pay from bailed-out banks.

Upon Leo’s election, many seized upon the fact that, back when he was Cardinal Robert Prevost, he had repeatedly taken issue with Trumpian populism, singling out the veep in particular. In February, an X account associated with him reposted an article headlined: “JD Vance Is Wrong: Jesus Doesn’t Ask Us to Rank Our Love for Others.” It took issue with Vance’s interpretation of the ancient concept of ordo amoris (“the order of love”) to justify a pinched account of what Americans owe foreigners.

Progressives took this as a (delicious) sign that Leo would carry over his immediate predecessor’s hostility toward populism, and maintain the hierarchy’s fairly uncompromising recent line in favor of the free movement of people across national frontiers. If Vance emerges as the Republican presidential nominee for 2028, his opponent’s debate barb writes itself: “Your own pope slammed your deplorable views.”

The Vice President has publicly brushed off Leo’s pre-papal posts. Vance is aware that Leo’s considered views on immigration are more sophisticated than his social-media footprint might suggest. The sort of mass, low-wage, South-North movement that surged over the past decade, he has said, “is a huge problem, and it’s a problem worldwide. There’s gotta be a way to solve the problem but also to treat people with real respect.”

This recognition that migration is a crisis — straining wages, public services, and social cohesion in receiving countries — jars with the stereotype of a Church always proclaiming “let them come”. Even Pope Francis sounded more nuanced notes, insisting that immigration is a “two-way process” that entails a duty of integration on newcomers. In a message to the US bishops rebuking Trump II deportations, Francis reiterated the right of nations to control their borders.

Still, these tensions suggest a far deeper clash of worldviews and sensibilities: between a fundamentally universalistic faith and Western populations fed up with universalism, or at least, the liberal kind. Between people redoubling to nationalism and a Church called to baptize panta ta ethnē (“all the nations”). Between the pride and particularism of the Appalachian “holler” and a two-millennia-old body that inherited the administrative forms of the Roman Empire.

As these two forces barrel towards each other, each has to wonder if a collision can be averted. A full accommodation is out of the question, of course. No more can the Church bend itself to 21st-century populism than it could to, say, the Napoleonic surge in the early 19th century. But mutual understanding and engagement aren’t out of reach. Indeed, they are essential. It helps, then, for each camp to start by trying to see the world through the other’s eyes.

The Church’s default political form is empire. That’s a scandalous term in our time, owing to its association with recent European imperialism and colonialism. But in this context, it should be taken in a strictly “neutral” way: a society that encompasses many smaller units (tribes, nations) — indeed, one that theoretically aims to encompass all. In the Church’s telling, the imperial form was pressed on Catholic Christianity not by accident, but by providence and the gospel itself.

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Make Catholicism weird again

By Darran Anderson

It began with ideas. Before the Church took up the universalist political forms of the Roman Empire, it embraced the universalist yearnings of Greek philosophy, blending these with the harsh desert monotheism of the Jewish people. It was just this synthesis — the unlikely but surprisingly durable synthesis of Greek logic with the voice from the burning bush — that made possible Christianity’s global span.

Christianity universalized salvation: from a story centered on a single nation, the Jews, to one that invited the Gentiles into the tent — now refigured from a building to a person, a God-Man. This universalism, as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out, was already latent in exilic and post-exilic Judaism, as contact with foreign overlords forced the Israelites to proclaim Yahweh “as the God of heaven and earth” — who, in parallel to Socratic philosophy, mocked local or national myths.

The Academy and the Temple, in other words, courted each other. The Christ event deepened this courtship, leading to the marriage between a Greek philosophy in search of the ultimate wellspring of reality, and the God of the Jews, held up as just that. As Benedict taught, it was no accident that it was a Macedonian man who appeared to Saint Paul in a dream, pleading with him to “come over and help us” (Acts 16:9).

Just as Christ’s Davidic lineage was no accident, so there was a reason that the founder of Pauline Christianity enjoyed overlapping identities as both a Jew and a Roman citizen. From the Catholic perspective, it likewise wasn’t a mere coincidence that Christianity put down its deepest early roots on the Mediterranean shore, among commercial and shipping hubs; in fertile soil already tilled by the Greek passion for universal ideas and the Roman love of law.

Yes, Rome persecuted the early Church, driving believers into the catacombs. But as the French historian Henri Daniel-Rops showed, all along the Church of the catacombs was preparing itself to conquer Roman administrative structures for Jesus. Underground, the Church was already a highly organized, hierarchical, corporate institution. With the Constantinian conversion, it got the chance to go overground. Now, 1,700 years on, the Church is ruled by a pontifex maximus, who is advised by a curia, overseeing worldwide dioikesis, according to a codex.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, this apostolic empire confronted the rise of nationalism (often in connivance with liberalism). Modern nation-states grouped ethnic and linguistic tribes into “pure”, prickly, militant little sovereignties. For the Church, this was a trauma. It meant the dilution of papal authority over the hearts and minds of individual Christians, as well as the end of Christendom as a larger geographic and spiritual society, folding in many nations.

Hence why it was Catholic political thinkers who first championed the European Union. Hence why senior churchmen down to our own time prize transnational institutions like the United Nations, and invariably seek regularized, well-administered relations with even hostile worldly powers, such as Beijing. And hence why the Church looks askance at immigration restrictionism and militarized borders. These are all deeply Roman impulses and yearnings.

In short: no one can understand Christianity’s largest denomination without appreciating the Roman-ness braided, even fused, into its institutional soul.

But for Vance’s voters, and similar populations in Europe, transnationalism has come to mean an entirely different set of outcomes. The erosion of solidarity and bargaining power by corporate globalization. Dislocation brought about by rapid demographic change. Above all, the loss of agency, as decisions about how to organize society were removed from democratic political contestation and placed under “expert” determination or judicial and bureaucratic fiat.

The rise of postwar, liberal (or neoliberal) transnationalism — an empire of autonomy without limits — has come at the expense of the political community, where the common good used to be properly located, defined and contested by competing classes and interests. Liberal transnationalism did well by multinationals and the educated managerial classes that service them, to be sure, but it left behind many others.

Laid-off workers, whether they resided in the French rust belt or the American inner city, were told to take up their complaints with the immutable and incontrovertible laws of the market and “globalization”. Nothing substantive could be contested; global supply chains, you see, were too large and tangled up. EU membership meant that, whether they liked it or not, individual nations had to bear the burdens associated with Angela Merkel’s decision to admit some 1.3 million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa over the course of a year, many of them hard-to-integrate welfare migrants.

To be sure, many of these voters live messy, unchurched lives — divorce, children born outside of marriage, addiction, etc. are common. Nevertheless, they sense that biblical universalism and the liberal kind aren’t necessarily congruous. Sometimes, the two are downright inimical. And the populist voters have half a point. The apostolic empire can’t be identical to the liberal imperium, whose subject, as the French thinker Pierre Manent has said, “no longer acknowledges any limits ‘because he deserves it’”.

When Christ charged his disciples to teach and baptize all the nations, was the Lord thinking of a European Union that militantly repudiated John Paul II’s appeals to include a mild reference to the Continent’s Christian roots in its constitutional documents?

Further reading

Why conclave still enchants us

By Kathleen Stock

Christianity is not the patrimony of a single ethnos, as churchmen rightly insist. But should they also not question liberal transnationalism’s drive to impose on all nations a single law — the smooth operation of the market and maximal autonomy for the unbound, unattached individual or corporate actor?

Indeed, they have: for example, in his book-length meditation on the Hail Mary, Pope Francis skewered a neoliberal elite “that does not know what it means to live among the people” and lacks “any sense of belonging to a family, to a land, to our God”. An elite that has “no need of mother, of father, of a family, of a homeland, of belonging to a people”.

A patria. A people. The Church can and has maintained that these things matter, even as it has rejected the idolatry of the nation. While Almighty God universalized salvation history through the fiat of a Jewish woman of the Galilee, he didn’t thereby obliterate her Jewishness.

So can the two — the universalist Church and Western populations recoiling from one recent form of universalism — come to some accommodation? Can they see eye-to-eye? Not totally. When the Trump administration dumps Venezuelan hairdressers into a Salvadoran gulag (for life, without due process), the Church can’t but rebuke and chastise. Ditto, when the more goonish populists make idols out of nations or races, much as Communists made idols of social classes.

Yet the Church, especially since Vatican II, has made a priority of encounter — of going out into the world and meeting people, especially the poor and marginalized. At this moment, with secular politics and Christian universalism poised to clash, the imperative to encounter should be widened to include not just the barrios and colonias of the desperately poor in Latin America, but also the dispossessed of the North: once-proud manufacturing workers scrabbling for jobs, often forced to compete at the lowest rungs with migrants willing to work for even less.

Here, Vance and Leo XIV do have meaningful things to say to each other. The new pontiff has taken the name Leo, he has said, in tribute to Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching in the late 19th century. Responding to the dislocations and miseries inflicted upon working classes in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution, Leo XIII preached not class war, as the socialists did, but class reconciliation, an ideal that jibed with the movements for social and Christian democracy in Europe and the New Deal in the United States.

Further reading

How American is the Pope?

By Alex Lucie-Smith

Yet as I’ve argued in these pages, reconciliation in the Leonine vision doesn’t come about from merely exhorting the asset-rich to do right by the asset-less. It requires empowering the latter relative to the former. Leo called for the state to require employers to pay a living wage, as a matter of justice — not charity. He also defended the right of workers to band together in labor unions in defense of their mutual interests and to boost their bargaining power.

In light of this teaching, Leo XIV can rightly chide the Trump-Vance administration for acting no better than its establishment-Republican predecessors in attacking America’s National Labor Relations Board and weakening regulatory guardians of the poor such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among other populist disappointments.

At the same time, as a Christian statesman, Vance can help Leo decode the secular signs of the times. The Vice President has repeatedly told me, for example, that he views the free movement of labor as a key component of the neoliberal models of exploitation which Francis decried and which Leo XIV surely abhors (given his choice of papal name). Can Leo, for example, deepen the Church’s theology of migration in a way that upholds the dignity of the sojourner while addressing the rights and concerns of recipient countries?

We can only hope. Indeed, Catholics on both sides of this divide must pray for such engagement. For the populists, it’s a matter of taking seriously the counsels of an institution that has outlived countless ideological enthusiasms in the past. For the Church, meanwhile, at stake is the ability to hear and reach fed-up working- and lower-middle classes in the Global North, even as it champions the claims and aspirations of the South.