"To Find Too Little Papistry in the Pope"

Plus: The Lesson of Spain's Blackout

A guy named Bob from Chicago.

As you can guess, I don’t feel like I have any great stake in who is the pontifex maximus of the Catholic Church. He’s not my spiritual leader. But he is a cultural influence, and the choice of a pope can indicate the direction of the Christian religion as a whole. And the selection of Pope Bob—excuse me, Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Bob Prevost, a guy from Chicago—was a very specific choice.

The Woke Pope

There are undoubtedly many inside-the-Vatican reasons why the Cardinals chose Prevost. But he is also someone who has been outspoken about the rights of immigrants and the need to treat them with compassion, and he has specifically been critical of the Trump administration and of Catholic convert J.D. Vance. The College of Cardinals knew this, so his selection, whatever its other reasons, is also a choice to push back against the current cultural and political trends in the United States.

What is particularly striking about this is that while the pope is not my spiritual leader, he is the official spiritual leader for many pro-Trump nationalist conservatives. The rank and file of Trumpism is largely evangelical Protestants, but the intellectual leadership, such as it is, is heavily Catholic. A large number of the writers, academics, and commentators who have pinned their hopes for America’s cultural and religious renewal on Donald Trump are Catholics: Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, J.D. Vance—many of them relatively recent converts to Catholicism. And they chose Catholicism specifically for its authoritarian aspect, for the way in which it centralizes moral authority in one institution led by one man.

I once observed that the Church is an unreformed leftover of feudalism in the modern world, and these intellectuals latch on to the papacy as the last remaining quasi-respectable form of ultra-royalism. But like the ultra-royalists lampooned by Victor Hugo, they are doomed “to find too little papistry in the pope.” So it has been amusing to see Trump supporters freak out over the new “woke pope.”

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who holds significant sway with Mr. Trump, wrote Thursday on social media that Leo’s style would be similar to that of his predecessor, Pope Francis, whom she described as “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist.”

“Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to,” she wrote. “Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”

And on Friday, guests on Steve Bannon’s popular right-wing “War Room” podcast piled on, casting Leo as a progressive figure and a continuation of Francis, an outspoken voice for migrants who was often at odds with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bannon, one of the president’s top allies, told the BBC that the selection was “kind of jaw-dropping,” adding that there was “definitely going to be friction” between the new pope and Mr. Trump.…

A social media account under his name posted an article in February that said Vice President JD Vance had misinterpreted Christian doctrine to support Mr. Trump’s mass deportation effort….

Francis spoke out strongly against Mr. Trump at times. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Francis said a policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border was “immoral.” And he warned that those who shut borders “become prisoners of the walls that they build.”

The “integralist” right-wing Catholic intellectuals keep fantasizing that the Church will reclaim its political power and use it to impose the true creed on the country. Yet they keep being roughly reminded that they themselves are viewed by the church as rebels and heretics, preaching a creed it does not support.

It’s tragic, and kind of pathetic—and, I have to confess, totally hilarious.

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Three Elections

I would add that this is the third foreign election Donald Trump has lost in the past few weeks. He definitely lost the recent Canadian election for the Conservatives, who were way ahead in the polls before Trump’s belligerent talk about annexing Canada caused voters to swing back to the Liberals in protest.

Something similar seems to have happened in Australian elections.