As a Protestant by baptism and heritage—some of my maternal ancestors were Huguenots who fled persecution in France, and I’m told we were firmly on Parliament’s side during its great quarrel with King Charles I—I guess I’m supposed to have views on the Vicar of Rome and his spiritual claims over the Christian faithful.
Unlike my Puritan forebears, I don’t feel any great urge to denounce the Pope as the Whore of Babylon or the Antichrist in a silly hat. I have many Catholic friends, and I respect their sincere commitment to their faith. I gently humor their continuing, futile attempts to convert me.
If I take an interest in what the Pope does, it’s to the extent his leadership touches my abiding political concern, which is the preservation of England, Europe and the West in the face of the titanic forces arrayed against them, from outside and, most dangerously of all, from within.
And so of course I’ve been watching and trying to make out exactly what the election of Cardinal Robert Prevost to the Papal seat is likely to mean in that regard.
In particular, I want to know what Prevost will say and do about the greatest threat facing the West today: mass migration and demographic change.
Will Prevost—now Leo XIV—be a traditionalist pope who says that any attempt to confound the nations is against God’s plan? That nations exist, rightfully, and that their boundaries should be maintained? That it’s not a sin to love your country?
Or will he cement the legacy of his predecessor, Pope Francis, and denounce as un-Christian any attempts to resist or even reverse the enormous flow of people from the Third World to the West?
In his final months of life, Pope Francis laid in to President Trump as hard as it was possible for a dying old man, passing in and out of consciousness, to do.
In February, in a letter to Catholic bishops in the US, Pope Francis said Trump’s mass-deportation policy was a “crisis” that was damaging “the dignity of many men and women.”
In the same letter, he also attempted to correct Vice President Vance’s invocation of the medieval concept of the ordo amoris, or “rightly ordered love,” to justify the Trump admin’s policy. Vance, himself a Catholic, was arguing that there’s a clear hierarchy of love, and that love for one’s own community and nation should be considered primary, before love for the rest of the world.
Francis was having none of it.
“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote.
“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Vance handled the Pope’s criticism deftly, indeed graciously, saying that he was only a “baby Catholic” and that there are “things about the faith that I don’t know.”
Pope Francis was never anything but a critic of Trump. He had Trump in his sights before he even took office for the first time. Back in February of 2016, on a visit to Mexico, Francis criticized Trump’s plan for a border wall and suggested he wasn’t a Christian.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said.
“This is not the Gospel.”
Trump fired back that it was disgraceful for a religious leader to question a man’s faith. Francis, like so many other people, probably thought Trump would never win.
So what of our new Pope Leo?
Initial indications, certainly, aren’t good.
Critics, doubters—call them what you will—have seized on a number of Tweets he’s posted recently and going back a number of years. He—or whoever controls his Twitter account—has retweeted sharply critical pieces about President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, and he’s also retweeted at least one encomiastic post by a fellow cleric about George Floyd.
In response to the Tweets, Laura Loomer wrote: “He [Leo] is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis. Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to. Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”
I even got in a few blows of my own. I joked that we should expect George Floyd’s canonization within the next four years. (I mean, it’s never been beyond the realms of possibility. You’ve probably forgotten how baptisms were held on the spot where Floyd was restrained and how miracles were reported. The man had a gold coffin, for heaven’s sake, and his body was displayed like that of a saint-to-be.)
Catholics have hit back by saying any attempt to label the new Pope left- or right-wing is just plain dumb. An anachronism: “Oh these silly people thinking they can map the beliefs and concerns of the Pope onto an axis—left-wing vs right-wing—that was created in the French Revolution. The Catholic Church is the oldest continuous institution in existence, and its spiritual concerns go far beyond mere politics.”
Leaving aside the fact that “politics” is an Ancient Greek coinage, hundreds of years older than the Catholic Church, and that Jesus was radically political even in his most apparently apolitical moment—“render unto Caesar”—there’s nothing frivolous or childish about such guesswork or about the hopes and worries that motivate it.
It’s denying the Catholic Church’s irretrievable entanglement in earthly politics that’s frivolous and childish. After all, if Pope Francis had been replaced by your average rainbow-haired elementary-school teacher from Oregon, very little would have changed in official Catholic policy: gay race communism is gay race communism, regardless of whether it wears the Papal tiara or a set of elf ears in its spare time.
Of course, this isn’t just true of the Catholic Church. It’s true of Lutherans and Episcopalians and Christian churches of almost every denomination, maybe except the Amish.
So much of what passes for Christianity today is a skinsuit of that great religion, a flayed tattered corpse. It’s earthly salvation, the inverted paradise of communism, where material conditions are perfected, that seems to be the goal, not the life to come.
One man who’s likely to know what Robert Prevost really thinks is his brother, John, who lives in Florida. Funnily enough, as it turns out, John Prevost is one of the best kind of based boomers. The kind that sends you fifteen memes a day about what’s lurking down Michelle Obama’s left trouser leg and how young the earth was when Nancy Pelosi was born. You know the kind, I’m sure. He’s MAGA and he’s not afraid to show it.
What John Prevost has to say about his brother won’t allay the fears of Trump supporters. In an interview with The New York Times, Prevost said his brother was close to Pope Francis and shared his concerns about immigration.
“I know he’s not happy with what’s going on with immigration. I know that for a fact. How far he’ll go with it is anyone’s guess, but he won’t just sit back. I don’t think he’ll be the silent one.”
Prevost is in no doubt, he says, that his brother “will be following in Francis’s footsteps.”
The last time Catholicism was a really live political issue in America was the 1960s, and the election of John F. Kennedy, but it’s worth remembering the deep suspicion with which Catholicism had been considered in America for at least a century before that. The 1860s onwards were a time of intense worry for Protestant Americans, as the nation accepted millions of new immigrants from countries in southern and Eastern Europe who didn’t share their faith.
The same question was asked again and again: Can these people really be Americans if their ultimate allegiance is not to the President in Washington, but the Pope in Rome?
I don’t think we’re going to see some great re-run of the Nativist scares of the nineteenth century—America has changed too much—but I do think American Catholics, both those of older stock and those who have come more recently, especially from Latin America, will be put in a very uncomfortable position concerning their true loyalty. The fact that Pope Leo is himself an American will only throw the options available to them into greater relief.