Air Date: 4–29-2026
Today we explore the extraordinary clash between Pope Leo XIV and the Trump White House — a feud involving military threats, medieval papal history, and an American-born pope who refuses to back down. We'll hear why analysts say MAGA's religiosity is pure aesthetic, and what that hollowness means for the millions of Americans still taking their faith seriously.
#1787 Full Episode
[00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
Today we explore the extraordinary clash between Pope Leo XIV and the Trump White House — a feud involving military threats, medieval papal history, and an American-born pope who refuses to back down. We'll hear why analysts say MAGA's religiosity is pure aesthetic, and what that hollowness means for the millions of Americans still taking their faith seriously.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include
Democracy Now!
The Holy Post
The PBS NewsHour
The Kavernacle
Conspirituality
SWAJ
and Man Carrying Thing
Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;
Section A, Trump and Company's Love/Hate Papal Relationship
Section B, Anti-Catholic Sentiment in America
Section C, The Pope vs The Trump
Section D, Some Misc. Historical Context
But first, a reminder to check out [00:01:00] our new show, SOLVED! on the Best of the Left YouTube channel! We're really proud of the show we're making, and think you'll get real value out of it. Plus, you checking it out will help us find new viewers on YouTube so thanks in advance for your all your views, likes, subscribes and comments. That's all on the Best of the Left YouTube channel, linked in the show notes.
And now, on to the show.
Speaker 113: the New York Times gathered data from two dozen diocese, Catholic diocese, including some of the country's largest like Los Angeles and Phoenix, as well as some very small ones like Gallup, New Mexico, and Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Each reported a significant jump. They do, new. New members at Easter, it's, it's a big deal. It's an annual thing, and that's coming up. So they're getting the numbers on how many people are signed up to become, members of the Catholic church. And it's off the chart, what it's been. Years ago, respondents pointed to a range of possible reasons, including the desire for community, social and political instability, outreach to young people and technological change, but they really don't [00:02:00] know.
And then our friend Ryan Burge reports that, Hey, guess what? Everyone for the third consecutive year, the share of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular has declined for the third straight year dropping to 31.8% in 2025, A level not seen since 2017. The decline is statistically significant and consistent across multiple large scale surveys.
The de decreases observed across all three categories. So atheists have declined in America, agnostics have declined in America, and those saying none. None of the above. Have also declined in America. So we're getting more Catholics. We're getting less atheists. Yeah.
Speaker 112: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 113: One, one other piece I wanted to bring up that the number of, this is from Washington Post, the number of, right wing political [00:03:00] influencers that are converting to Catholicism and using lots of religious language. Mm-hmm. Their comment that the new religious right is distinct from the one that was once led by evangelicals and the new one.
Mm-hmm. Is led by. People like Candace Owens, for example, who attends the Latin mass and spins anti-establishment and anti-Jewish fantasies while sitting in front of an ornate crucifix and a gothic reliquary containing a stone associated with the cult of St. Michael, the Archangel, Megyn Kelly, another Catholic has grown more demonstrative in her piety as she's grown more critical of pro-Israel Jewish commentators.
In December, she announced to the world that she was about to pray the rosary quote, like virtually all Christians do. Go through a list of similar talking heads that don't talk about scripture much, but they, they use the imagery of yes. Of particularly of the Catholic church.
And asking the question, [00:04:00] are we moving into a Christian identity? Politics? Politics? Mm-hmm. That's more about images and symbols and less, of course about theology. Yeah. In scripture. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to put all this together. More people, it'd be great to know all these new Catholics.
Mm-hmm. How many are, are politically liberal? How many would qualify as, as progressive? And what are they attracted to about the Catholic church? How many would qualify as very conservative and what are they attracted to about the Catholic church? There was another article that I was gonna pull up, but didn't about how this year, the US bishops are speaking out on issues that code left much more than they're speaking out on issues they did in previous years that coded.
Right. So they used to speak out most loudly about abortion, about sexual ethics. This year they're speaking out about, immigration and, and the war mm-hmm. In [00:05:00] Iran. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And things that typically make conservatives cranky with them. So I, and so are, are liberals being attracted to the Catholic Church mm-hmm.
Because of Pope Leo and Pope Francis? Or are, really far right. Conservatives being attracted because of Candace Owens and JD Vance? What's going on, Caitlin? You get to answer that question, and then after that thank you. We'll see what chat gpt thinks.
Speaker 115: Right, right, right, right. I My impulse is to say none of that is true.
I really, I really wonder if the vast, well, not all, not
Speaker 113: none of, not none of it. You say none of what I just said is true.
Speaker 115: No, I think what might be going on
Speaker 113: now I have, now I have social friction with
Speaker 115: you. I, I know. Well, it might be going on. I wouldn't be surprised. I don't have any data to back this up or anecdotes, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the very public expression of this, Candace Owens and conspiracy theories and Right, right-leaning interest in Catholicism and the Catholic Bishops making [00:06:00] statements about immigration and left-leaning interest in Catholicism are what's animating online conversations amongst people who write op-eds and are on Twitter and think about things in that way.
But that might have very little to do with. People on the ground who might be more interested in Catholicism for the reasons we mentioned earlier. Looking for rootedness, looking for community, looking for tradition. I, I just had a conversation this week with a bunch of people who were, who all went to seminary or some theological education, and we were all expressing just like disbelief sometimes at the number of people we know in our lives that don't have any theological education who will switch between churches or traditions with an ease that we just are like, mm-hmm.
What do you, you are at a Presbyterian church and now you're considering becoming Catholic. Mm-hmm. Like, how does all this work together? Mm-hmm. And we kept coming up against the fact that most people make decisions about church. Sometimes it is about politics. We've talked about this in the past. It's more about political, social leaning, but honestly, a lot of people aren't even queued into that register.
They're just like, there's a church nearby. Someone was nice to me. [00:07:00] Mm-hmm. Or I would like to be in a small group, or I would like to, I'm attracted to when it comes to Catholic and Orthodox churches, I'm attracted to the history and the tradition. I don't know that I could really articulate for you some of the other things that are going on.
So I just wouldn't be surprised if some of the, we should figure out if it's the right or it's the left is just what talking heads do.
Speaker 113: Yeah.
Speaker 115: And most people on the ground. Whatcha you
saying
Speaker 113: about me?
Speaker 115: We are talking heads. Oh no, I'm so sorry. We have no bodies under this. I'm body
Speaker 113: entity.
Speaker 115: I just wonder if the people on the ground are oblivious for the most part at the Candace Owens versus Catholic Bishops fight.
Speaker 113: That's probably true. I think that's probably true. 'cause I, I will say I follow the news a lot more than you do. Most people. Partly 'cause it's part of what I do for work. Mike?
Speaker 112: Thoughts? I thoughts? I actually, and Caitlin, I adore you.
Speaker 113: Don't, don't go chat. GPT on Caitlin.
Speaker 112: Caitlin, I had that exact same.
Inclination to say, I don't [00:08:00] know that it's politics that's driving it. I think it's disenchantment and people trying to find re-enchantment that's driving it. Because I don't think, if we, if we adapt those frames from Charles Taylor, I don't think the evangelical church re-enchantment anything.
Yeah. We're part of the de disenchantment of, we, our buildings aren't unique. Our worship services are blend. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's just the, and so I think there's something about, we don't even expect orthodox get
Speaker 113: healed anymore.
Speaker 112: No. Some do, but
Speaker 113: Yeah. Well, yeah.
Speaker 112: There, which is why Orthodoxism is
Speaker 113: growing.
Speaker 115: That's true. Yes. There's some
Speaker 112: enchanting
Speaker 115: there.
Speaker 112: I just think, I just think, I think that the evangel, the standard evangelical church cannot ree ch anything.
Speaker 115: Mm.
Speaker 112: And I think these historic traditions, they, they appeal to the senses. They appeal to. Aesthetics, they appeal to smells and sights and sounds differently.
And I, I, my personal opinion is, I think that's, [00:09:00] if I had to guess, I would say it's that I think people are just done with warehouse churches and cookie cutter music and self-help sermons. They want something that feels deeper, richer and truer than that.
Speaker 115: And Mike, to your point, I, this was buried in the, the article about Roman Catholic, observance, but the Roman Catholic Church requires a pretty robust.
Program before you're confirmed. Mm-hmm. S good. Like there's a lot of study and obligation and like really making promises and knowing what you're getting into. And as much as the evangelical church spent many years in the seeker sensitive vein saying like, let's get rid of all of them.
Come just as
Speaker 113: you are,
Speaker 115: right? Like this is a performance or it's a product, or it's, yeah. And I think if you're feeling unrooted and lonely and you're like, I'm done with this AI chat bot, that's really not fulfilling my need anymore. If you show up to an evangelical megachurch where you can sit in a not a pew, usually you can sit in a chair every week and not have anyone talk to you.
And you can become a member by coming for like one meeting and signing a [00:10:00] paper. But then the Catholic church, not only to your point, Mike is beautiful and rooted and engages the census and also says, well actually. Belonging to us really matters. It will ask things of you. Mm-hmm. And so actually you have to go through this whole process of learning and, and I'm, I've been doing all this research on the early church process of this.
There would be a moment Yes. When people were joining the early church. Yes. Where not only would they have had to learn all of this theology and make sure they knew what they were signing up for, but their sponsor, the person who was like helping them enter the church, would have to be able to tell the bishop, I've seen them feed the poor.
Or like I've seen them sacrifice for their neighbor. I've, and that real buy-in, even though it will filter out a lot of people who do wanna just still come and see a performance every Sunday is attractive to a lot of people, especially in a world where no one else is asking anything of them and then giving them nothing in return because they're not being asked of anything.
Speaker 36: Over the last 10 years, Pope Francis has gained the adoration of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world for his humility, care for the poor, and for steering the church to reform its stances on some social issues. [00:11:00] While the most recent polling from 2021 shows, Francis has the support of the majority of Catholics in the us, conservative clerics and lay people in America are some of his most vocal critics.
In November, the Pope moved against two of his loudest detractors, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland and Cardinal Raymond, Leo Burke, both Americans. Last month, Strickland was removed as a bishop of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas. Then a few weeks later, Cardinal Burke was stripped of his Vatican privileges, housing and salary.
David Gibson is the director of the Center of Religion and Culture at Fordham University. David, thank you so much for joining us. Let's talk first about the type of Pope Pope Francis has been. What reforms and changes to the church has he focused on?
Speaker 37: Pope Francis is really focused on being a pastor, being providing a more pastoral, inclusive, merciful church, going out to the peripheries, those who are in suffering.
So that's been his signature, is really going out and [00:12:00] helping those of the poor, the homeless. The immigrant, the refugee. So he's seen as this very merciful figure. What? He's not terribly. Merciful towards are the elites in the church, the powerful, those who have all the privileges and all the perks. And we've seen how he's moved against some of them in recent months.
Speaker 36: And is it that the American Catholic bishops leaders who have criticized him, are they considered elites in church standing? And why is it that they seem to have been among the most vocal critics of Foote Francis?
Speaker 37: Well, the opposition to Pope Francis is very loud and it's very influential, but it's really very small and very much located in the Anglosphere, especially in the United States.
There's a lot of big money behind this conservative movement, so they have this great profile. And a, again, a certain degree of influence, but they're [00:13:00] relatively small, but they have a certain approach that kind of tracks the political trends in the United States, and they don't like what Pope Francis is doing.
He's really upending. All of the customs and all of the privileges that these bishops and cardinals were used to, and they really don't like that. If you step back from the disagreements over politics, over doctrine, over ideology, a lot of this is simply the fact that these are bishops and cardinals who had the inside track under the previous Pontificates, John Paul II and Benedict XVI for over 35 years.
Now you have a Pope who was elected 10 years ago who upends all of that. He's the first Pope from the Southern hemisphere. He's from Argentina. He's not going to play favorites in the way that the other popes used to.
Speaker 36: And what does it say about the state of American Catholicism that Pope Francis [00:14:00] enjoys relatively high approval ratings among the majority of American Catholics, and yet he's coming under criticism from, from some American leaders.
Speaker 37: Well, what those high approval ratings say is that Catholics always like the singer, even if they don't like the song. It also indicates, again that this conservative opposition to him is really vocal opposition to him based in the United States is very small. That doesn't mean it's not influential and it's not damaging.
You have to remember that the American Catholic Church is just 5% of the global 1.2 billion. Member church. So we tend to forget that. And even within the 60, 65 million member Catholic church in the United States, these real conservative, elements are a minority.
Speaker 36: We mentioned these two Catholic leaders in the United States that Pope Francis has punished.
Can you tell us a little bit more about them and what they've said about him that elicited [00:15:00] this response?
Speaker 37: Well, these two cases, one Bishop Joseph Strickland in Tyler, Texas, diocese in East Texas, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, who's lived in Rome and also in Wisconsin. They're, they're, they're distinct, in the sense that, they're both been longtime critics of Pope Francis, but Bishop Strickland.
His diocese really was not being well run. Pope Francis has been extremely patient over 10 years with his critics like Cardinal Burke, who's been a long time thorn in his side, and even with Joseph Strickland, who's endorsed some of the most virulent attacks against Pope Francis. But. In the case of Bishop Strickland, his diocese, the morale was, was, was down.
The diocese is divided administratively, it's a mess. Pope Francis finally said, you can't be a bishop of this diocese. You remain a bishop, but we need to replace you. In the case of Cardinal Burke, you've got a 75-year-old Cardinal who's living in a [00:16:00] 4,500 square foot apartment in Rome with a $60,000 a year stipend.
He spends. No one knows, maybe a month total in Rome. He has no job there. He's got all these perks and privileges. The Pope finally said to him, look, you can still be a cardinal. You can still vote in the next conclave. You could even be elected Pope. After I leave the scene, but we, the Vatican are not gonna give you a stipend anymore, and we're not gonna give you a free apartment.
You can keep the apartment. You just need to pay for it.
Speaker 36: In terms of his response to these critics and, and what you've laid out as inefficiencies in their diocese, what does that tell us about the type of pope that Francis is and the type of leader and the type of human that he is?
Speaker 37: Pope Francis has really been patient.
He's resisted moving against some of these critics. Again, the criticism against Francis is of an entirely different category than the dissent was from the left against John Paul II [00:17:00] and Benedict XVI. These, bishops and Cardinal. Aren't just disagreeing with the Pope. They're saying he's not a legitimate teacher of the faith.
Some of them are even saying he's not a legitimate pope. It's almost like accusing the president of Sedition. Any bishop in a sense can be his own Pope. In the social media sense and Francis has not wanted to create other rival voices out there, but at a certain point he has to lose patience.
Speaker 17: on their recent feud, obviously Donald Trump took to true social to write this.
After Pope Leo has been criticizing the US War in Iran, Pope Leo is weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy. He talks about fear of the Trump administration, but doesn't mention the fear that the Catholic church and all Christian organizations had during COVID when they're arresting priests and ministers and everybody else for holding church services and even going outside and being.
10 and even 20 feet apart. I like his brother Lewis much better than I like him because [00:18:00] Lewis is all maga. He gets it and Leo doesn't. I don't want a pope who thinks it's okay for Iran to have nukes. I don't want a pope who thinks it's terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a country that was sending massive amounts of drugs into the US and even worse emptying their prisons.
Into our country, and I don't want a pope who criticizes the president of the US because I'm doing exactly what I was elected to do in a landslide. He wasn't on any list to be Pope and wasn't, and was only put there by the church because he was an American, and they thought that'd be the best way to deal with the President Donald Trump.
If I wasn't in the White House, Leo wouldn't be in the V. And unfortunately, Leo's weak on crime. Weak on nuclear weapons does not sit well with me, nor does the fact that he meets of Obama Sympathizes. Leo should get his act together as Pope and use common sense and Leo responding. I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do.
We are not politicians. We don't deal with foreign policy with the same perspective. He might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the gospel as a peacemaker. And then he also tweeted [00:19:00] after this recent feud, hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are immersed in extreme poverty, yet disproportionate wealth remains in the hands of a few.
It is an unjust scenario in the face of which we cannot fail to question ourselves and to commit to change things. There is no lack of resources at the root of disparities, but the need to address solvable problems related to a more equitable distribution of wealth to be achieved with moral sense and honesty.
So clearly a more left wing Pope who, American conservatives are generally not liking, but it seems to be. The American Christians who hate Leo and are backing Donald Trump are the Zionist ones, where the other ones who are either. A bit apathetic to Israel or don't like Israel of of course our backing Pope Leo, despite him being more left-leaning pages like this.
Grab the Greg, the GR put Pope Leo needs to excommunicate JD Vance from the Catholic Church. And this is, symbolic of a lot of the far right backing Pope Leo against JD Vance, who is as Catholic [00:20:00] convert, who is backing all Israel's terrible crimes on Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine. So there's an account called Trad West, which is a Catholic.
Twitter account with 500,000 followers. So I want to use this to show you how even on the far right they are embodying what Chris Pratt was saying, they act like politics and supporting Pope Leo because he is the pope is completely separate. So this page was celebrating Chris Pratt for putting a massive cross up.
I missed this. They're celebrating Henry Cavill, which is really funny. They're celebrating things like was cast as Geralt in the Witcher. Writers try to modernize and ruin the law, and he leaves the lead role of a massive franchise because of his principles. Moves to Warhammer 40 K and refuses to allow them to push modern agendas unfathomably based.
And no one ever said conservatives understood the media they love because the Wi the Witch one is funny because. Out of all these fantasy franchises, obviously Lord of [00:21:00] Rings is like super pro Catholic 'cause it was written by a bit of a Catholic zealot in Tolkien. The Witcher is actually like the opposite of that.
One of the running themes in the Witcher is a massive criticism. Of the Catholic Church and its role in just Polish history and Polish nationalism. There's a church called the Church of the Eternal Fire. They're nearly like a one for one standin for the Catholic church, and they're like fanatical racists who burn non-humans and witches at the stake and ally with these witch hunters who are like the one of the most evil factions in the game.
Right? The witch is criticizing a lot. Polish history and contemporary Polish Catholicism. It's funny if Henry Cavill was not backing down on the source material to say that's a good thing for Catholicism generally, because it definitely isn't like if, if he didn't back down on. Putting in the Church of the Eternal Fire into the show, which I don't think they're in the show, would this Catholic page be happy about that?
But also the Warhammer one's funny. I've only played Space Marine two, so I dunno the law too much. But even playing that and how like [00:22:00] religion is depicted in that, I wouldn't say that Warhammer probably. Has the most rosy outlook on Catholicism, especially considering the things that are inspiring Warhammer, like the Dune series and stuff.
But that was a funny thing I thought I'd talk about and remember, Pope Leo has just talked about redistributing wealth and Trad West posts. Many think communism. It's just political theory. It's not. It's a spiritual weapon of the devil designed to enslave souls, destroy the church and erase God from the hearts of men.
This is why the saints stood up to it. Why is communism demonic? Because communism begins with atheism and it denies God in his church. Man is reduced to a number in the collective, and the state becomes God. The church becomes the enemy. This is just not political. This is not just political theory. It's Satanic and yes, like with the Chris Pratt thing, a lot of these posts seem to be written by AI as well.
You have stuff like this, mosques in Germany. Versus churches in Saudi Arabia, Reconquista 2.0. Soon the Crusades were awful. Europe without the Crusades. So I don't have time to talk about [00:23:00] this, but yes, the, defensive war narrative around the crusades is absolutely bullshit and stupid. I'll throw up, a thumbnail of the video I've made on this, so if you care about this.
And you've always wondered why Catholics always say shit like this. Like we were defending Europe from Islam. That would've taken over the whole of Europe. It's just so stupid. But again, they love it. And they're talking about Reconquista too, so. Assuming they're talking about like doing violence to Europe's Muslim population.
So saying stuff like this, after careful consideration, I've decided to become more extreme in my political beliefs. Think about everything I've just read you. It's all far right? Garbage. It's all fanatical far, right? Catholic garbage. So who would you think these people would support if it's a mashup between Donald Trump and Pope Leo?
Who would they support? This is why it's so surprising, but that's why I had to play that Chris Pratt clip where he says, I don't care about politics enough. I don't care about politics enough to take a stand, but I will take a stand in my faith. So here's what Trad West writes about. Leo Pope Leo [00:24:00] walks into the collapsing moral landscape and doesn't flinch.
Immediately sets a tone. No ambiguity speaks about truth like its objective. Reminds the world that Christianity is demanding openly. Challenges the culture of convenience and excess. Calls out spiritual laziness pushes for larger, stronger families. Warns that demographic collapse as a spiritual issue, confronts modern ideologies without dressing it up diplomatically names, enemies of the church without hesitation, emphasizes prayer.
Not as a symbolism, but as a necessity. Constantly redirects attention back to God, not institutions. Rejects. The idea of adapting doctrine to modern trends. Insists truth, shapes the world not the other way around, and draws a clear line between truth and error. Forces people to choose where they stand and doesn't seek popularity popular anyway.
And then here's another one. Pope Leo is a Catholic. Why are people shocked when he takes Catholic stances? Liberal. Pope Leo is woke Republican. Pope Leo is not woke. Pope Leo. I love God in his church, and Jesus saying, I love you too. [00:25:00] So just one more, A page called Catholic for Catholics, which is an, again, an American conservative Twitter page.
They wrote a statement saying, president Trump's attack on Pope Leo. Was disheartening and merits an apology. The attack on Pope Leo is primarily a reaction to the Holy Father's courageous calls for peace amidst the Iran War and Israel's bloody destruction of Southern Lebanon. It's a war that is highly unpopular, especially among Catholics who sense the immorality of the whole conflict, let alone the net lost for America.
Israel has pulled us into the war and continues to threaten the peace with their insatiable desire for territorial expansion. The role of the Catholic Patriot in America is more crucial than ever. Our faith gives us the freedom to never be sheep that follow blindly, a political leader or even a pope.
We are sheep, but sheep that follow the good shepherd, Jesus Christ. So again, I find that interesting because like I said, so many of these Catholics are absolutely fanatical. Far right. Racist who hate Muslims, who idolize the [00:26:00] Crusades, talk about wanting to do another one, and here they are. Backing a lefty liberal pope against a far right, president because of things like Israel.
And why I find it interesting is it is, it's not even about consistency. It's not like the Catholic church has an allied with war mongers like Donald Trump. The Catholic church historically backed so many fascist dictators. The Catholic church doesn't mind war. The Catholic church doesn't mind a whole host of, of terrible things, but maybe that's the good sign sometimes that all these American Catholics who are right wing, they're being influenced by a left wing pope who is saying that these things like the Iran War is bad.
And that's even making them go against Donald Trump, who the majority of them supported for president in the first place. But yeah, like I was saying, I find this interesting, but also really, really bizarre that these people who have such fascist politics can still be influenced by the Pope. But I think part of this is also.
My ending point. So many people who love Catholicism, they love the history, they love the element of the [00:27:00] Roman Empire, and they like Pope Leo because they view him as a king. He's like the king of the Catholics. And no matter what you think of the king, he plays a spiritual role. He plays a leading role.
You have to show him deference. And I think that plays such a role in it. Like these people are very, very conservative. They secretly yearn from a monarchy and that's why they show this man respect, even though they massively disagree with him. And I think because Pope Leo is an American, he gets even more of that because I don't think these same people would be saying this about Pope Francis, like they're saying it about Pope Leo.
Speaker 30: We saw this clip of Pope Bob giving a brief audience to convert Tra c JD Vance, possibly the most annoying convert in the world, uh, with Usha standing beside him in a black mania. Jeanette Rubio's in Amenta as well.
Marco is very stiff. He's holding his breath. He always looks constipated. Vance has this ubic manner that I think [00:28:00] belies all of his boot licking aggression, and he hands the pont of an oversized envelope, and he says that it's an invitation from Donald and Melania to a White House dinner. Pope Bob smiles guardedly as he takes it, and without looking at it, sets it on his desk saying quietly.
I'll read that at some point. And Vance Sputters of course. Of course. And then they give him a Bears Jersey signed by their kids, even though he, he's a baseball guy. And then they pose, I don't know if you saw the photo, but Yeah, it's a very awkward photo. There's like eight inches between them all and they're standing quite stiff, I don't know, like on a wedding cake or something.
Mm-hmm. The scene sums up the church state tension of whatever phase of global fascism we're now entering. I think and marks a high point in our consideration of the religion of politics. Here come these shit heels jailing students, rendering immigrants and blueprinting the Trump Gaza Resort, and they shuffle into the Vatican with hats in hand to meet a fellow [00:29:00] American who is nothing like their boss, and they're asking for pats on the head.
And we have this enigmatic response from Pope Bob that I think sums up where we all are as we read the incense swirls for whether he's gonna keep steering the world's 1.4 billion Catholics against the tides of late stage capitalism, somehow Francis style. And will he do it while seeking common ground with conservative movements around the world on the key points of anti wokeness?
Speaker 62: Senator thing In recent weeks, your party has come under fire for supporting an unpopular and many say unwinnable war in the Middle East. Care to comment. Look, we wouldn't be doing this unless we 100% had to. As a recent convert to Catholicism myself, I know how important it is to protect the world with our bombs.
Pope Leo the 14th commented indirectly about the Iran War. It's not a war, it's just a thing. Can I play you the Pope's comments,
Speaker 63: Leo? Our Chicago boy old deep dish, Leo? Yes. Yeah, just show me
Speaker 62: I think, war is, bad. Like I don't [00:30:00] think only we should, people should do war
care to comment.
I have never struggled with my faith as much as I have today. Didn't you hit someone with your car once to process my rage. I wrote some complaints I'd like to address to the pope one. No more wokeness. No more. Two, sorry. How many complaints do you have?
Speaker 62: 95.
Speaker 123: I applaud the pope for his courage. To say what his position demands him to say, as a leader of faith, as someone we look up to, to speak through truth to power and to call for a vision of peace, and what we've witnessed is actually two versions of Christianity.
One represented by the Pope, shaped by the ethics of Christ, shaped even by all Testament prophetic tradition that emphasize justice, care for the poor, for the oppressed. And as I said, shaped by the vision, the ethics of Jesus. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are those who are thirsty for righteousness and peace.[00:31:00]
At the other hand, we see another version shaped by Christian nationalism, shaped by even a fascination of returning to the days of the crusades. That by Pete Hegseth, and many Christian Zionists. I'm grateful that, the Pope is bringing back sanity and trying to reclaim, as I said, the ethics of Jesus into this conversation.
Our God is not a God of war, and this is really frightening to have this. War framed, as a religious war, even as a Holy War. Ironically, they accused the Iranian regime of invoking religion into their politics. And now we have the same thing done by, the American, secretary of War. So I'm grateful for, the voice and courage of Pope Leo on this matter.
Speaker 118: Mm. I also wanna ask you about what's happening in Jerusalem on Sunday, Israeli police. Stop the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Palm Sunday to celebrate mass [00:32:00] due due to Israel's ban on gatherings at religious sites during the Iran war. The Latin Patriarchate said it was the first time in centuries that the heads of the church were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday mass at the site, calling the incident a grave precedent.
Following the backlash, prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Latin patriarch would receive full and immediate access to the church. Now, interestingly, I think probably the most powerful response for Netanyahu were the people you refer to as the Christian Zionists, like the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz.
If you can link these two.
Speaker 123: Yes. Well, first of all, we must emphasize that. The actions of Israel stopping, the patriarch from going to the church has nothing to do with safety and security. So let's be clear. They were four leaders going to pray in the church [00:33:00] alone. The church has respected every security measure of attempt for safety, and the number of people allowed to gather.
If Israel is really concerned, they would go to the. Israeli Jewish neighborhoods and stop people from gathering. But let's be clear again. If Israel is concerned for our safety, they would stop the settlers from attacking us in the West Bank. They would not kill us in mass numbers committed genocide, in Gaza, this is about control.
They stop them on the way to the church. They want to emphasize who's in charge of Jerusalem. This is what it's all about. And you mentioned the response of Prime Minister Netanyahu, saying that now he's kind enough to allow us to go and pray on our churches. Do we really need permission? From an occupying authority because let's remember Jerusalem.
Israel does not have, sovereignty over, should not have sovereignty over Jerusalem. It was annexed illegally, and now he comes across as someone who's allowing Christians to worship in the church, go knowing that we have been worshiping here for centuries, uninterrupted, this is what it's [00:34:00] all about.
And I think. The backlash shows sometimes that Israel does some missteps when it comes to its image. They're always concerned about their image, so they've seen the backlash to the extent that even. The biggest cheerleaders, the Christian Zionist, had to interfere. And I find it troubling that only now they come to the defense of Christians, given the great numbers of violations against Christians by Israel that we have articulated, that we have said, Christian Zionists are big danger to our region, at the Bethlem Institute for Peace and Justice.
We do our best to counter that theology because we think it's a theology of war of virus. What's needed at this time, is to reclaim the, teachings of our religions, of our faith that promote justice and peace, not the idea of a tribal God. Of favoritism. So, as much as we were surprised by the comments of, the, ambassador Hakai and Ted Cruz at the same [00:35:00] time.
Let's not kid ourselves. They are not really on the side of Christians, in the Holy Land. This is all about the image, of Israel in the West.
Speaker 118: Your final thoughts as you speak to us from Ramah, from the occupied West Bank in this Holy Week, your trajectory from Christ in the rubble in 2023, and then writing the book about it to finally where we are today with the war on Iran.
Speaker 123: Yeah, sadly, things are not that much better since, I made that sermon. Or wrote the book, let's not, be under the illusion that the war on Gaza has ended, or the genocide has ended. The siege is not, lifted yet. Aid is not entering, people are still suffering as a result of,
ruthless decision makers who have total, no regard, to human, lives. And, on Good Friday, we're reminded of this, idea that Jesus himself became [00:36:00] the victim. Of the violence of empire and religious extremism. And although things will look many times dark, silent, there will be, times in which even we doubt.
Where is God? Jesus himself on the cross, cried, my God, why have you forsaken me? We cannot lose faith that justice will ultimately win. Resurrection is about the victory of life. In these dark moments when millions are. Displaced not from Gaza. Now, now even in Lebanon, are displaced in which we see children pulled from under the rub.
In Iran, we see, more and more, embrace of the culture of death and violence, even celebrating death. More than ever. We need courageous faith leaders to say, what the pope said, that God takes sides with the victims, with the poor, with the marginalized, and that God is looking for. Voices of peace, voices of sanity, voices that elevate human dignity and life above every national [00:37:00] religious ideology.
And I hope this is the message that is preached from pulpits around the globe, in this eastern in which we celebrate life and the resurrection of Jesus.
when this is coming out, it's easy to see this in the context of condemnations, of hexes behavior at the Department of Defense to see this in the context of condemn nations of Iraq.
This is the context to that, right? We are now going back and getting a better sense of where the conflict is coming from and the way that an American threat about the papacy needing to back American military power threats and violence has backfired so much that Pope far from bending to, to their will has taken this as effectively the challenge.
Like I am the I am Christ vicar on birth, I will use my megaphone to tell you exactly what I think of your genocidal campaigns. I. Rarely loved a Pope more than I love having this background effect, which is, which is a threat, which is a fundamental threat to the safety of the papacy. [00:38:00] The response to this being, I I you and what Army, and their response is the America covers is like, I have God.
It's great. This is, this is actually a beautiful moment, you then get little bits and pieces of not only the threat, the military threat aspect. The side comment by some other anonymous US official of Avignon papacy, which is a truly insane thing to bring up in this context, but is why all the medievals are losing their minds.
And then what it means when you have, especially within the context of the Pentagon and how weird the Department of Defense is. Under Pete, he Rain. How you piece this together with all the other parts. So what we have are, are two reports. One coming from the Free Press, one coming from Christopher Hale, letters from Leo.
These have been picked up. They are now all over the place in terms of mainstream media, legacy media and so on. But in those reports there's a mention that an American official, it does not seem, and I'm happy to defer to you here, Thomas, that it was Elbridge Colby my, it was someone else who we don't know yet [00:39:00] mentions the Avignon.
So. We need a decoder ring for that. Why? When you hear that, does that signal a threat to the living Pope Pope Leo? So Avignon, this fascinating moment where for most of the 14th century, the popes who are considered canonical now are no longer in Rome, but in the modern day French city of AV at the time.
It's within the kingdom of a, which is part of the Holy Roman empire. But it's a series of seven French popes who are moved into an area much closer to French power. It comes about because the conflict between Boniface VIII, thei, and Philip IV. BFIs and Philip have fought over papal authority over money over.
Really who's in control of the French church and the assets of the French church. It's a fairly long form fight. There are some excommunications back and forth, and it ends with the fourth sending his agents into Rome where they attack Boniface. They beat him. They imprison him for [00:40:00] three days and then.
They withdraw, but he dies a month later from a fever that is almost assuredly as a result of the kind of beating and abuse and imprisonment. So the threat of an Avignon papacy starts with the idea of a recalcitrant pope who does not acknowledge the temporal authority of the King of France. That the response to this is the, the effectively the beating to death of the Pope.
And afterwards you get the fairly aggressive pressure after the death of the next Pope Benedict XI, you. A King of France who pushes the conclave to elect the Archbishop of Eaux, who's a friend of his as Pope. Clement V, Clement refused to move to Rome in 1309, he moves to the papal enclave at Avignon, and for the next 67 years, it stays there.
We talk about this as the Babylonian captivity of the papacy, which. Maybe hyperbolic, but there is a degree to which you have a specific plate where the King of France has a much more direct hand in the control of the church with armies across the Rome that could be brought [00:41:00] in if they ever needed to.
It's worth mentioning that Clement V is also the guy who bans the, the Knight's Templar. It's like the end of the night's Templar. We all get really weird with like, oh, it was heresy, and were they worshiping demons and are they still around? Like that's all French revolution, fanfiction conspiracy rod, and like people should get offline.
It's also like this is the Pope who as soon as he becomes Pope and the king of friends, like, hey, at that time I was at war with all of my neighbors and I asked to like tax the church. What if we tax the Knight's Templar out of existence too? And the Pope was like, I would like to not die. Sure.
There is an actual there. This is a language of a metric of state capture of the Catholic church. Does it make sense in American context? Absolutely not. These are people who are deeply brain rotted. It is a actual active threat. Let me translate and see if you agree with my, I'm an, I'm your student. I'm, I'm in an oral exam.
I'm, I'm spitting this back to you in office hours. You tell me if this [00:42:00] holds up in like common parlance. The United States in January is trying to get the Pope to come home for the 250th anniversary of the country. The birthday, the Semiquincentennial, the Pope is the first American Pope. He's the only Pope.
Who's ever eaten a, a hot dog at a ball game? At least as a kid, at least as a, an 8-year-old, the only Pope who knows how good corn on the cob taste on 4th of July, and he's like, not gonna happen. Just we're not doing it. And things get worse and worse. He's actually fairly critical starting around the new year in January of the Trump presidency foreign policy.
And it goes from, Hey, Leo, do you wanna come home? Seek a centennial? Maybe we'll get you eating a hot dog. Ball game. I don't know, downtown Chicago. What do you think? To, alright bro, if we need to, we'll capture you, put you in a castle and beat you until you're no longer with us, and then we'll pick our own Pope.
Is that sound like [00:43:00] the weird, bro, culture threat that was made or what? What did I exaggerate? I don't think, here's the thing, I don't think you exaggerate the thing. I don't think anyone said the last part out loud. I think we have to go with like, it'd be a real shame if something happened, happened to you.
Exactly. The, the mafia implication. But that's the only, that is the only difference I would make is that it's the mafia implication. It's like, it's real dangerous in these parts around Avignon, if you know what I mean. Don't you wanna come home for the 4th of July? You, you've been to the south side of Avignon lately.
Hmm. Have you? Yeah. Eats. That's insane. But these are also, these are both deeply unserious people who also just have killed a lot of people in this year. And that's the problem. Right? It's, it's the two parts. It's the stuff that seems like clown fodder, but also you have the death tolls of what are, what the US military is doing all around the world.
Yeah. So like that's the problem. You are going from [00:44:00] the actual Sears per because. Elbridge Colby is as serious you would be regardless of the politics. He, he's a grownup. We have a direct quote from him. The direct quote that we get in these stories is that America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.
The Catholic church had better take its side. That's a very particular argument. And then the account is that one US official, and they don't name which one invokes the AV papacy. So you have one person who's making the very serious argument that. We have the military power to do whatever, which is a threat, but it's also a call for the Catholic Church to align itself with a dominant temporal power, and, and Elbridge Colby is Catholic.
This is not necessarily, and I have not done a deep dive into his life because I don't need to be sad about everything every day. This could be an argument of like, surely my church will support me in this. The other one is then like, sure, surely you wouldn't want an accident to happen at two o'clock on a Friday.
That's, that's the combination. It's the, it's the. Bad cop and cartoonish villain [00:45:00] cop.
We've just heard clips starting with
Democracy Now! contrasting Pope Leo's call for peace with the Christian nationalism used to justify the U.S. war on Iran.
The Holy Post dug into rising Catholic membership numbers and asked whether the growth reflects a hunger for tradition and belonging rather than the right-wing Catholic influencers dominating online conversation.
Going back to the previous Pope, The PBS NewsHour unpacked why Pope Francis, patient for ten years with critical Cardinals, finally stripped them of privileges, framing it as a clash between reform and entrenched church elites.
The Kavernacle explored the strange split among far-right American Catholics who back Pope Leo over Trump on the Iran war despite sharing little of Leo's left-wing politics.
Conspirituality examined J.D. Vance's Vatican visit, where Pope Leo's cool response to a White House dinner invitation framed the tension between the new pope and Trump world.
SWAJ dove into the history of the papacy to explain the bizarre [00:46:00] attempt at a mafia threat against Leo
And Man Carrying Thing satirized a Republican senator's crisis of faith after Pope Leo said "I think war is bad," with the senator vowing to file 95 complaints
And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,
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As for today's topic,
The first [00:48:00] American pope has spent the past year publicly fighting the most Catholic White House in modern history, and the constituency hit hardest by that White House's policies, Latino Catholics, moved harder toward Trump in 2024 than any other group. That's the situation, and the interesting thing is what made it possible.
To get there, you have to start with what neoliberalism did to American working-class life over the last forty years. Unions gutted, wages stagnant relative to productivity, pensions replaced with 401ks, healthcare tied to whether your boss feels like keeping you around, and the civic and religious infrastructure that grew up around stable working-class employment basically dismantled along with the jobs themselves. People are squeezed, and the institutions that used to give working-class life some ballast, like unions, religious communities and the neighborhoods where people actually knew each other, got hollowed out alongside the wages that sustained them. Democrats spent decades [00:49:00] treating that vacuum as background noise, as if people would just absorb the disruption and find new sources of meaning on their own. They didn't, and the vacuum got filled by other things. We're now living with the political consequences of pretending it wouldn't.
In 2024, Trump won 41% of the Latino Catholic vote, the highest share for any Republican presidential candidate in modern polling. Latino working-class families got hammered by inflation, watched a Democratic administration that had passed real economic legislation completely fail to communicate any of it, and noticed that on Gaza, the same administration was funding a campaign that Pope Francis was openly condemning. So, if you're a Catholic voter for whom both economic conditions and the Pope's moral authority matter, the Democratic Party's pitch in 2024 was basically asking you to ignore both.
Now, in this face off with Trump, Pope Leo is practically sounding like a progressive, but he isn't. He's a centrist [00:50:00] within Catholicism, pro-immigrant, anti-war, anti-inequality, broadly aligned with Catholic social teaching on workers' rights. He's also not progressive on women's ordination, LGBTQ inclusion, abortion, or contraception. So, Leo is a coalition partner with real disagreements rather than a fellow traveler and that’s an important framing.
The version of "the left needs to get faith back" that you usually hear is basically a translation argument, where progressives just need to learn to speak Christian-ese so we can pull religious voters back into our camp, but that’s a tough ask for a lot of people with no interest in joining a religion. What we need is better coalition building skills. Many religious people are regular people whose politics already line up with the left on a lot of things. And just as the mainstream left isn’t great at translating ourselves into religious communities, being a religious member of a coalition shouldn't require you [00:51:00] to translate yourself into the dominant cultural register of secular progressivism in order to be heard.
Real coalition-building means a Catholic social teaching tradition, a Black church tradition, a labor tradition, and a secular progressive tradition can all be authentically themselves and pull in the same direction. Pope Leo speaks Catholic social teaching fluently, and he's been making sharper anti-imperial, anti-inequality, pro-immigrant arguments than most elected Democrats have managed in years. The pope is making many of our arguments in his own voice that’s capable of reaching people that we’re not. And Catholic voters whose politics already fit in the Democratic coalition shouldn't have to convert to MSNBC-speak to be treated as full members of a coalition.
So when Pope Leo tells the Trump administration that treating immigrants who've lived here for fifteen or twenty years as criminals is "extremely [00:52:00] disrespectful," and the response from elected Democrats is mostly silence, that's a strategic failure as much as a moral one. Hispanic Catholics outnumber or match white Catholics in the electorate in California, Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. The 2026 midterms run through those states. PRRI's polling shows Trump's approval among Latino Catholics has dropped from 31% to 23% over the last year. So, the opening is real.
What meeting that moment looks like isn't another round of scolding ads about Trump. It looks like showing up in parishes that have been part of these communities for generations, running candidates who don't have to code-switch when they walk into a working-class Latino neighborhood, and backing the immigration position Pope Leo is articulating with actual legislation rather than vibes. It also means understanding the fact that real coalition is uncomfortable, because it requires people who don't share your worldview to be welcomed at the [00:53:00] same table while still being themselves.
The first American pope is saying out loud what a Catholic political tradition has been saying for over a hundred years, and Catholics recognize it because it's theirs. Pope Leo isn't doing anything especially clever or strategic. He's just speaking to people in the language they actually use about issues that matter to them. The Democratic Party should be taking notes.
Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.
And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;
Section A, Trump and Company's Love/Hate Papal Relationship
Followed by Section B, Anti-Catholic Sentiment in America
Section C, The Pope vs The Trump
And Section D, Some Misc. Historical Context
Speaker 106: one of the major theological advisors at the second Vatican Council, a major American Catholic theologian, John Courtney Murray, was, the Kennedy people were soliciting his advice, asking for notes, essentially on this [00:54:00] major speech, a former Commonweal editor, John Cogley, I think was another reader of that speech.
So there's not just like the timing's, not just fortuitous or providential as you might view it, but actually there are links, very particular links in terms of. People that were connected to both, one John's reign, the Pope John his reign, and President Kennedy, his reign. There's actually material, personnel based links between them in very interesting ways as well.
Speaker 105: Yeah, it is a really interesting parallel because Vatican II was, as you said, the Catholic church, the oldest institution in the world, like stepping into the 20th century. And I think the JFK presidency was seen as such as, well, because he was young, because he had young children. 'cause he had this new sensibility, the new frontier.
Speaker 106: He's a little like Zorro in that sense. Like it's a little hard to make the bigoted attack stick because you look at him, right? This handsome guy in Kennedy's case, right? The cute kids running [00:55:00] around in Zorro's case, lovely guy, beautiful wife, et cetera. It's a little hard to make the bigotry stick when that's who you're saying is this odious, nasty person.
It just is a little, I think Kennedy's appearance and the marketing around it and the youthful, yes, new, fresh. This isn't Adlai Stevenson running for the third straight time, right? That merely mattered in terms of shedding, I think, or at least repelling some of the anti Catholicism. But there's a line I wanted to share about.
This in particular that I thought was really interesting, and it was by Peter Steinfels, who's another former editor of Commonweal. And after that, the New York Times Religion reporter for a couple decades. But he published a book in 2003 called A People Adrift, the Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.
But he formulated the Kennedy moment in an interesting way, and I'll just read it. Here's Peter Steinfels. He says, suddenly, between 1960 and 1965, all the residual stress points between Catholicism and America's public ethos [00:56:00] seemed to collapse. The campaign of John F. Kennedy for president had first revealed how much of the old suspicions remained alive, but Kenny's victory rendered all that anachronistic.
The liberating effect on American Catholicism was enormous. And I like that formulation that the Kennedy candidacy at first revealed how much of this bigotry remained. But then once he won, how much it seemed to put that behind us in a way as a country. Now whether, how much that actually happened or not, it's interesting, but that formulation, it's true.
I mean you can look at Eleanor Roosevelt dipping her tone to the water of anti Catholicism a bit. 'cause she wasn't sure Kennedy was a good liberal or good enough liberal. Right. Anti Catholicism was said, oh, this is the last acceptable bigotry. In a way, conservatives like to say that, especially, which it's not true.
Yeah. But like the fact that you could be well into the middle of the 20th century and anti Catholicism be an a live issue in a campaign. Right. That was true. It really was a problem for Kennedy. He worried about, his advisors, worried [00:57:00] about it, and as I mentioned, took him going down to Texas of all places in front of these Baptist preachers and saying, the Pope ain't gonna tell me what to do like that was it.
I think he did have to do that actually. It was his, Obama's, Jeremiah Wright speech.
Speaker 104: Well, I was about to say, the quote you read has such clear echoes of Obama's election in the sense that the most optimistic possible narrative at the time was that the election exposed all the racism that still existed, but his victory.
Transcended that, and officially we are in a post-race America. And much like JFK, he was also young. He also had young kids. The parallels are quite striking just in the sense of the mainstream media narrative. I think there's totally many other differences otherwise, but,
Speaker 105: right.
Speaker 106: And how quickly that narrative collapsed.
Think about it. So Kennedy is assassin, assassinated. He's elected in 1960s, the first Catholic president, 1963. He's assassinated. 1973 is Roe v. Wade. Right. Like, yeah, Catholic says, well, we got this thing [00:58:00] settled, religion, politics, we got it. Everything's fine. And then within a decade right of his assassination, an issue that was seen as a Catholic issue, abortion, right.
Becomes a major, major flashpoint in the culture. Wars were the onset of the culture wars even. Right. And it was suddenly, yeah, maybe assuming there's a little too easy relationship between your Catholicism and secular liberal democracy in the United States, those celebrations were a bit premature.
Speaker 105: We have only had one Catholic president since JFK.
Speaker 106: That's true.
Speaker 105: This is so crazy. And I wanna say, I do not think these two are. Equal comparisons, but we have one more Catholic president than we have had black presidents.
Speaker 104: Yeah, I, I have a friend whose favorite party question is, do you think we will have an Italian American president or a gay president first?
And I'll just leave that, I'll just leave that with the group. I wanna say before we get it, I know we're historically now we're post JFK victory, but before we keep going, I do wanna talk a little bit about. The [00:59:00] election itself and Sure. The Catholic question, 'cause I think the Kennedy's dealings with both the church itself and Catholic groups during the election really have defined the relationship they would have during the rest of the dynasty to this day.
And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the specifics of the anti-Catholic attacks, both from Republicans and Democrats and people running against Kennedy. What did that look like? Because it's the type of prejudice that I think people in our age group didn't grow up with. So it seems very foreign to us.
Like I know there were accusations of him having a dual loyalty, like what were the attacks like at the time?
Speaker 106: Yeah, that's a good point, George. It seems a bit quaint in some ways to haul out arcane theological slurs, and that's, that's your nasty contribution to public discourse. But I think it is essentially a dual loyalty charge that the Pope was, and especially this was more true this.
In the years preceding Kennedy's running for president before the second Vatican [01:00:00] Council where the Pope was considered a monarch of sorts, not just like an authoritarian in a neutral sense of that word, like leader of the church, the decider in the Catholic church, but literally a monarch who had terrestrial power, right?
That the papal states, and then when that was taken away from him, he was holed up prisoner in the Vatican. They called it that period of time until the latter in treaty, which created Vatican City. Right. That's why the Pope is the head of the Vatican City. For decades, he wasn't, he was essentially stuck in the Vatican not knowing what to do.
So he was a monarch in the fullest sense of the word for much of the Catholic church's history, at least in the West and in Europe the past few centuries, millennia, whatever. This was a religion that supposedly didn't believe in liberty of conscience, right? As a Catholic, you couldn't have the same relationship to your faith that certain kinds of Protestants did a freethinking religious liberty.
You can't dictate what someone really believes deep down inside thing. It was the dual lawyer charged that the Pope would essentially the Pope who was the John f [01:01:00] Kennedy's real dictator, right? The real person telling him what to do. He would be taking orders from the Pope, if not literally directly then.
Indirectly in the sense of implementing Catholic teaching or being unbound by it in a certain way. And yeah, so it was, it was a dual loyalty charge that he would be unreliable. That he wouldn't be the liberal. 'cause this is the period of time too when liberals in the Democratic party really are surging, right?
This is post Hubert Humphrey's intervention in the 1948 convention, right? This is, after Adlai Stevenson had already run twice a champion of a certain sort of liberalism as the party is coming around on civil rights and the freedom struggle of African Americans, right? All this is happening, and suddenly the sky as the democratic parties, like embracing its liberalism, this is the guy who has some ties to the old world, stodgy, authoritarian religion that's out of the mainstream of American public life.
It just, it was, I think, not just. Vestigial or lingering anti [01:02:00] Catholicism or the anti Catholicism that prevailed, especially before the Second Vatican Council. It was a Catholic running at this moment, not just in our history, but in the Democratic party's history and where the trends were going in the party at that time.
Its liberalism. It's more progressive and embracing more progressive positions. Kennedy's Catholicism was considered a problem and precisely in relation to that too. And that's why someone like Eleanor Roosevelt wanna mention her, dipping her toes into, I think people eventually just came out and said it.
Yeah, I'm a little suspicious of this guy 'cause he is Catholic. Yeah. And not so many words perhaps, but that was behind so much of it. I'm pretty certain
Speaker 55: it's still amazing to me that we have an American pope.
Speaker 48: Yeah.
Speaker 55: Right. And Trump said he wouldn't be there without me. That could be true. That could very easily be true. I, I'm a Catholic, and when they mm-hmm.
Speaker 48: As am I,
Speaker 55: I did not know that I'm, and. I just felt like that was such a gift when he became the Pope.
I just couldn't believe it. It was like such a, it felt like a really generous show, for the College of Cardinals to, show like, Hey America, but we don't [01:03:00] all think you're like him. And also it's just such a power play, unbel unbelievable power play. Like, Trump thinks he knows how to like, play these political games, but it's like, do not mess with the College of Cardinals management they're doing.
Don't
Speaker 48: play with the Cardinals.
Speaker 55: Totally.
Speaker 48: And,
Speaker 55: and the other thing that like sets a stage for this that I think is, in terms of power building is because after Pope Francis. We had Benedict, it was the, the more conservative, if I can like generalize, just get in trouble for this, but like more conservative popes and then Pope Francis, more liberal pope.
And you thought, okay, are the college of, they were, taken surprise by how active Francis was. Are they gonna swing back? But of course what had happened is a lot of the Cardinals had been replaced by Francis and just like the judiciary in the United States.
Speaker 48: Right.
It was like the inverse of the Federalist Society only.
Speaker 55: Yeah. The Catholic
Speaker 48: church.
Speaker 55: Right, right. Fascinating. But it [01:04:00] is a, it is, it is a little lesson in, in, in power building. And then you see, I, Leo. Didn't seem to want this political fight. Right. And he took a year to get really into it, but now he's so direct and the thing that I found so amazing about, it wasn't necessarily where he said like, I don't fear Trump.
He said that. But when he said somebody asked about truth social, he's like, just look at the title. Ironic, isn't it? So he's speaking really plainly now. Yeah.
Speaker 48: Yeah.
Speaker 55: I don't know. I don't know that it moves Catholic voters that are hardcore Trump voters, but it, it's another, I think anytime there's moral leadership that opposes Trump, it's like another drop that is at that, that I think particularly now in 2026 after Alex Prety, after Renee.
Good. That is meaningful. So I, I don't know that it just, that it means it's isolated to how Catholics feel about Trump. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or that it's gonna move, gonna move, [01:05:00] Catholic voters that support Trump. But it's a, it's a high moral voice coming out to say no.
Speaker 48: Let's talk about the Catholic vote, because I think people, yeah, it's the Catholics in America, not just Alex Wagner and Jen Palmieri.
And I'll say, I wish I went to church more often. Sorry, Pope Leo. But I love, and, and, and, and it really is a, a, a, a true restatement of Catholic values to be so opposed to this war, so opposed to Trump. I think it's a very good move strategically for the Catholic Church, which is rightfully under fire for the sexual abuse that happened for decades and the covering up of that sexual abuse.
But, the Catholic vote in the United States is 20% of American voters, one in five. It's,
Speaker 55: it's amazing. That's a huge, it's making that high. That high. Yeah.
Speaker 48: And they used to split, they're swing voters. They used to split pretty evenly between a Republican or a Democratic presidential candidate, but 56% of them backed Trump in 2024.
These numbers aren't [01:06:00] firm 'cause they're exit poll data. And about 42% com voted for Harris, which I think was like between a 10 and 20 point swing from the previous election with Joe Biden. Right. I agree with you that I don't think the PO the President going after the Pope is gonna be maybe enough to swing all of them back.
Speaker 55: Right,
Speaker 48: right. But you do take into consideration the way the Pope is framing this, this conflict. Yeah. And the one with Trump, which is about a moral question of war. Yeah. It is about the administration's treatment of immigrants and the most vulnerable in our society. And what you have is a suite of arguments in favor of like the basic foundational values of Catholicism and the values in contrast to the values of the Trump administration.
So maybe it's not like the tweets that will get Catholics. Right. But I don't know. Jen, I wonder how you think as a Catholic in the US as a strategist, as a political animal, how the bundling of all these issues. Is a potent mix to move Catholic voters away from a Republican in 2028. [01:07:00]
Speaker 55: The other piece of it is that a lot of those Catholics are Hispanic voters.
Speaker 48: Yes. Hispanic Catholics I think are moving in greater numbers away from Trump. Yeah. Because the deportation rates hit harder. And also the economic pain is very, very real.
Speaker 55: And I saw, I saw recently a, a focus group with, Hispanic voters and it was, most of them are Catholic too. And what was really interesting was one of them said most of them have voted for Trump men, Pennsylvania.
I used to look at the US as bright.
Speaker 58: Hmm.
Speaker 55: And like full of light. And now it feels full. Now it feels very dark. And I wonder like where the bright colored America went, because that's
Speaker 48: devastating.
Speaker 55: Isn't that, isn't that really, isn't that really something that, that, and they said, a lot of 'em said they, how do they felt about, just like, they felt like, but how do you feel about life in America right now?
And they use words like scary, [01:08:00] unsettled, afraid. And, I think, I think that that ice deportations hanging over their lives in a way that maybe sometimes people don't even want to acknowledge because it's too scary. Mm-hmm. Very concerned about Iran and what America was getting into there.
But the, the, but the notion of things being dark, as opposed to moral and light struck me. So I think if you, I think what's more likely to happen is. The fight with Leo, Leo standing up and being a moral voice, the way people who were unexpected stood up to be, moral voices to condemn, the killing of Alex Preti and Renee.
Mm-hmm. Good. I feel like, what are we doing in Iran with no certainty and, no, direct, objective. All of that wears on people and becomes baggage for the [01:09:00] Republican in, in 28. And I think it leaves, in, leaves the demo, it leaves people open to hearing something else from a Democrat that is more, that has a, that has a moral voice, moral authority has, is like, and, and, and, and is willing to.
To share that and, and talk that and inspire people to a, a place that we, where we can go. But it sure does feel like people are worried and are ready for that when they're talking about America. You seem to be bright and now it's all dark and black and white.
Speaker 48: Can I say on that note, I would love it if Democrats and Progressives could find a way to bring religion back into, onto the left.
Not to, not to say let's make the left a religious party or a Christian party for that matter. Right. But to not let the right co-opt the values. I'm speaking as a, as a Christian, as a Catholic, to co-opt the, the, the, the, some of the values of, of Christianity, which, when you look the, the, the rights embrace of [01:10:00] Christianity, and we'll talk about JD Vance in a second, is such an abomination given the clear values that, that that party has.
Established for itself. And in the same way that it's like you don't get to have the flag and you don't get to have the church. You're probably the least patriotic party in the modern era. And you're certainly the least moral. And I think it's, it's okay. And maybe even high time for progressives to say we can be religious and have religious values and also embrace progressivism.
Just like we can feel patriotic about this country, but also in our patriotism find fault where it exists in our institutions.
Speaker 3: Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense. He calls himself Secretary of War. But as I like to remind y'all, that cannot be changed by Executive Fiat. The name of the department remains the Department of Defense, and thus Pete Hegseth remains the Secretary of Defense.
Our Secretary of Defense is doing one of his regular, now religious devotionals at the Pentagon where he. [01:11:00] Calls on the Lord to bless his various murderous campaigns against people in the Caribbean, against Iran, and so on so forth. Bless his love of war crimes, his blood thirstiness, his desire to be some medieval crusader.
And during his latest such worship session, whatever you want to call it, he quotes a Bible verse. He quotes Ezekiel 25:17. Now there is a book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible, and there is an Ezekiel chapter 25 verse 17. It is the conclusion of a story in which the Lord is getting his vengeance on one or another of the groups of enemies of the Israelites.
Typical stuff for the Hebrew Bible. But what Pete Hegseth quotes isn't from the actual Ezekiel 25 17. Pete Hegseth said this. What he said was a prayer given to him by an aviator.
Speaker 4: The path of the downed aviator is [01:12:00] beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of comradery and duty, shepherd the loss through the valley of darkness.
For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon the with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy one, when I lay my vengeance upon me.
Speaker 3: When I was reading that I was really trying to not invoke the rhythms of Samuel L. Jackson's delivery because Samuel Jackson delivers. That San Sands, the aviator stuff in Pulp Fiction. It's a very famous scene from Pulp Fiction, and the [01:13:00] thing about this Ezekiel 25:17 is that it's not in the Bible. In fact, it's Tarantino quoting, as he often does in his films.
Another movie, A movie from the seventies, a movie from the famous Japanese Action Star. Sonny Chiba, which begins with the narration of this constructed, made up Bible verse,
Speaker 5: who poison and destroy my brothers, and they shall know that I am Sheba the bodyguard when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.
Speaker 3: What it isn't. Is, anything, from, the Bible? It's not that at all. I find this very funny. This is very funny to me. That Pete, Seth who went to Princeton, right? Like ostensibly he has some smarts about him, but I think he's made himself and to, I think he's made himself into a Tite. So it's funny that he would c sip this, and it [01:14:00] also gives lie to the ostentatious religiosity, the Christian nationalism of he accept and its fellow travelers.
I failed to mention that at the podium at the Pentagon. He had a Jerusalem cross. He had some crusader slogans. He's, this is really a big part of his personal identity. And it goes without saying, it is an affront to the separation of church and state to the notion that ours is a secular government because it seeks to represent people of many different faith traditions or no faith traditions at all.
And before some commentary is like, well, excuse me, separation of church and state isn't the constitution. The First Amendment prohibition against an establishment of religion is like a clear nod to the idea in circulation at the time, very much part of the proceedings that no, there isn't gonna be any state-sponsored religion, in part because these are people who are not that far for far removed.
Historically speaking from disastrous wars of religion that killed millions of people in Europe, like they. Very much are aware of the past here. They're aware that they're trying [01:15:00] to create a nation full of all kinds of people of different religious beliefs, right? Different Christian denominations, even some Jews, even some Muslims.
They didn't like Catholics too much, but, but that's how it was. They wanted the government to be for everyone. So outta here with it, that nonsense. But beyond it being an Aron to the separation of church and state, it is just a remarkable display of ignorance, remarkable display of ignorance.
And what's been weird about this week, in fact, is that this display of religious ignorance has been like the theme. Of course, at the beginning of the week, president Trump shared an image of him as Jesus blessing some unnamed figure who, to me looks suspiciously like Jeffrey Epstein, but Trump as Jesus blessing some figure.
You have Trump beefing with the Pope. You have JD Vance lecturing the Pope, JD Vance, who just became a Catholic seven years ago, lecturing the actual Pope. This administration, [01:16:00] again, leans on these ostentatious displays of religiosity, but also pumps out foe religious slop. Some of it literally made by AI and shows no particular knowledge or consideration for, or even respect for the religious traditions.
They're constantly referencing it's religion, it's Christian religion in particular as a pure aesthetic, completely disentangled, completely removed from any possible substance, simply a cultural signifier, a tribal signifier. Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary Bo, these big garish crosses while she's justifying any manner of cruelty towards innocent people.
The substance isn't there anymore. It's all tribal signifier. A way of saying you belong in the in group. And of course the principle thing actually connecting you to the ingroup isn't religious belief. It's a political commitment to Trump, [01:17:00] right? It's politics. It's a set of cultural signifiers. And so thus, the Pope who is, Protestants have no particular allegiance to him, of course, but he's still the leader of the Catholic church with, well over a billion followers worldwide.
And most previous heads of state presidents recognize that you gotta, you respect the guy, right? But the Pope. Because he is not submitting to Trump to this cultural identity, to this political allegiance, is now outside of this sphere of concern. He's not really a Christian to these people. And the same goes for Americans.
The Pope isn't American, but the same goes for Americans who belong to any number of Christian traditions, which are non-evangelical, which are not politically conservative, which aren't committed to the Republican party. Thus fall outside the the ingroup. It's something like the end stage of a trend that began over 20 years ago under President George W.
Bush of Christianity as a political and cultural signifier first and foremost, and I'll note [01:18:00] that it's really no accident that in the 25 years since. Bush first entered office. There's been a steady decline in church going and Christian identification, and I don't think it's because Americans are less spiritual or whatnot.
I don't even think it's because Americans no longer want what religion has to offer. I think it's really because of the extreme politicization of Christianity and evangelical Christianity in particular, and how that has come to color so much of American religion. But I'm now just putting my religious sociologist hat on.
Maybe we'll talk about this in a different video for now. Hi, Seth. Dumb guy. Trump blasphemous. And one thing I'm interested to see is if the final stage of all of this of MAGA is something like a religious cult, are we gonna see relics blessed by Trump after his death? Maybe an [01:19:00] AI Trump offering his blessings to whomever hopes to claim the mantle of the Republican party.
That sounds frankly terrifying, but given how these things develop. It, it wouldn't surprise me all too much to see that that is where all of this ultimately leads the Lord.
Speaker 6: When I lay my vengeance upon the.
Speaker: On the night of the 2024 US election, Donald Trump told his supporters that God had saved his life for a reason. Alluding to the assassination attempt on his life a few months earlier. In the latest edition of Too Long, we explore how faith fueled populism from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin has slowly been reshaping modern democracy.
That's just one of 72 pages in the magazine. Because as always, there's more to too long than you'd expect. Purchase your copy by clicking the link in the description. So the key thing to understand here is that while it was hardly [01:20:00] unforeseeable, the reason falling out between the Vatican and the US will nonetheless come as a real disappointment to the Trump administration and the American, right.
More generally, the Trump administration really didn't get on with Leo's predecessor, Pope Francis, who is a relatively outspoken critic of Trump's immigration policies. But were apparently optimistic about engendering better relations with the new Pope. Despite the fact that, as you might remember, Trump was posting AI generated memes of himself as Pope while Leo was being elected.
Anyway, to this end, barely two weeks into the new papacy vice president JD Vance invited Leo to celebrate America's 250th birthday at the White House on July the fourth. 2026. However, and this was probably the first sign, that relations between the White House and the holy seat weren't going to be smooth sailing.
Leo apparently wary of becoming a political PA ahead of the midterms, quickly poured cold water on the idea and delayed his first trip to the US indefinitely. [01:21:00] Instead for July the fourth, the Pope has scheduled a trip to Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island in the Mediterranean that serves as a gateway for migrants coming from North Africa to Europe, and which has seen its fair share of migration related disasters, including the capsizing of a migrant boat in 2013 that led to over 300 deaths.
It's hard not to read Leo's decision to shun the White House for Lampadusa as anything other than appointed criticism of the Trump administration's hardline immigration policies. It's also worth noting here that Leo's first major foreign tour is actually going to be an 11 day trip around Africa, including a number of countries affected by Trump's US aid cuts.
Anyway, things didn't get much better in the second half of 2025. American bishops became increasingly vocal in their criticism of Trump's immigration policies, especially after the widespread deployment of ice towards the end of the year, culminating in a rare special message. From the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, their first in 12 years, and with [01:22:00] overwhelming support amongst the bishops expressing sadness at quote, the vilification of immigrants and advocating for a meaningful reform of our nation's immigration laws and procedures in late September.
Leo himself who'd previously been quite cautious with his own rhetoric, describe Trump's immigration policies as inhuman provoking. What was perhaps the first public spat between the Holy Sea and the Trump administration? When asked about the Pope's comments, white House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back and suggested it was really the Biden administration who had pursued an inhumane immigration policy.
This didn't deter Leo, who came out swinging against Trump's immigration policies again in November, calling for deep reflection on the treatment of migrants in the US, and later claiming that at least some immigrants were being treated, quote in a way that is extremely disrespectful to say the least.
In December, the Pope even took the unusual step of criticizing Trump's foreign policy. When after meeting with Vladimir Zelenskyy Leo said, Trump's remarks about [01:23:00] European leaders being weak. Were trying to break apart what I think needs to be a very important alliance today and in the future. However, relations properly created in January, 2026 after Leo's first annual state of the world address, which was given just a few days after Trump's operation against Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela.
In that speech, Leo made a number of thinly veiled criticisms at Trump's foreign policy warning that a diplomacy that promotes dialogue is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force and lamenting the decline of post-war multilateral institutions like the un. According to that free press report we mentioned in the intro, it was this speech that really drew the ire of the White House with Elbridge Colby hauling the Vatican's then ambassador into the Pentagon, the first recorded visit for a Vatican official to the Pentagon ever for a verbal dressing down.
After this meeting, relations continued to deteriorate at a rapid pace. Only a couple of days later, the head of the [01:24:00] military archdiocese in the US said that it would be morally acceptable for soldiers to disobey an order. After Trump threatened to invade Greenland in February, the Vatican pointedly refused to join Trump's board of peace.
A decision that leave it described as deeply unfortunate. In March, soon after Trump's assault on Iran began, Leo called for dialogue instead of war, and one that God ignores the prayers of leaders who wage war and have hands full of blood and apparent rebuke to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, who prayed for quote, overwhelming violence against America's enemies during a public Christian worship service for military and civilian workers in late March.
More recently, Leo directly condemned Trump's threats about ending an entire civilization as truly unacceptable. So you get the idea relations between the White House and the Holy Sea have truly collapsed. Usually this wouldn't present too much of a political risk to the president. After all, historically America and the Vatican have had a pretty complicated [01:25:00] relationship, but it's more of a risk for Trump, not just because he fared remarkably well with Catholics at the 2024 election.
But also because his administration is dominated by Catholics and has lent heavily into Christian nationalist themes in recent months with Hegseth repeatedly invoking religious rhetoric to justify the war in Iran and Trump himself holding bizarre prayer sessions with evangelical pastors in the White House.
Speaker 67: defense secretary Pete Hegseth had hosted a prayer meeting at the Pentagon. In which he repeated the prayer offered by the commander of the raid that had captured Nicholas Maduro. Here's part of that speech.
Speaker 70: Let Every Round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation, give them wisdom in every decision. Endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be [01:26:00] executed swiftly and without remorse, that evil may be driven back and wicked souls deliver to the eternal damnation prepared for them.
For the wicked F Flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.
Speaker 67: So Leo, whose name of course means lion, responded saying, quote, brothers and sisters, this is our God, Jesus, king of peace, who rejects war whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, even though you make many prayers, I will not listen.
Your hands are full of blood. And then Leo pivots into a full on Liberation Theology Register, which will characterize the rest of his Holy Week appearances quote, as we set our gaze upon him who was crucified for us, we can see a crucified humanity. In his wounds. We see the hurts of so many women and men today.
In his last cry to the Father, we hear the weeping of [01:27:00] those who are crushed, who have no hope, who are sick, and who are alone. Above all, we hear the painful groans of all those who are oppressed by violence and are victims of war. Christ king of peace cries out again from his cross. God is love, have mercy.
Lay down your weapons. Remember that you are brothers and sisters, so that's. Palm Sunday. On Thursday, he's back on Twitter with this extraordinary tweet, which I'll spend some time on. The cross is part of the mission. The imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked.
The poor, imprisoned and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death. Yet, in so doing, he brings a new creation to light. And I'm gonna take some time with this because I think it's extraordinary, but I'll start by saying that every once in a while [01:28:00] something lights up the social channels in a way that shows what people are otherwise hiding.
The number of respondents to and sharers of this tweet in particular, who revealed their post Catholic or. Collapsed Catholic or gutter Catholic selves lighting up was amazing. These are people who never talk about their heritage because it's private and they're suddenly overcome with the need to gesture to point at and wonder.
And my favorite among hundreds of responses, was from Nora Loreto, who's a, an independent leftist journalist here in Canada, who does a lot of great work covering the NDP, but also right-wing extremism. She retweeted the Pope with a quote, tweet. Quote, be right back. I'm just pouring contempt on all my pride and she's remembering a hymn that we all sang on Good Friday quote.
When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count, but loss and pour contempt on all my pride. This is written by the [01:29:00] English non-conformist and father of English Hymnity Isaac Watts, who published it in his hymns and spiritual songs in 1707. But my favorite aspect is that Laredos quote tweet is expressing humility not toward the cross, but towards Leo's capacity to intervene on Twitter, which is a cesspool of pride.
So as to the tweet itself, since Leo the 14th is highly educated in and fond of liberation theology. I read it through a Marxist lens because to my ear, it's a powerful description of the development of liberatory consciousness through contradiction. So he starts by saying the cross is part of the mission, and it's an opening that sets the stage for a meditation on transformative conflict.
So the cross of history can be seen as the symbol of a horizontal flow of events interrupted by vertical revolutions. And also in liberation theology. The cross is the instrument of state torture, which is [01:30:00] ongoing and suffered by all bodies under capitalism, especially those in the global south. Also, I think the meaning of mission here is close to the German, zen or the, the idea that workers in the poor are sent to transform the unjust society.
He goes on the imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within. Come on. I see two braided meanings here. So first, capitalist imperialism always contains the seeds of its own destruction and the form of class conflict. And the crises of inequality. Secondly, the microcosm of this is one's own conscience.
As one contemplates, the ways in which one and everything, one loves are exploited and one can no longer pretend it's okay, one's heart becomes disruptive. The violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. In Christian terms, Leo is likely referring here to, a very old covenant of patriarchal control that's [01:31:00] undone by the innocence of the human child.
But through Marx, we can think about how genocide and immoral war and extreme exploitation of the poor are not only permitted, but encouraged, incentivized, made to seem normal and inevitable. He goes on the poor, imprisoned, and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death. And here I see that the worker must experience her labor as alien, her working conditions as hostile.
Her social relations is transactional. She has to feel the full weight of what capital does to human life, and then things will become clear. Lukacs, said that the worker is both the product of capitalist relations and the only agent of its transformation. And so a dissent into full alienation is the condition for seeing through it.
There's no way out but through, as they said, in and or, and what kind of death are we talking about? In liberation [01:32:00] theology, this is the death of the naive self that thinks it is free, that thinks it is an autonomous individual who owns its labor and enters contracts voluntarily. The self who believes it's a frustrated millionaire or who thinks that power will bless you if you are polite and follow the rules.
In short, it's a self that believes its freedom is real, its suffering is deserved, and its liberation will come individually. And once that false self dies, here's Leo's last line quote. He brings a new creation to light
so Trump had to delete the AI slop icon of himself, but that's not gonna stem the tide. About 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and a large portion of them are Christian Zionists. Catholics were much more split in their vote, roughly 50 50 or 60 40 on partisan affiliation, and that voting block is teetering.
And adding [01:33:00] fuel to the fire. We have far right Catholic converts like Candace Owens, who are actively inflaming the Catholic Evangelical split by framing opposition to Israel as a distinctly Catholic position, while consistently lashing out with antisemitism. JD Vance for his part is trying to quell tensions between Trump and the Pope, but he is also telling the Pope, Hey, you should stick to church stuff.
There are also reports of quiet quitting among Evangelicals and Catholics alike. And what this looks like is, pastors and priests avoiding political sermons, but at the same time helping folks disengage from maga, particularly over images of federal agents arresting immigrants near churches and schools.
The Trump administration's decision to lift bans on ice operations inside churches, jolted a lot of those who supported him back in 2024. So here we are with at least [01:34:00] three deepening freres. First, the Vatican Trump feud over Iran and immigration now personalized through an American Pope. Secondly, a deeper evangelical Catholic theological split over Israel and Christian Zionism.
That. Trumpism has just tried to paper over and third, a grassroots disillusionment among moderately religious voters, horrified by immigration enforcement, atrocities, and really bad memes. So it's all very volatile at the moment. And my personal hope is that the progressive churches throughout the US of whatever denomination are strategizing hard currently to think about how they're gonna provide spaces of welcome for the inevitable flood of refugees that will stream out of this impending Trump MAGA church implosion.
As somebody who's done a lot of journalism on cults and people recovering from cultic dynamics, I know that there's gonna be a lot of people who. Need a place to [01:35:00] land.
Next, Section B, Anti-Catholic Sentiment in America
Speaker 11: obvious fake fraud.
Catholic, JD Vance, who's pretending to be Catholic,
Speaker 10: be careful when talking about theology.
Speaker 11: You don't have to be careful when you talk about childless cat ladies. But you do have to be careful when you're the Pope, and you've spent your entire life. Working to be the Pope.
Speaker 9: You don't have to be careful with your words when you're alleging that certain, residents of a town are eating pets.
You don't have to be careful with your words then. Ooh,
Speaker 11: yeah, of course not.
Speaker 9: Anyway. So the Pope, as he tends to do tweets like war, don't do, war. The everyone needs to not do war. He, he doesn't, he's not like lambasting, the Trump administration saying the United States
Speaker 10: of America. Yeah.
Speaker 9: It's hard to avoid because of the war that.
They just started. But anyway, he, he tweeted, the Pope did. God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the prince of peace is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. [01:36:00] Yeah, so JV pretty good message. JD Vance thinks the Pope is wrong about that.
At a, turning point, USA event which was attended by people,
Speaker 11: Canceled. Erica Kirk had to cancel. Erica Kirk
Speaker 10: had to cancel.
Speaker 11: She felt
Speaker 10: unsafe.
Speaker 11: So Erica Kirk had to cancel due to, security concerns. So instead they got the vice president?
Speaker 9: No, the
Speaker 10: vice president. 'cause she didn't actually cancel.
He
Speaker 11: was already gonna do it.
Speaker 9: He was already gonna be there. He was going to be in conversation with her, her team. They say got like word of some security thing and they said, well, she can't go now. And so the vice president's like, I'll just talk to some other guy there. According, I'm sorry, it's sorry for me gentlemen,
Speaker 11: because
Speaker 10: It's okay.
For, according to Candace Owens, according to Candace Owens, and I didn't listen, this is just, I've, I've osmosis this information according to Candace Owens, that's bullshit. She didn't go 'cause ticket sales were so low.
Speaker 11: A, that I would believe. But Candace Owens, I am pretty sure doesn't [01:37:00] believe in like dinosaurs or like the moon or something.
So I, she
Speaker 9: believes the dinosaurs are here
Speaker 10: now. None of these are sentences I wanna be talking about. I'm just saying to your point. Erica Kirk didn't feel safe, but Okay. The president, vice President of the United States. Oh
Speaker 11: yeah. It, it's so silly. It's,
Speaker 9: it's ridiculous. So, but, so that's funny. Yeah, it's a 8,500 seat, arena.
Maybe 2000 people were there. It was less than a quarter full. It appears. It didn't
Speaker 11: look great.
Speaker 9: It didn't, it didn't
Speaker 11: look great. But,
Speaker 9: and so the vice president is talking with, I'm sorry, some guy, I don't know who, he's asked about the Pope, he can't just say like. The pope's a pope. Of course, the Pope wants peace.
Who wouldn't want peace? Mm. And then move on. He has to defend his boss. Do we wanna watch his? Sure.
Speaker 12: I think it's very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. And I think that one of these issues here is that there has been,
Speaker 11: sorry. Stop, stop, stop. Sorry. Pause, pause, pause.
We're pausing. So
Speaker 9: there's a heckler
Speaker 11: as
Speaker 9: well. That's also
Speaker 11: good. There's a heckler as well, which complicates [01:38:00] things. JD. He is, he is careful about it. He's the pope. It's like this bizarre, this bizarre world where, first of all, JD has apparently appointed himself like arbiter of everybody's behavior.
It's not his role or job. And he like again, is like one year senator and now he's like, I actually should be in charge of telling. Everybody how to act. I'm gonna tell people to say thank you and how they should dress up and how the Pope should talk. It's absurd, but it's like he thinks that like the pope was chosen gives a shit what he says via like lottery.
Like no, he's actually quite studied, in theology and knows what he's talking about because he became the fucking pope. It's not like a random guy. It's somebody who. Wanted to be the pope probably and has like spent his life like studying this specific thing. We're gonna continue, but I just like, it's,
Speaker 10: well, I just wanna [01:39:00] say, I wanna piggyback off of that 'cause it's, blows my mind.
Look, I'm not religious, I'm not Catholic, but I actually do feel offended to a degree about this. The, the audacity of the
Speaker 11: audacity,
Speaker 10: this Rube, who just. Found God, so to speak,
Speaker 11: this fake
Speaker 10: fucking
Speaker 11: Catholic
Speaker 10: piece of shit. Fucking asshole. Like he's out here saying, I would tell the Pope to be careful when talking about theology.
The fuck
Speaker 11: He's dumber than
Speaker 10: dog shit assholes. It's beyond just like beyond. Anyway, that's
Speaker 9: why it's like, it's easy for us to say, it's like he is the pope. You can ignore him if you are. The thing JD Vance is if you are like,
Speaker 10: you're not supposed to ignore the Pope
Speaker 9: a Catholic, right? It's that's the pope you're talking about.
Speaker 10: It's just so condescending.
Speaker 9: All right. He is gonna, he's going to yell at this heckler and then keep going
Speaker 12: is again, hey, random dude screaming. I told you I'd respond to your point. I just wanna respond to this question first. But [01:40:00] I, I think one of the issues here is that if you're going to opine on matters of theology, you've gotta be careful.
You've gotta make sure it's anchored in the truth.
Speaker 11: This weird, like. Stay outta politics. He's just saying war is bad. First of all, he's saying peace is good and blessed be the peacemakers and all that, all that jazz. You talk about religion all the time. You try to bring religion into the political conversation constantly.
Your boss father is likening himself to Jesus Christ. On the regular. So the idea that like, if you're gonna like, be the Pope, don't get into politics. Fucking shut up jd.
Speaker 24: I was very fortunate to be guided here by one by generations, really have wonderful historians who have, especially historians of English Catholics who really devoted a lot of time to understanding what does that mean to be a Catholic, in a Protestant country. And what his have, what I. To be a [01:41:00] Catholic under those conditions means that you have to find a way to translate and transfer some of those essential processes, encounters into a domestic context.
You cannot celebrate the mass in a church with the priest, but you can try to find a way in your own home by either dedicating a room in that house to be the place where you and your family gather on a Sunday. To, you cannot receive communion, at the hands of a priest in that room, in your home on a Sunday.
But you can read together the Catholic missile or, or, prayer book, and you can imagine it's, receiving communion. It's a ma, it's a act of imaginative, reception. And you can try to think about that. There are other people doing this at the same time in their homes that you don't necessarily know personally, but you have a sense that there is a community out there.
So this domestication a ritual. The domestication of the experience of the mass was. The biggest innovation that [01:42:00] colonial Catholics and English Catholics made in this time, and it had really far reaching consequences. For one thing, it meant that women assumed a really central role. Women were in a sense, the priests of the, of the Catholic community, and that they were the ones who gathered the family together.
They were the ones who kept, the. Essential, the, the missiles, and the, and the bread that you might try to pretend is a, is a wafer, and organize these events and presided over these events. And they were the ones who kept the feasting and fasting schedules of the church. So, so two things are happening.
One is that the, the a. Experiences that would take place in a church are taking place now in a home, in a much attenuated, much modified form, but also other rituals that were not centered on the church, become more important. And this is where, for instance, the calendar of feasting and fasting becomes absolutely central to preserving a Catholic identity.
The Catholic, calendar, liturgical calendar is [01:43:00] full. Something like. Two thirds of all days. I may be exaggerating. Two thirds of all days on the Catholic liturgical calendar. Someone is, you are supposed to either fast, fast or feast. By feasting they really mean receiving communion. That's what they mean by feasting.
They don't mean eating an as sumptuous meal. And there are many rules about fasting, but that's the thing that a Catholic household could maintain without fear of exposure, right? No one's peering in at dinner time to see whether you're eating. Meet on a Friday or not. No one's peering in unless you invite neighbors to join you for dinner to see whether on a day of obligation, holy day of obligation, you are as stewing all meals except for one meal, in the middle of the day.
So those are the kinds of rituals that families could continue, and preserve, and be relatively safe from exposure. And again, it meant that that other, that women in particular are stepping up to be the guardians of this faith, in ways that, were not as true, in other communities and other households.[01:44:00]
Speaker 22: Religious identity, of course, is not the only identity that people have. And so you talk about interesting situations where an enslave is Catholic, maybe is okay with their enslaved workers being baptized, maybe marrying, but it, it, it gets complicated, right? Because they're also part of other communities.
Could you talk some about that interplay and how complicated it is?
Speaker 25: Yeah,
Speaker 24: that was something I really spent a lot of time on trying to figure out. It was one of the biggest challenges of this project. It was very important to me to incorporate people who might be considered Catholic, by one measure or one metric into a story that had largely been told.
About a community that was only English and white. So the usual story of colonial Catholicism is that outside of Maryland, one, Catholics aren't, don't, aren't to be found. And two, that those Catholics that are there are very specific community. They are wealthy. White represents Englishmen and women planters [01:45:00] who came and settled in Maryland, the one colony founded by a Catholic proprietor where they could.
Live their lives relatively untouched, untroubled. But it was so important to me to understand that that was not the sum total of the Catholic community. And this was a, a, a bit of a fi a surprise finding for me. I should have known as a colonial historian who'd been studying this field for 30 years.
There were many, many Irish Catholics in the colonies that there were many enslaved African Catholics and many indigenous, converts, in these communities. I think I knew it at some level, but had never really focused on it. So in understanding what it meant to be an enslaved Catholic was something that I really struggled with.
At a certain level, we will never know. Right? We will never know. What did it, what did baptism at the hands of ones enslavers, often under forced conditions mean to an African man or woman laboring in the household of an English planter. Those are, those are questions we, we will never really understand and the answers to, but what?[01:46:00]
Research reminded me was that many of the enslaved Africans who were brought as captives to the English colonies were, in fact, came from areas of of Africa that were in fact Catholic, that had been the Kingdom of Congo, had been a a Catholic country since the 1490s. Angola was a Catholic country at this time, nation at this time.
So there was a whole stream of, of migration, forced migration from Africa into these households that consisted of people who, in their own mind and their own lives would've considered themselves Christians, specifically Catholics. There was also another steady stream of, of captives into English households from various Spanish, French, Portuguese islands in the Caribbean where Africans would, from wherever they part of Africa they had come from, had been forcibly baptized upon their arrival in these colonies, and then sold, either sold into English households, captured by English priers, and then taken into English households, a variety of methods that brought them [01:47:00] into English households.
So really a challenge for me is to think about do we, one, should we even consider someone who has been forcibly baptized against their will under terrible conditions, right of, of duress as Catholics and I tried to keep an open mind without prejudging the issue. I, I think it is fair to say that most Africans who had been forcibly baptized did not consider themselves Catholics.
It was that their baptism was a marker of their enslavement. And it was something that was imposed upon them and it was something that defined them in ways they would never have defined themselves. I think that's absolutely fair to say, but I was really intrigued by the very clear evidence that for at least some of these captives, Catholicism was something that they had embraced at some level.
We have evidence of Africans fleeing South Carolina, fleeing the North American South. Into Florida, which was a Spanish colony, and seeking out a Catholic community to [01:48:00] rejoin, seeking out Catholic marriages for themselves and their and their spouses, seeking out baptism, seeking out the other sacraments of the faith.
So we do know that, at least for some Africans, that there was a sense in which Catholicism was an identity. Took on for themselves under whatever, regardless of the circumstances in which they were first introduced to that faith. And of course, I, I was really intrigued by what it meant to be a, an enslaved Catholic living in the household of, an enslave.
And the English MA manners and plantations in Maryland were the best place to explore that dynamic. The Jesuits, which was the religious society that served the English colonies, the only priests who were allowed really to, to operate at all were themselves slaveholders. So the English, the Jesuit community in Maryland owned hundreds of slaves themselves, and they became, they were they tutored.
Their English followers, English white Catholic [01:49:00] followers, and how to be a Catholic household with enslaved peoples living in it. It was a source of tremendous contradiction, right? The record of Catholic Slave Holding is as brutal as you would expect it to be. There was no attempt to protect families, marital husbands, and wives when it, when it came to selling their property, as they would've put it.
But there was an effort to incorporate enslaved peoples into this, into the sacraments of the household. I found that very intriguing. So baptism and marriage. Interestingly enough was in fact a sacrament that enslaved Africans and and indigenous people had some access to. On the other hand, the bonds of marriage were not respected when financial trouble came and English households decided that for whatever reason they needed to sell their property, they didn't hesitate to separate husbands and wives.
So it's a very mixed record and trying to parse out. How to, how to make [01:50:00] sense of that record was a challenge for me. Should I be more impressed by or more drawn to the evidence that suggested a sacramental fellowship between black and white Christians within these households? Or should I be more impressed by how fragile, whatever the evidence of that spiritual fellowship was when, when life hit?
And to this day, I, I remain conflicted by this and I think it's one that readers will have to make their own choices about. I tried to present the evidence on both sides, the evidence both for fellowship and the evidence for Christian hypocrisy and Christian exploitation. And I think it's going to come down to how you read that evidence.
Speaker 73: let's talk about these anti-Catholic fears for those of us, who were born after, JFK, John F. Kennedy became president. Talk to me a little bit about. The, the fears in this country of, of Catholics. 'cause it just seems amazing to me this fear of a, of a [01:51:00] Catholic takeover takeover by the Vatican of this country If a guy like JFK became president, but, but this is all very real.
Tell me a little bit about this history.
Speaker 78: Yeah. And, and in that moment, 1960 is really a high, long remark of it in a lot of ways, or a culmination of it. It, it often can seem like something 19th century, something really distant. Phrases like papists and, and those very, those, those much more.
Archaic ideas, but as, as recently as, as half a century ago, there was a pretty sustained debate in our mainstream political media, body politics from multiple organizations of the genuine concern on behalf of many of those entities that any Catholic. Including John F. Kennedy, the candidate for president would, would owe a first allegiance not to anything within the United States, not to America, not to the American government or the American people, but to that entity, to that foreign scary place and entity that was [01:52:00] the Vatican and the Pope and the Catholic Church.
And there really was quite a bit of debate, again, on, on every level of our political and social. Conversations in 1960 about that question. Could Kennedy be trusted to answer to America, answer to the American people, or would he always first be a Catholic first, be answering to this foreign body? And so, and that was, as I argue in the piece, the culmination of centuries of such attitudes, but was just as strong, I think in 1960 as it had ever been.
It was just a central park. Of these debates in a serious way and in a widespread way in 1960. So that recently, it was very much a question of whether we could trust Catholic Americans to be a part of our city rather than owe to a different one.
Speaker 73: And, and was there as, as we heard from Ben Carson, recently.
Republican, almost the leading Republican candidate, I guess he's now in, in second place in, in most polls behind Donald Trump, calling for any such candidate who, who, who would be Muslim and who would, who would [01:53:00] want to become president that they must first quote unquote, renounce Islam. Were there similar calls, to President Kennedy, I guess, to candidate Kennedy, before he became president that he must renounce.
The cast Catholic church E Exactly. How did that, how did that play out? In the campaign and in the years leading up to his presidency?
Speaker 78: It were, there definitely were, from. Political parties from churches, evangelical churches from newspapers. There were explicit, statements that such pledges would be needed, that Kennedy would need to pledge his allegiance, adu as if he were not already a part of our society and body politics to, to doubly pledge his allegiance to America rather than to the Vatican or the Catholic church.
And he even did as, as I guess any candidate does have to respond to even the more outrageous. Perspective. He, he responded and, and made the case. This campaign overtly made the case that, that when it came to political decisions, when it came to [01:54:00] national policy, he would be, thinking of America, not thinking of this foreign, perspective that was being defined and feared and, be told his audience, in a 1960, speech, for example, September, 1960 speech
Speaker 79: mm-hmm.
Speaker 78: That it in America, where the separation of church and state is absolute. Where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be a Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote. We know that the latter is not always true, but he was making the case for the former overtly that a Catholic, a cardinal of relay or the Pope would never tell the president how to make policy and he felt the need to, to state that.
So he did in a way even offer up such a, mm-hmm. Pledge of allegiance in response to those fears. So they were certainly there and, and he engaged them as like, if he had to in order to, to be a part of that campaign.
Speaker 73: Yeah, he, he was forced to do that. And, I guess that also parallels what we saw with Barack Obama before he became president.
He had to come out and make a similar speech, a similar, Kennedy esque speech about his own [01:55:00] background and, the, the. The black, liberation church that he had spent so much time in all of those years and he had to put that to rest. But I, I, I, I'm wondering how analogous this all is and the current fear of Muslims, which of course, I think is.
Absolutely ridiculous and absurd. And you cited the story of Ahmed Mohammed. That just, frankly, idiocy, but I wonder still how, how analogous it is. At the time that this nation feared. Catholicism feared a, a proxy takeover of the nation by the, by the Pope via a president. You, you didn't have an extreme, at least to my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Ben Ton, but, you didn't have an extreme, fringe element.
Of the Catholic, religion actually at war with a number of countries. And we do have that in, in Islam, with radical Islam in a number of countries crossing extraordinary [01:56:00] violence. Of course, Catholic, church was involved in its own share of violence over the years. But is it, is it exactly analogous?
In other words, isn't there a. An actual real justified fear that some people may have of Muslims, of of Islam that wasn't really justified when it came to Catholicism.
Speaker 78: I I certainly think any historical comparison, any, any use of history for analysis of the present needs to be able to be nuanced about both things.
Present and to be specific to them and to not try to act as if they ever are, are one to one equivalents. Mm-hmm. I agree with that and, and I certainly in the piece tried briefly to at, to acknowledge those, those differences and, and aspects of our specific moment. So I, so I agree with that and I don't think that it's either or.
I certainly don't think that we should try to pretend again that there's an equivalence that is absolute or that we can ignore present. Realities and situations. But on the other [01:57:00] hand, I would say a couple things. One thing I would say is many of the fears to my mind that are directed at Muslim Americans and Muslim communities are directed at the idea of these communities and their, their customs and their beliefs themselves representing an internal.
That is present here in the us. Which to my mind is a different argument from saying, fighters for ISIS on the ground in Iraq are, at war with, with the entities around them and with mm-hmm. With other nations that are present there.
Speaker 79: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 78: And so I do connect that to, for example, in the piece, I talk about this book written by Harry Beecher's father, Lyman Beecher, where he argued the Jesuit priests in the west of the, continent at the time who were practicing their Jesuit religion were in fact creating past.
Strongholds that were aimed to take over the country and to make Catholicism the law of the land. A,
Speaker 73: a
Speaker 78: papist
Speaker 73: a papist takeover as they called
Speaker 78: it. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And I see that very much like the fears of, building mosques in places like Tennessee or [01:58:00] of building a Muslim. Cultural center in New York City.
The fears that somehow would be active doing that is, is not simply a group of people, a community, embodying parts of their customs and their beliefs and their communal identity, but represents a threat in, and in and of itself, just the existence of these communal practices or these communal spaces.
Mm-hmm. And so I think that would be an example where. Where that part of this particular set imperatives are not to my mind, directed at at radical terrorists or radical fighters in a foreign country. They're directed at an American community and the idea that that community. Practicing its identity is itself a threat is itself doing something that constitutes a internal danger to us.
I think we can think both. I think, we are able to, to see actual threats and external threats and engage with them in, in the ways we should. And also recognize on the other hand that we have this wide variety of communities here as we always have, [01:59:00] and that they are all. Developing their identities within this American setting.
So, so I would say that's one thing is that, we can do both. I think we can think both about our specific present situation and recognize some of these patterns of how we treat communities within the United States as they are, again, embodying their identity, creating their identity, becoming a part of this nation, in their own way, each of them in their own way.
Now, Section C, The Pope vs The Trump
Speaker 7: Leo says, much of the coverage has been commentary on commentary, which is an elegant way of saying that the press and political class have been feeding on their own noise. That is a deeply papal move. The office of Peter is damaged when it starts to look like a permanent rebuttal unit. The Pope who spends his days batting back at the presidential insults starts to look smaller, not larger.
Leo seems to understand this. He's preserving hierarchy, not in the sense of earthly domination. But in the sense of spiritual [02:00:00] order, Trump posts Rans boasts imposes. Leo continues. His pilgrimage continues. His liturgies continues speaking of peace, justice, eternity, and the duties of conscience. He declines the bait, but keeps the principle this matters, especially because Leo is on a major African tour from the 13th to the 23rd of April across Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea.
Vatican and agency reporting describe it as one of the most complex trips of his pontificate so far with four countries, 11 cities. While Reuters notes, his visit spans four countries and 11 locations. He's trying to keep the trip centered on Catholics in Africa, interfaith dialogue inequality, peace building and pastoral presence, not on the vanity storms of Washington.
In his own words, he came to Africa primarily as pastor and head of the Catholic Church to encourage and accompany African Catholics, and this is where Leo's [02:01:00] grace becomes clever. He doesn't retract the truth. In order to avoid conflict, he refuses conflict in order to project, in order to protect the truth.
It's harder anyone with a temper can trade blows. Far fewer people manage the older Christian art of Measured rebuke Leo Rebukes the threat to Iran. Leo Rebukes the idolatry of power. Leo Rebukes tyrants. He doesn't let Trump decide the frame. That is a form of mastery. And secondly, Leo's grace does not mean neutrality.
It means moral seriousness without narcissism. This is the key point some people will hear, not in my interest to debate Trump and assume the Pope is rowing back. He's not the same Pope who now avoids a personalized feud as the Pope who won the 7th of April. Condemned threats against an entire people is truly unacceptable.
He is the Pope whose bender speech on April the 16th declared that the world is being [02:02:00] ravaged by a handful of tyrants and who warned that billions are spent on killing while little is spent on healing education and restoration. These are not the words of retreat. These are the words of a man who thinks war has become morally degraded, spiritually corrupting, and economically predatory.
And Amanda Leo's language was rich and precise. He spoke of masters of War who destroy in a moment what a lifetime cannot rebuild. He spoke of those who rob lands of their resources and invest the profits and weapons creating an endless cycle of destabilization and death. This is larger than Trump. It includes war profiteers, cynical states, regional elites, and all who manipulate religion and patriotism for gain.
So when Leo later says the speech was written two weeks before Trump's remarks, he's not offering an excuse. He's reminding everyone that the church's criticism is older and broader than one American president, and that universality is [02:03:00] important. And I should also add that, Leo is speaking in Africa, having started his pilgrimage at the place where Saint Augustine was raised.
And Saint Augustine is the person who defined the just war in the first place. Whatever JD Vance may want to say about it, Trump wants to personalize everything. Leo Universalizes it. Trump says, you are attacking me. Leo replies. No, I'm speaking about a pattern of sin in the modern world. Trump speaks as though criticism of war is disloyalty to America.
Leo speaks as though criticism of war is loyalty to humanity and to God. And this is why the Pope's position has a certain calm force. He doesn't need to win a news cycle. He needs to keep intact to moral vocabulary, which politics has almost destroyed. There's also a theological dimension. Trump has repeatedly wrapped his [02:04:00] politics in religious imagery and the Jesus like AI figure deepen that tendency into self parody.
Reuters reported that the image showed Trump in a white robe with a glowing hand over a sick man before it was deleted, after backlash. I posted a copy of that picture the other day. A Pope faced with that kind of material has two options. He either enters the carnival, denouncing each grotesque flourish one by one, or he quietly refuses to dignify it while continuing to preach peace, justice, and fraternity.
Leo has chosen that second path that was wise. A ponti shouldn't be reduced to the critic of memes, and yet Leo has not hidden. On the 18th of April, he said that he would continue preaching peace. That's today. Earlier he said that he had no fear of the Trump administration and would keep speaking out loudly against war.
So the pattern is plain. [02:05:00] He doesn't fear Trump. He doesn't chase Trump. He doesn't flatter Trump. He doesn't live inside Trump's orbit, he speaks, then moves on. That is grace with a backbone. Thirdly, and finally, this episode shows why Leo may prove more formidable than Trump expects. Trump's instinct is always the same.
He assumes public authority works by dominance, humiliation, and narrative capture. If he attacks hard enough, he expects one of two outcomes, either the target submits, which flatters him or the target lashes back, which gives him fresh material. Leo has offered neither. He has not submitted. He's not lashed back.
He has done something more irritating for Trump. He has placed the president below the level of the papal mission, and that is why this feels like grace, but also like judgment. Leo is in effect saying that the office he holds is too serious for this sort of circus. He's not too frightened to reply. He's too occupied to perform.
That [02:06:00] distinction matters. Trump's own conduct has made the contrast sharper. His attack on Maloney over her defense of the Pope widened the dispute beyond Washington and Rome and, Maloney called Trump's comments on Pope Leo unacceptable. And Trump then lashed out at her as well. So the president has matter, has managed in a matter of days de Quora with the Pope and with one of Europe's leaders most disposed to work with him.
That isn't strength, that is self-indulgence and stupidity. Lu by contrast, has looked larger because he has looked less needy. He praises Cameroon's welcome. He meets Imams. He speaks of Saint Augustine African wealth and the unequal distribution of that wealth. He denounces war extraction and false peace.
He carries on with the work. Trump keeps trying to turn the weak into a feud. Leo keeps turning the weak back into a pilgrimage in political terms, that is [02:07:00] message discipline. In ecclesial terms, it is fidelity to office, there is to a deeper lesson for the church. Modern politics, rewards speed, vanity, and instant retaliation.
Christianity at its best offers another grammar, patience, witness restraint, truthfulness, and the refusal to worship force. Leo has not been passive. He has named Evil, named War, named Tyranny, named Injustice. But he has done so without accepting the degrading terms of modern political showmanship. That is what gives his intervention weight.
He's not louder than Trump. He's steadier. He's saner. So the Pope's grace to Trump is not indulgence. It is not weakness. It is not an apology. It is a deliberate act of superiority, moral superiority, institutional superiority, and in some sense psychological superiority. Leo is [02:08:00] granting Trump something.
Trump has not earned the chance to be treated as a personal enemy, but he is also withholding what Trump wants most, an equal competent on the world stage. The Pope has condemned the threat. To Iran. He has condemned the waste and the cruelty of war. He has spoken of tyrants. He has kept faith with the gospel of peace.
Yet he's also refused to become a character in Trump's drama, and that I think is the heart of it. Trump wanted to fight. Leo has offered a rebuke, a prayer and then distance, and in the present climate that counts as grace. I think it also counts as power.
Speaker 90: talk about. How Catholics were, were, introduced into the United States, during like the settling period of the nation prior to, prior to the revolution. [02:09:00]
Speaker 91: Absolutely. So Catholics enter what would become the United States through, a, a number of different empires, right?
The, the French Empire, in northern New England, mainly in Canada, but in including parts of what would become the United States, the Spanish Empire, right? The Southwest California. But also, and I think this is what most surprises people, in, in parts of the 13 colonies. Where they mainly met went was Maryland, which was founded in great measure as a refuge for, for Catholics.
The, the Calverts who were a convert family, chartered the colony. So there are Catholics in Maryland from the very beginning. They lose control of the colony fairly early on politically, but they're always socially and economically powerful there. And in fact, part of that tradition was a fairly, tolerant, plural approach [02:10:00] to religions, because Catholics in that context understood that they were not going to successfully be a state religion.
And so work to create a colony in which, a variety of forms of Christianity, right? Not all religions, but forms of Christianity could find a home. So they, they are there from the beginning. They actually participate in great numbers in the revolution. If you, if you wanna move ahead to the American Revolution, Catholics in Maryland, and by that point, they'd moved into Pennsylvania, parts of what would become Kentucky and so forth tended to favor the cause of independence.
Speaker 90: WW was there a, a hostility, towards Catholics? I know in New England in particular, the Pope's Day, November 5th. Yeah, the anniversary of Guy Fox, what they would call Guy Fox Day. Talk a, so in New England. We think of the pilgrims, we think of John Winthrop. We, we think of the Massachusetts Bay, colony, Congregationalists, this really [02:11:00] Puritan, part of the country.
They didn't like the Catholics. Right,
Speaker 91: right. No, Catholics were, everything that the British, did not want to be, did not really want to have in their territory. It was this remarkable antithesis, of everything British and that, that transferred to, to the colonists, to most of the colonists who were, as you absolutely correctly, point out, overwhelmingly Protestant.
So Catholics were. Thought to, lack the independence of mind, that, British, people considered an element of, of Britishness. They were thought to follow their priests through their pope, and that not only made them not good individuals in this view, but it also made them unpatriotic because the argument went that their first loyalty was always to, this guy in Rome, not, not to whomever their, their [02:12:00] leader was.
And so this is a political argument. It's a spiritual argument that Catholics do not have an individual relationship to God, but only an individual through clergy. And it's also very much a geopolitical argument. So that Catholics were thought to be this potential fifth column that who would align with the French or the Spanish, or really anyone who came by who was, who was speaking to harm British interests.
Speaker 90: And, and, and it didn't help in that part of the. Of, of the country because you had, Canada was French Canadian. Yeah. And it was, it was not far away. It was only hours away from Massachusetts, so
Speaker 91: it was not, yeah, it was not far away. And it came closer, in raids. Right. This is, this is not simply an imagined threat.
There, there, there actually were French alliances with indigenous peoples, in wartime. And sometimes there were, there were [02:13:00] raids on, new England colonies. So, so there, there was a real component to what was also a, a set of cultural attitudes.
Speaker 90: I would have to, recommend to our listeners, John demos, the unredeemed captive.
If you wanna get an idea of the tension between Catholics and Protestants and this time in American history, that, that, that is a great historical narrative to go to. So let me ask you about Pope's Day. I, I love telling my friends about Pope's Day because, me and my son, we go out and we play, we shoot basketball, we play horse, right?
Or, or, or, or we try to play go fish, me and my kids and my wife. But on Pope Day in New England, the kids played a game called Break the Pope's Neck.
So maybe just as a way to, emphasize this host, this Protestant Catholic hostility, maybe tell our listeners a little bit [02:14:00] about the, what would happen in Boston on November 5th before the American Revolution In the years, prior, yeah. AB yeah,
Speaker 91: absolutely. And so the, the reference was to this effort to blow up the British Parliament, which had failed and was connected to, what the British felt very strongly was a a, a broad Catholic conspiracy.
So Pope Day is the annual celebration of that failure and of the fact that the British were not Catholic. In addition to these children's games, adults would, make effigies of the pope, pope puppets, and march them through the streets, burn them publicly. There would be all kinds of toasts, some of them rude.
And after you do enough toasts, everything is rude, right? Again, attacking the papacy and attacking Catholics and this, this went forward, through the revolutionary period. George Washington, as I recall, actually was uneasy about these celebrations during the revolution, right?
Because when you're fighting a war, you do not [02:15:00] want denominational divisions, among your troops and. Washington in, in general, made a point throughout his career, also as statesmen of reaching out to the Catholic communities. But this was, this was absolutely part of the fabric of, of British life and of life, of life in the colonies.
If you were British, you were not Catholic, you did, make fun of the Pope burn the Pope in effigy. That was, that was just absolutely unquestioned.
Speaker 30: we also looked at the anti-abortion movement. How it has its intellectual, but not quite. Its activist roots in Catholicism because US Protestants and evangelicals didn't take it up as an issue prior to the enactment of a lot of the civil rights statutes that took away Stax tax status privileges for their non-integrated Bible colleges in the 1970s.
And at that point, US event [02:16:00] Evangelicals had to find a political cause that would reestablish their power but not appear to be racist. They needed this other issue. And saving fetuses was an obvious choice. They turned to the Catholics for the moral and theological arguments that they needed about, you know, when does life start and the status of the woman's body.
The Protestants really weren't interested in any of that. They didn't have that sort of hammered out, and this forged an alliance where previously enmity towards Catholics was so severe that it was like a big obstacle to the presidential bid of JFK.
Speaker 31: My enemy's enemy is my friend. I got really fascinated with Opus Dei, which is this deliberately secretive and Machiavellian association founded in Spain from within the Catholic Church in 1928 by this priest named José MarÃa Escrivá, who claims as many people do, to have been guided by a vision from God.
It has had an absolutely shameful alliance with the fascist government under Francisco Franco, who ruled for 36 years [02:17:00] and Opus Die Opus Day, excuse me, amassed extraordinary wealth and power via its strategy of recruiting very rich and influential members through this sort of multi-tiered organization where some are priests and some are laypeople and, and some live together in these, in these dormitories under very sort of austere conditions, and others are out in the world making money and donating tons to Opus Dei.
They're estimated to be worth $3 billion and they've had this uneasy but largely conciliatory relationship with the Vatican.
Speaker 30: Yeah.
Speaker 31: Their founder, Escriva, who I mentioned was even canonized as a saint by John Paul II. Politically, the group has very reactionary conservative puritanical policies and practices according to the reporting of Gareth Gore, who's this journalist who wrote, in some ways the Definitive Expose book, which is controversial about them, but they've been accused by him of enacting cult-like demands and controls over members.
They have been charged legally with human trafficking and labor practices that verge on [02:18:00] slavery. In terms of our current American political landscape, though, what's interesting is that several prominent figures are actually involved or alleged to secretly be involved with Opus Day through actually some pretty reasonable educated guesswork.
These include former Heritage Foundation President and Project 2025 Architect. Wouldn't you know it, Kevin Roberts former Ag Bill Barr. Uh, Supreme Court alumni Scalia and Thomas and Alito, and the man who is himself behind the conservative Catholic takeover of the Supreme Court, Leonard Leo. This is all consistent with Gareth Gore's book about the group characterizing them as seeking totalizing worldly power for their particular religious ideology.
The group has publicly refuted Gore's bombshell reporting, but he stands his ground on it. Now, Benedict XVI was very supportive of Opus Dei, but then perhaps surprisingly so too, was Francis. He even said about Jose. José MarÃa [02:19:00] Escrivá the founder, that he was a precursor to Vatican two, due to how his organization called non-Res into a life of sanctity.
And Francis would go on to Canonize Rivas successor, a man named Alvaro del Portillo. But there are some complexities here because he's also made some changes to Canon law in 2023 that seemed to be designed to limit Opus Dei's power.
Speaker 30: Yeah.
Speaker 31: So now Pope Leo, following on from some of Francis' recommendations seems set to go a step further.
Speaker 30: Well, they're more than recommendations. They were, they were ordered changes to Canon law that actually would take away Opus Dei or to to, to, um, name its own bishops. It was gonna put all of the administrative and financial sort of oversight, uh. Over Opus Dei and shunt that all to the Vatican, which is significant.
And you know, we're gonna talk about the money in a moment, but Yeah. You know, just reviewing that this is an organization that's [02:20:00] estimated to be worth $3 billion. That's one fifth of the estimated asset holdings of the Vatican itself. If, yeah, the Vatican is estimated to be worth 10 to $15 billion, there's a thing about like priceless artifacts mm-hmm.
That we'll get into in a moment. But like, uh, you can see what kind of line these people have to walk with. Not only this very sort of. Conservative, uh, and reactionary organization, but this very wealthy and politically connected organization that could very easily, uh, become a parallel church, right?
Speaker 32: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 30: So last in our, our list of Catholic threads is, is a more sort of, um, I, I guess, frayed thread, which is that every other man flu out there is getting baptized these days and talking about the Latin mass and mobilizing theological arguments of against birth control and why women should stay at home.
There is an intense level of manosphere, fetishizing of [02:21:00] trica ideology being used to justify misogynistic backlash, uh, against feminism and to construct these romantic and fascist visions of authority. When these guys really get agitated, they rehash the Satanic panic themes with their own versions of Q Anon and they, they elevate their own MAGA style Pope figures like Bishop Strickland to oppose the woke corruption of the Francis Church.
Now we have the arrival of Pope Bob, uh, and the world I think is going to get exposed to. A slightly different side of Catholic modernity that Francis started to pull the veil back on. Now his choice of the name Leo the 14th has implications that, you know, we'll get into in a bit. But overall, his arrival, I would say, is a break from the fairly cursed lineage that we've so far been [02:22:00] chewing on on this podcast.
He does not come out of the Satanic panic. He is not strongly linked with anti-abortion and activism that way. He is anti-abortion. But this is a standard position. This is not his, this is not the thing that he rides or dies on. Uh, he has nothing to do that we've seen so far with Opus Dei uh, he's formed by monastic community and experience and, and then on the ground ministry in the global south with some political activism under his belt as well.
So I think he's giving people exposure to a different. Church on one hand, like a futuristic and aspirational non-European movement that's marked by its receptivity to post Vatican II radicalism, as radical as it can be. But on the other hand, he's also through his name choice. He's referring back to a church of the late 19th century that realized that massive political and economic [02:23:00] changes were reshaping what it meant to be human through the industrial revolution.
And so, you know, at that point, Leo the 13th has this choice about becoming either more politicized through his church leadership or more cloistered in response to this. Set of conditions. And the 13th Leo headed up a politicized Catholic response to unbridled colonial capitalism on one side, and also positioned himself as resisting communist materialism and atheism on the other.
And through that sort of third way passage, he is seen to have inspired a lineage of left-leaning socialists, sometimes even Marxist Catholics from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers Party to Daniel Berrigan and the anti-Vietnam War movement. You know, these figures who had pretty outsized impacts here in the us.
Speaker 31: So you're suggesting that his, his choice of name telegraphs. At [02:24:00] least some of this in terms of his, his affinity for this figure
Speaker 30: 100%, like Leo the 13th is said to be the father of Catholic social teaching. Mm-hmm. Uh, which is part of its modernization move, uh, at the, at the end of the 19th century.
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Speaker 43: do you think it's true that Donald Trump was watching 60 minutes and that's what, 'cause it was around that time and he may well have been catching, watching catch up.
Speaker 44: It may have, it may have had something to do with that. I also noticed that he mentioned David Axelrod.
Speaker 43: Yes.
Speaker 44: You know, Obama's Chicago fixer.
Speaker 43: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 44: And I think the fact that the Pope, for reasons that nobody can quite work out, made time in his diary to see Axelrod at this time of, you know, heightened sensitivity, clearly infuriated Trump.
Because one of the things he mentioned in his quite extraordinary truth, social. Post. And if I could just mention that [02:25:00] just this morning the Pope was on the, on the papal plane on either on the way to or back from Algeria. And uh, he just made a joke to, you know, they call it truth social, said the Pope Guffawing.
Speaker 43: It is a very strange name actually. Uh, the more you think about it. But I, I think there was, there's a lot of things going on here. One is this sense among a lot of Republicans, not just Trump, not even just pro-Trump Republicans, that there is a sort of democratic. Stop going on to peel off. Catholic voters who voted the majority of Catholic voters voted for Trump in the presidential elections at the midterms coming up.
There's a lot of disgruntlement about the economy, about the Iran more and so on. Particularly among that swing group of voters that is Catholic voters, I realized the American Catholic vote is very complicated to talk about, but it is, does seem that there is some sort of, there are democratic maneuvers, which is why Axelrod would've reached out to meet the Pope to try and get the Pope on side or get the Catholic church on side.[02:26:00]
The build up to the midterms and that's generated this angry reaction.
Speaker 44: It's possible. It sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory to me. The Pope has never been particularly associated with the Democratic party. I think I'm right in saying he was a registered Republican and we know that his older brother Louis, who was very flatteringly mentioned by the president, is, uh, paid up maga or was at least until the president attacked his brother of the Pope.
I think the, um, the operation to peel off. Catholic Republican voters seems to have been led by one Donald J. Trump because his, his tweet was really perfectly designed to alienate those, uh, Catholic voters who were never maga, but you know, automatically voted Republicans simply because they were so horrified by the, you know, the wokeness of the Democratic agenda.
And clearly there's a danger for Trump. You would've thought he would see it coming would be that they, you know, they'll sit on their hands in November, not that they'll vote Democrat, they just won't turn up. 'cause [02:27:00] they'll remember the insult to the Pope and it was insulting to the Pope.
Speaker 43: Mm-hmm. Well, let's get onto how insulting was to Pope Stoke.
But then as you say in your piece, he then decided to potentially, Trump then decided to potentially offend Protestants too by posting this picture of himself very obviously as Jesus.
Speaker 45: Yes.
Speaker 43: Um, and then saying completely, uh, unashamedly. Just obviously lying that this is not an image of Jesus. This is me as a doctor, and nobody can believe that unless Trump is so capable of self-deception, because of the power of positive thinking or whatever it is, that he can actually convince himself that yes, he, he, he just thought he was a doctor.
Speaker 44: Well, I think he put your finger on something there. The power of positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale's Church was attended by Trump. And, you know, years before that by Richard Nixon, very much a, a message beautifully tailored to, you know, um, Republican business. Tycoons and politicians. [02:28:00] Also don't forget that Trump has appointed as his spiritual advisor, the appalling Reverend Paula White, who represents the Prosperity Gospel in its.
Crudest form. And who has been telling the president that he, you know, he has been chosen by Jesus to do this and that he is being persecuted much as Jesus was persecuted. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 46: And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused.
It's a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn't end there for him and it didn't end there for you.
Speaker 44: It's probably not difficult to plant that particular sort of thought in the president's head, and it seems to have worked
Speaker 43: well.
Let's
Speaker 44: talk or not work. Shall we say
Speaker 43: a bit more about Norman Vincent Peale?
stuff because it does seem that it is Trump's [02:29:00] religion and it, it has absorbed an element of Christianity at some stage. Paula White or Paula White Cain, which she sometimes called. Uh, she seems to be a kind of semi positive thinker. Televangelist,
Speaker 44: absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 43: Um, uh, slightly prosperity gospel.
Speaker 44: Oh, more than slightly prosperity gospel in flagrantly prosperity Gospel.
Speaker 43: As in you pray hard enough, you riches will come to you.
Speaker 44: Yes.
Speaker 43: And that's very much what. Trump thinks, you know, if you're positive enough, if you refuse to back down on everything, riches will come to you.
Speaker 44: Yes. I'm not sure that praying is a particularly important part of his modus operandi, but nonetheless, you know, if you have to be, if you have to pray for anything, then praying for money probably makes sense to him.
Speaker 43: Yes.
Speaker 44: Um, she's, I mean, she really is an absolutely dreadful figure and how he managed to choose her as his spiritual advisor. I do not know.
Speaker 43: He does seem to have, have a, had a sort of spiritual moment after the attempted assassination. Uh,
Speaker 44: where, but they, they go back, they go back years and years and years.
Paula White and [02:30:00] the president, I think she has, I, I know a similar role in the, in the first Trump administration.
Speaker 43: You, you are actually right, but I'm saying sort of Trump's spiritual journey. I think he has. Certainly he went through the sort of straight, and some of his advisors were quite worried that he'd become too good and placid, and he was saying kind things about his enemies and things like that, and they thought, what's going on with Donald Trump?
Speaker 44: He has allayed those fears.
Speaker 43: He has allayed his fears very successfully. But he thought that God, and he said so in his inauguration, God saved me to make America great again.
Speaker 47: Just a few months ago in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason.
I was saved by God to make America great again.
Speaker 43: And this is certainly what Paul White is feeding him all the time. And if enough people tell you that, if I was to tell you, Damien, that you know God had [02:31:00] chosen you to come on my Americano podcast. Then you would eventually feel that, uh, that maybe he had, if enough people said it to you?
Speaker 44: Well, you know, feel free to try the experiment is all I can say.
I think what one of the things that doesn't delight me, but d amuses me about this horrible sort of train wreck of a situation is that you have the president whose ideas about theology are rudimentary, shall we say, and, and whose advisor is Paula White. And then you have the vice president, JD Vance.
Influenced by, you know, the, the cleverest Dominicans in America converted in 2019, so powerfully affected by the writings of Saint Augustine that he presented the the City of God. And another book, I forget which it was to the Pope. When he met him, I would've thought the Pope having been head of the Augustinian order, could say, thanks, I've already got it.
I already read that one. But the theological sophistication [02:32:00] of JD Vance has, I think, bitten him in the ass, as it were. Mm-hmm. Somewhat. Um, because he thought, so my contacts told me. That he had the specialist theological knowledge to manage the relationship the of the second Trump administration with the Vatican.
But in fact, things had already got off to a bad start before Leah was elected because Leah had clashed with him on Twitter over basically his interpretation of the ot of and of, and of Saint Augustine. Then there's this meeting, uh, news of which was leaked last week that there had been. A very, um, free and frank exchange of views at a meeting in the Pentagon between various officials and the Popes now retired Ambassador Annun to the United States Cardinal Christophe Pierre.
And, um, it, it was that moment that it became, you know, the whispers that have been circulating for months. You know, were generally recognized to be true that [02:33:00] relations have been steadily deteriorating between the White House. And the, um, Vatican, even before the Iran venture, and the, perhaps the main reason for this was the Don Doctrine because.
Could remember that after the disaster of Francis Pontificate, it was generally accepted that they, you know, the Catholic church wouldn't have a, another Latin American Pope. But it kind of has, because Leo has spent, you know, actually a majority, I think of his, his, um, career as a, as a priest in Peru. He is now a citizen of Peru.
He particularly objects to the idea of United States, exercising, you know, economic and political, he over the Western hemisphere and that, you know, the, the knowledge that he would oppose. That was probably one of the reasons that the Latin American bishops as a lobby pushed him so hard and very successfully in the conclave of last year.
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 43: Well, that's, I mean, that's why I wanted to go back to what Trump actually [02:34:00] said in his rant. He said that if it weren't for me. Being in the White House, he wouldn't be in the Vatican, meaning Pope wouldn't be there. And that's like as Trump, you know, everything Trump says. Shocking. Vulgar, probably true.
Speaker 38: Living out the Pope's words might be difficult, but reading them, it's pretty easy. In chapter one, polio sets the stage with what he calls essential words, laying the foundation for a discussion on poverty in the church, which naturally begins with love, it is Jesus who loves the poor and loves those who love the poor.
Even the smallest acts of kindness to the downtrodden do not go unnoticed by him. Unfortunately, our world has and continues to mistreat people forcing the poor to cry out to God for help. It is those who hear their cry and respond to it, not only serving the poor, but changing cultural mentalities that lead to poverty.
Who will be close to God in this opening chapter, Pope Leo exhorts us to not let our guard down when it comes to poverty. That we must be aware of new forms of emerging poverty and resist false ideologies that suggest that people are poor because of chance, or blind and cruel fate. The poor [02:35:00] exists, at least in part.
Because the wisdom of the world that does not cherish them as God does. Lest we make the same serious mistakes, we must go back and reread scripture to see how God treats them. In chapter two, pop Leo offers a brief but sweeping look at how God relates to the poor throughout scripture In the Old Testament, for instance, God uses the prophets to denounce the injustices committed against the weakest and exhorts Israel to renew its worship from within.
Because one cannot pray and offer sacrifice while oppressing the weakest and poorest, particularly in Amos and Isaiah, he points out. We hear of a God who hears the cries of the poor and inflicts punishment on those who cause them to cry. This is of course, because God has chosen the poor as his own going as far as to identify with them in his own human experience as Pope Leo reminds us, God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, not as a rich king in a palace, but as a carpenter.
Someone who was rejected, excluded, and died and outcast. He preached good news to the poor and the beatitudes and exhorted his followers to always care for them. In fact, in one of his final discourses, he told them that when they care for the [02:36:00] poor, they do so for him and that those who neglect the poor will be condemned, not exactly a passage to take lightly.
St. Paul builds upon these teachings in his own writings, helping the early church understand that those who show generosity to the poor do so, not only for the benefit of those with little but for themselves as well, stating that God loves a cheerful giver. And so it was because of this, that the first communities of Christians were known above all, not for their liturgies or their theological treatises.
But for how they treated the poor. A commitment that has defined the church ever since. Thus, in chapter three, a Church for the Poor Polio moves beyond Scripture to highlight the many works of charity the church has exhibited throughout its history in all its varied forms. For instance, in the early church, there was a clear link between martyrdom and the poor, as witnessed by St.
Lawrence, Polycarp, and St. Justin, all men who gave up their lives defending the poor. People like St. John Chrysostom made sure that the church's worship was always tied to the life of the poor. Famously admonishing his people that if the faithful do not encounter Christ in the poor, who stand at the door, they will not be able to worship him at the altar, [02:37:00] and that the church must feed the hungry first and only afterward adorn the altar with what remains taking seriously the words of the prophets.
The early church understood that charity was a requirement for true worship. Of course, poverty involves much more than just the lack of money, and so throughout the history of the church. Faithful Christians have served the poor in a variety of ways, such as the early monks who welcomed outcasts into their community.
The Daughters of Charity, the Hospital Sisters, and Little Sisters of Divine Providence, among others who founded hospitals and cared for the sick orders like the Trinitarians who worked to free people from prisons and slavery, the mendicant orders who challenged both clerical, opulence, and the coldness of urban society.
St. Joseph Calasanz, the Marists, and others who founded free schools to offer education for all, regardless of wealth. And those like St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, who dedicated their lives to accompany migrants, welcoming, protecting, promoting, and integrating those living in a foreign land. From the very beginnings of our faith, until today, Christians have been known by how we care for the poor and vulnerable, providing charity to those in need.
But as Pope Leo points out in chapter four. The Gospel compels us to [02:38:00] do more than just charity. We must seek justice as well. In chapter four, a History that continues, the Pope picks up our story in the late 19th century when a new focus begins to emerge, rather than just seeking to help the poor, the church started to ask why the poor were poor in the first place, and what needed to change in our world to ensure an equitable society.
This concept called social justice. Is encapsulated in Catholic social teaching and began with the Pope's namesake Pope Leo the 13th from 1891. Until today, popes have been looking into the signs of the times and asking the question, how does our society reflect the values of the gospel when they're at odds?
The Pope's call for change, such as in Rerum Novarum, the first social encyclical in which Leo XIII called for safe working conditions and a just social order in Mater et Magistra St. John XXIII advocated that rich countries could not remain indifferent to the suffering resulted from poverty around the world.
They were obligated to do something about it. The church at the Second Vatican Council identified itself as the church of all. In particular, the Church of the Poor [02:39:00] reaffirming the universal destination of goods God destined the Earth and all it contains for all people. Justice tempered by Charity John Paul II continued in this tradition tackling issues related to the progress of peoples and dignity of laborers.
And more recently, Benedict XVI advocated for the more equitable distribution of goods and the preferential option for the poor. Building upon the work of his predecessors, pop. Leo concludes the chapter with a number of profound and desperately needed exhortations. First, that we need to consider marginalized communities as subjects capable of creating their own culture rather than objects of charity on the part of others.
The poor are not, therefore, our benefits, and they're not entirely dependent on us. They have agency and worth in themselves. Second, their experience of poverty gives them the ability to recognize aspects of reality that others cannot see. For this reason, society needs to listen to them. Not only are they subjects capable of determining their own lives, but their very experience of poverty provides them with insights into the world that most others will never know.
While [02:40:00] lacking in wealth, they're rich in other things. Leading ultimately to this crescendo drawn from Pope Francis. In light of this, it is evident that all of us must let ourselves be evangelized by the poor and acknowledge the mysterious wisdom, which God wishes to share with us through them as rich and as educated as we may be.
It is not the poor who always need to learn from us, but often we who need them to understand God because God has identified with them. We must identify with them as well if we want to be with God. For polio, it is only in our closeness to the complaints of those who suffer hearing their cries and experiencing them ourselves.
That we can accept the challenge God has for us to simplify our lives. But this is not the only challenge. Chapter five, A constant challenge calls us to action. Putting it all together, pop. Leo concludes with his purpose for writing. We must never forget who we are and why Jesus has loved us. We must also identify with the poor to love.
The poor is not just something the church does. It is the catalyst that sparks all [02:41:00] renewal Throughout our history, every movement of growth has been associated with people who give preferential option to the poor. And so the task of the church is before us. We must feel bound to invite everyone to share in the light in life born of recognizing Christ in the faces of the suffering and those in need.
It is how we will renew our church and how will we bring about change in our world. We do this first of all, by teaching the world that the poor are not a societal problem. They're a part of our family. They are one of us. Because of this, it is our responsibility to reject the indifference of the world that would prefer to overlook their suffering and all that causes it.
It is up to us to offer alms taking from our surplus to care for those who have little or nothing, but also to challenge our governments and markets to act justly. Those with power have a responsibility to care for the poor and to act justly. Yes, you heard that correctly. And no, this is not new. The church has advocated for more than 130 years that it is the right and responsibility of leaders to ensure the common good of all.
And Finally, Section D, [02:42:00] Some Misc. Historical Context
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Speaker 8: For almost two millennia, the Pope has been a figure of supreme spiritual authority for Catholics around the world. But in the late 14th century, Catholics found themselves with not one, not two. But three popes, where did this plethora of popes come from, and who among them was the genuine article? The origins of this papal predicament began in 1296 when Francis King Philip IV decided to raise taxes on the church.
Given the clergy's political power, this offended Boniface leading him to write the unum san a radical decree asserting the Pope's total supremacy over earthly rulers. But King Philip struck back. [02:43:00] He declared Boniface a heretic and tried to have him arrested in a violent raid. Bonos survived the assault, but died soon after.
And following a short-lived successor, Pope Pope Clement V, a French diplomat seeking peace in the war between England and his homeland. Clement wanted to stay close to the conflict. And escaped the demands of Rome. So in 1309, he moved the seat of the papacy to Avignon a city close to France, but owned by a vassal of the church.
The papacy remained here for the terms of seven popes until the reigning pope finally returned to Italy in 1376. But just several months after his arrival, he suddenly died. This shocking development. Meant a new Pope had to be elected immediately [02:44:00] and in Rome where there hadn't been a papal election in over 70 years.
The Romans were determined to elect one of their own and restore Rome as sec seat of Western prison. Them local officials pressured cardinals to choose an Italian poop while rowdy mobs raided the conclave and plundered the papal wine cellar. Amidst this chaos, the Cardinals elected the Neapolitan Archbishop of Bari to become Pope Urban VI.
Initially, urban was seen as a safe choice, but he quickly proved to be a reformer who sought to limit the Cardinals finances. Desperate to maintain their luxurious lifestyles. The Cardinals declared the recent election illegitimate since it was decided under pressure from the Roman mob. They denounced urban as a usurper and held a new conclave [02:45:00] to elect Pope Clement VII.
Clement attempted to excommunicate urban, but he refused to recognize the authority of Clement or his greedy cardinals urban, named new Cardinals to his court and entrenched himself in Rome while Clement and his supporters. Return to Avignon, the schism had officially begun. Western Christendom now had two capitals, Avignon and Rome, each with their own Pope and Court of Cardinals.
As popes from each line died, their cardinals appointed successors continuing the crisis for decades. This strange situation didn't impact most ordinary Catholics as there were no significant doctrinal splits. Instead, the drama played out in the diplomatic realm. [02:46:00] European rulers were forced to choose sides as both popes V for spiritual and political supremacy only a Pope had the authority to call a general counsel to officially resolve the issue, and both sides refuse to take this step.
So in 1409, a group of cardinals from France and Rome took matters into their own hands. They claimed that since both popes were disputed, Cardinals did have the right to call the council. And at their gathering these cardinals depose the pretenders and elected a new Pope. Unfortunately. Both Avignon's Pope and Rome's Pope refuse to recognize this council.
So instead of solving the crisis, the number of popes rose to three. This unusual arrangement lasted five more years until the [02:47:00] Council of Constant. In 1417 here, the Popes from the Roman line and recently created third line, resigned and agreed to unite the church under a new Pope Martin V undisputed, Martin swiftly excommunicated the only person still against him.
The Pope of Avignon and finally ended the schism after 39 years.
Today, the church's official records say the Roman line was always the true papal power. But regardless of how the schism ended its existence proves that even those who are supposed to be pious are prone to petty power struggles.
Speaker 24: I had spent a lot of time reading about the rhetoric of anti Catholicism ca you know, Catholics were the great bug [02:48:00] bears of the, of the 17th century and 18th century.
They embodied everything that English Protestants detested. They were disloyal. They were overly emotional. They were obsessed with ritual and materialism rather than with true doctrine and true ideolog. They were feminized because they were so emotional and so sensual. So they embodied everything that English Protestants despised.
And so anti-Catholic rhetoric is everywhere in Colonial records, but in fact, I had found very few examples of actual violence against Catholics. So there was this sort of glaring gap between the rhetoric, which was so hateful and so persecutory, and the experience, which seemed to be one of sort of benign neglect or indifference.
So I was very curious about that. There's one episode in part, and that's sort of the exception to the rule. Pitched battle between armed Protestants and armed Catholics in Maryland in the 1650s where the Catholics were routed by the Protestants and the loss of [02:49:00] some 20, 20, 22 or so lives. But that was the total exception to the rule.
So I was interested in how it was that colonial Catholics sort of occupied this space between heightened rhetoric and a kind of lived neglect. So that was what. Sort of led me into this project.
Speaker 22: How did you go about actually finding anything, you know, the, these are people who, as you said, were flouting the law, they don't leave a lot of trace.
In some cases you're talking about some that are servants or enslaved. So what all did you have to look at to go about to put this story together?
Speaker 24: Yeah, that was the real challenge. How do you find people who don't wanna be found in the archives? Archives that are created by colonial administrators who are, have one set of objectives and one set of motives and aren't particularly good at detailing and narrating the lives of ordinary people who don't otherwise come to their attention.
So [02:50:00] it was a, it was a scattershot approach. It required me to be a lot more creative than I think I'd been in, in, in other books to look beyond the documentary record for one thing. To look at the material record. I'm, I'm certainly not an archeologist, but I ended up reading a lot of archeology over the course of this book to sort of discover and find what are the material remains, that had been left by individual Catholics or individual or Catholic communities.
So, and that, that revealed one set of sources. There were scattered examples of. Rosary beats, discovered in archeological pits. There were stray references to a crucifix here and there found in probate records or in inventories, of people's households. So the material record gave me some clues. The material record is always.
Ambiguous. You, you, you can, I can know that a, a crucifix was owned by a particular person. I have no idea what that meant to them. Was this a relic of a, of a, of a grandmother, right. [02:51:00] Perhaps as someone who holds on very dearly to the, the rosary that my mother left behind, but does not consider myself in any way, a member of that community, that rosary, I own it.
And if you were to look at my probate interest story, you would see it, but it couldn't tell you much about my own personal beliefs. So, so objects are very difficult to decode, and to the meaning of them. But then nonetheless, they do offer us one clue. The other way to find Catholics, in addition to what they've left behind in their material possessions, is to read about the accounts of encounters with them from the people who were opposed to them.
And that is often true of minority groups, right? Who are persecuted, what we know of them. Is left to us by their prosecutors, by the law, by the colonial authorities in many cases, minister Protestant ministers who took it upon themselves to try to identify and convert or at least oppose the Catholic settlers that they found in the midst of their congregations.
So reports by Colonial Anglican [02:52:00] ministers were a great source always with, always keeping in mind that they are writing from a very. Particular viewpoint that they, they're trying to find these people in order to expose them, either if they're more generously minded to convert them or somehow incorporate them if they're less generously minded to prosecute them.
Wills were another, great resource. Colonial wills, like many wills in the early modern period, often began with a preamble that sort of lays out a statement of belief much different than Wills not, well, I'm not sure that they're that different than Wills today, but nonetheless, their, their preambles tend to be quite theological.
And so even someone who might have hashed their whole life, as a, as a secret Catholic, who wouldn't have been known to be Catholic from their, to their neighbors or to their larger community might in their last will and testament the last time someone has to sort of make a statement about their lives and their beliefs might lay out a kind of theology of what it meant to be a Catholic.
So I [02:53:00] read a lot of wills and looking for those theological cues in the preambles. Read a lot of, and at the point when newspapers become available, which is not until the 18th century, really 1730s on looking for any stray references on the Catholics, I did have to learn to, when I was using more digital databases to use the term papist and not Catholic, papist was far more.
It was the term that was most commonly used in this period of time to describe Catholics. It is a term of insult. It's a term that suggests that these are people who still owe their political loyalty to the pope. So therefore our papists. So it was really a scattershot approach to looking for evidence wherever I could find it.
Often being very mindful of fact that most of this was coming from people, institutions, organizations that were hostile to the people I was trying to understand.
Speaker 22: I was raised Catholic and a lot of what it meant to be a Catholic as I was growing up was going to church every week [02:54:00] and being baptized and being confirmed and, and all of that.
What does it mean in this colonial period when there are by and large not Catholic churches when there are maybe not a whole lot of priests around? What does it mean to be a Catholic for these colonists?
Speaker 24: That is the most important question. That is the essential question. What does it mean to be a Catholic when you don't have access to the sacraments, which are the building blocks of a Catholic identity in a Catholic life when you don't have access to priests who are the only people authorized to perform those sacraments to perform, most importantly, the miracle of the mass?
The, the, the, the fundamental central ritual of Catholicism, which is the turning of. Bread and wine into body and blood. So, and, and churches, and there are no churches in which to gather and celebrate these sacraments, these moments of transformation and transcendence as a community. That is the most essential question.
And I was very fortunate to be guided here [02:55:00] by one by generations, really have wonderful historians who have, especially historians of English Catholics who really devoted a lot of time to understanding what does that mean to be a Catholic, in a Protestant country. And what his have, what I. To be a Catholic under those conditions means that you have to find a way to translate and transfer some of those essential processes, encounters into a domestic context.
You cannot celebrate the mass in a church with the priest, but you can try to find a way in your own home by either dedicating a room in that house to be the place where you and your family gather on a Sunday. To, you cannot receive communion, at the hands of a priest in that room, in your home on a Sunday.
But you can read together the Catholic missile or, or, prayer book, and you can imagine it's, receiving communion. It's a ma, it's a act of imaginative, reception. [02:56:00] And you can try to think about that. There are other people doing this at the same time in their homes that you don't necessarily know personally, but you have a sense that there is a community out there.
So this domestication a ritual. The domestication of the experience of the mass was. The biggest innovation that colonial Catholics and English Catholics made in this time, and it had really far reaching consequences. For one thing, it meant that women assumed a really central role. Women were in a sense, the priests of the, of the Catholic community, and that they were the ones who gathered the family together.
They were the ones who kept, the. Essential, the, the missiles, and the, and the bread that you might try to pretend is a, is a wafer, and organize these events and presided over these events. And they were the ones who kept the feasting and fasting schedules of the church. So, so two things are happening.
One is that the, the a. Experiences that would take place in a church are taking place now in a home, in a much [02:57:00] attenuated, much modified form, but also other rituals that were not centered on the church, become more important.
Speaker 104: That was one of the number one things, the relationship of the Kennedy men to women. Obviously people know that JFK had affairs and that there were rumors, whatever, but I, I don't think I had realized how like cults, like the environment was, I mean, they were raised to believe the JFK generation Joe's children were raised to believe that women are like objects to be passed around.
Joe would wanna participate and sort of be involved with his son's. Girlfriends and lovers. I mean, it really was way more crazy than people realize.
Speaker 106: It's just deranged. I don't think people recognize just how much sex there was. Like yes, right. To say John Kennedy had affairs, JFK had affairs really is not even scratching the surface of what he got up to.
It seemed like some of the people around him, like Secret [02:58:00] Service members, his aides, procuring women, was almost a full-time job for them. It seemed like a different one almost every day, seemingly, or that would've been the dream, you know? I think some of them stuck around more long-term affairs. Right.
But I mean, the number was just insane, frankly. And there's a lot you could say about, you know, what was John f Kennedy's? Personal faith as a Catholic or what was Bobby's? What was Teddy's? What was the dad's? And we can talk about all of that. But I think in some ways, as I was thinking about some of this, again, to me it's always the Catholicism of the Kennedy's is most fully expressed in the people you don't see in their mythologies, which is the women.
And I do think that is a function of their Catholicism in a profound way. I mean, wills talks about Rose Kennedy as almost being in Alister within a nunnery convent within their domestic arrangements, sometimes even at their vacation home, right? Having her own little cottage on the beach she would go to and live in almost by herself.
So there's a way in which I think the most conspicuous elements of the [02:59:00] Kennedy's Catholicism often do relate to women. But the people in the Kennedy family, you don't know that much about, or you don't hear that much about are the women. And I can't think that can be separated from their Catholicism, frankly.
Especially that era, that vintage of Catholicism, pre Vatican, two very old school that was very much in play.
Speaker 105: Totally. I was actually talking to George about this right before we started recording, which was, it seems like a lot of times when we talk about the Kennedys, we are just talking about the men.
Speaker 106: Yeah. Three or four of them.
Speaker 105: Yeah. We're talking about Joe, Jack, Teddy, Bobby, but in terms of. Their relationship to Catholicism, it seems like the ones who were most strictly held to the principles of Catholicism, it was the women in the family.
Speaker 98: Yes.
Speaker 105: In a way that the men just simply were not, and that I'm sure was both a function of the time.
A function of this particular family itself? Yes. This was just a very [03:00:00] patriarchal, in the truest sense of the word family. And it's funny because Joe, and you can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but Joe's relationship to the Catholic church was entirely political from all accounts. It seems like he had no real spiritual interior life and treated Catholicism, the way that he treated women and the way he treated anything else, which was as a political pawn, as a means to an end.
And I, I thought that was really interesting. But yeah, the women who were held to the highest standards of being good Catholics, quote unquote, were the women
Speaker 106: and and often were held to that standard by themselves. Yes. Like they did. Their duty would've been, I think, the language, right. And mm-hmm. That duty, they understood it in terms of the obligations imposed upon them as women, mothers, wives, by the Catholic faith.
Speaker 104: I'm just thinking about the times we have talked about Catholicism on this podcast. We had an episode on Kathleen Kennedy and it was such a big controversy within the family that she ended up marrying a non-Catholic. And [03:01:00] depending on who you ask, people say she was disowned by the family.
Other people say that's exaggerated, but the point is that there was a real fracture in the family and it's so. Crazy to imagine what a big controversy it was that she wanted to marry this man, that she, by all counts, loved. And meanwhile, as you're saying, there's a team procuring various loose women for JFK to have affairs with inside the White House.
And that is not seen as contra to his faith. But Julia mentioned Joe KI wanna start kind of at the beginning. I wanna start at Joe Kennedy. So to me it's interesting that the Kennedys are so synonymous with the Catholic church and the American imagination because from what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, Joe initially really wanted to assimilate in WASP culture.
Like I, so much of his initial thirst for power was because he was in his mind, rejected from the country club set. Well, literally, yes. Yeah. I mean, I think there was a point in time where he wanted to [03:02:00] join the beach club, you know, where people would summer, you know, when summer's a verb and not a season, the kind of elite.
Speaker 106: Rich person, but therefore mostly protestant club. And he couldn't. Right. And like that was a chip on his shoulder. There's a story of him going back to his college reunion, right. And being kind of booed or his stat, like these little slights to him, whether it was his college reunion or joining the elite social clubs, beach clubs, those kinds of things.
He didn't get what he wanted. Right. And this was a man who got what he wanted most of the time. And wanting one of his sons to be president is a kind of elaborate revenge fantasy on his part for all the slights of the high society types, the Boston Brahmins, who wouldn't accept him. Mm-hmm. And his Irish Catholic clan.
That's a major factor in the whole story of the Kennedys, is we've come to know it.
Speaker 105: And I think, as George alluded to, it's so funny that this is the most famous Irish Catholic family in America in the last a [03:03:00] hundred years. And Joe. So badly wanted to distance himself from that because he saw it as like a personal hindrance and only became to embrace it when it became politically useful to him.
But exactly as you were saying, he was rejected by the WASP in Cohasset, Massachusetts. He was denied the position he wanted in the Roosevelt administration. Yes, the Secretary of the Treasury. And then his second choice was ambassador to England, which is again, as an Irish person. What's a bigger stab in the back?
Speaker 104: Yeah.
Speaker 106: Yeah. Uhhuh.
Speaker 104: Well, the relationship with England is funny because there was a part in the Wills book in the very beginning where Willis is saying that the children thought of Joe's. Relationship to sex as very English or something. It was, I'm trying to remember the exact phrasing, but it was like, it was very Randy.
Yes. It was something about how it's ironic that the IES are considered this iconic Catholic family because he always thought of himself as having a [03:04:00] very sort of English disposition. And I do think that was also part of him wanting to be this cosmopolitan, worldly connector of people who was above specific ethnicities and religions.
But in terms of Catholicism in America, because obviously if we fast forward to the JFK election, a huge hindrance for him was the so-called Catholic question. And people fa, he has some sort of dual loyalty to the Catholic church and to America. But before that, what in your opinion, was the status of the Catholic church in the American imagination sort of leading up to that?
Like from the forties through the sixties? Like yes, there was prejudice against Catholics. What were the stakes?
Speaker 106: Yeah, in some ways I mentioned already, you can look at the particular face of any individual Kennedy and see what's going on there. But I think the more interesting questions are about the moment that the Kennedys and their Catholicism met with the history of [03:05:00] our country, and especially the history of Catholicism in it.
One of my favorite lines of Gary Wills is the reign of the two, Johns, meaning John the 23rd, who was the Pope who called the Second Vatican council. We've described that a little bit already, but one of the phrases associated with it is throwing up the windows of the church, throwing up, open the windows so that the, the church can look out and the world can look in.
And it was at the Second Vatican Council where, again, religious freedom, religious pluralism, human rights, liberal democracy, how the Catholic church related to the Jewish people, right? Or were all reformulated and reworked and. Adapted and updated in a way in the Second Vatican Council, which was, you know, we're talking late fifties, early, early sixties.
So as America is electing, its first. A Catholic president, uh, the Catholic church is literally calling the bishops and cardinals from all over the world to convene on Rome and deliberate about the very matters I was just discussing among others. So it's a [03:06:00] very interesting moment and the phrase, the reign of the two johns, I've always loved that.
That's going to be it for today.
As always, keep the comments coming in.
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The additional sections of the show included clips from;
United States of Kennedy
Runaway Country
Takesâ„¢ by Jamelle Bouie
TLDR News Global
Conspirituality
Some More News
Unsung History Podcast
The BradCast
Professor Tim Wilson
The Road to Now
The Spectator
Breaking In The Habit
and TED-Ed
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Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show and co-starring in SOLVED!, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes including her co-starring on SOLVED!, thanks to our editors and and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships
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