President Donald Trump is no longer the most important American in the world.
He is certainly the most powerful, at least for three more years, but power is only one measure of importance. On Thursday, a Chicago native and Villanova University graduate named Robert Prevost supplanted Trump. He became the first American pope, taking the name Leo XIV.
And it happened at exactly the right time.
I’m not Catholic. I’m an evangelical from the rural South who grew up so isolated from Catholicism that I didn’t even know any Catholics until I went to law school. But I’m deeply influenced by Catholicism, in both its ancient and its modern forms.
I devoured the works of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in college. And one of my favorite classes was about liberation theology, a left-wing, modern Catholic approach to the Gospel that puts an emphasis on improving the material conditions of the poor, in part through political and economic reform. And no book has influenced my approach to abortion and human life more than Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “Evangelium Vitae.”
It was in this study and reflection that I understood the true importance of the historical stream of Christian thought. Christianity is an ancient faith, one that has endured through rulers and regimes far more ignorant and brutal than anything we’ve ever confronted in the United States.
All too many American evangelicals are disconnected from that history. We belong to churches that measure their existence in months or years, not centuries or millenniums. Our oldest denominations have existed for only a fraction of time compared with the Catholic Church.
That lack of perspective ends up exaggerating the importance of politics. It narrows our frame of reference and elevates the temporal over the eternal. It leads to absurd declarations, such as Trump’s vow this Easter to make America “more religious than it has ever been before.”
And when you believe the success of your religion depends on the success of any politician, it’s only a matter of time before politics becomes your religion. That means that too many Christians will evaluate even the pope through a partisan political lens.
And that’s exactly what happened last week, as people found the new pope’s social media feeds and began devouring his old posts. Is the new pope MAGA? Is he woke? How does he fit into the American culture war?
The headline of a story from The Federalist, a MAGA publication, said it all — “Read the New Pope’s Far-Left Takes on Immigration, Climate, Covid and Race Relations.”
And what is far left about the new pope? It turns out that he was opposed to family separation for migrants crossing the border during Trump’s first term, and disagreed with Vice President JD Vance’s interpretation of a theological idea called ordo amoris, which Vance had used to argue that American compassion “belongs first to your fellow citizens.”
Leo had also expressed his sympathy after the death of George Floyd, reposting a tweet by Bishop Michael Olson that said, “I join my voice and prayers to those of my brother bishops that we might work hard to end racism in our hearts and in society. May God give comfort to the family of #GeorgeFloyd in this time of anguish.”
He also posted, “We need to hear more from leaders in the Church, to reject racism and seek justice.”
That’s far left? It seems simply Christian to me.
The new pope had also reposted a message from Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut in support of gun control in 2017, and reposted a message expressing alarm that the United States wouldn’t meet its carbon-emission goals, also in 2017. He expressed support for the COVID vaccine, reposting in 2021 a message that said, “May God grant us the grace to face #COVID19 with the strength of faith, ensuring that vaccines are available for all, so that we can all get immunized.”
Again, these positions aren’t far left. They’re all quite mainstream. But if your catechism is the MAGA party platform, then the pope’s positions are very challenging indeed.
At the same time, he doesn’t fit well into the Democratic box, either. He is strongly anti-abortion, and he upholds the church’s traditional teachings on sexual morality and gender identity. Don’t look for Leo to alter the church’s doctrines on abortion or marriage.
So, no, the pope is neither MAGA nor woke. He’s Catholic, and party platforms are irrelevant to church doctrine.
In addition, don’t look to Leo to provide aid or comfort to those inside and outside the Catholic Church who seek to redeem the culture through the raw exercise of Christian power. In his first homily, he said that the church should serve as “an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world.”
But, the pope argued, it does not accomplish this through “grandeur” (and here he referred to the beauty and majesty of the church’s buildings and cathedrals), but rather through “the holiness of her members.”
It is not the church’s power or wealth but the church’s witness that helps transform the world.
In the case of Leo, the church’s witness to the world also becomes part of America’s witness to the world. Millions of Americans have been lamenting that the most prominent American in the world is a person who embodies cruelty and spite.
Many of us (and certainly many dissenting evangelicals) are also lamenting that Trump owes his victory to the evangelical church more than to any other group in American life. He won the votes of white evangelicals by a 65-point margin. He lost the rest of the electorate by 18 points. Trump’s election, in other words, isn’t just an expression of American political will; it’s also an expression of American Christian will.
But American Christianity does not speak with one voice. It contains multitudes. And so does Leo. He appears to be of mixed-race descent (his maternal grandparents were apparently Creole from New Orleans), and he spent much of his adult life in Peru. In fact, he has such close ties to Peru that the nation celebrated his election, and its president, Dina Boluarte, declared, “The pope is Peruvian.”
Oh, and he’s a White Sox fan, so he has a heart for hopeless causes.
He’s also the living embodiment of one of America’s most important and profound transformations — from a Protestant-dominated nation that was often deeply intolerant of Catholicism and Catholics to a nation in which people of all faiths can worship freely.
Leo will forge his own path, and it’s important not to read too much into various tweets and social media posts. But if there is one thing we can glean from the new pope’s words and the way he has lived his life, it’s that he shares Pope Francis’ love for the poor and the vulnerable. He’s expressing and trying to embody a religious faith that views all life as precious.
“The church,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “must be reminded once again that it is not to be the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.” The Catholic church, however, is a global church. It’s not the conscience of one nation. It is the conscience of many nations.
As one American steps onto the world stage as a man of malice, another American answers, leading with love and compassion. They represent two starkly different visions of American character. And, if all goes well, Leo will command the world stage long after Trump is gone from public life.
I don’t know what kind of pope Leo will ultimately become. But Thursday, I felt the cultural wind shift just a tiny bit. An American man who confounds political categories now leads the world’s largest church. As a friend texted me right after the pope’s selection was announced, that shift “almost feels like … hope.”
David French writes a column for the New York Times.
Related Articles
Editorial: Welcome, Pope Leo XIV, Chicago’s holy father
Thomas Friedman: What Trump should keep in mind on his big Middle East trip
Mihir Sharma: Why I’m thinking twice about traveling to the US
Parmy Olson: AI chatbots want you hooked — maybe too hooked
Lisa Jarvis: Parkinson’s disease finally finds a source of hope
