I was not paying attention in 1978 to the stage set in Rome for a showdown with the Soviet Union that would ultimately lead to its demise. I was 12. I was only mildly interested in the Catholic Church as an altar boy at my parish, but, if I’m honest, it was for the outfits – cassocks and vestments and the habit (religious robes) I would later wear for a time as a Franciscan friar, the ritual, and the building with its marble, its stained glass, and the sound the pipe organ made. We had some cool statues too!
The second conclave of 1978 ended in a triple surprise: a young (he was 58) man, a non-Italian, and one from an Eastern European (i.e., communist) country. He would take the name John Paul the second, a nod to his predecessor John Paul I elected only two months earlier whose pontificate ended with a sudden heart attack after just 33 days in the Cathedra Petri (“Chair of St. Peter,” the first pope).
he almost looks as if he’s saying, “I’m as surprised as you.”
A Polish pope? History records the indispensable role he played in standing up to the Soviets which weakened their grip on power. Perhaps this is what the cardinals had in mind when they selected him. And perhaps they likewise were thinking who best to confront a malignant evil force in the world when they delivered the surprise of surprises in the conclave of 2025 – an American pope.
World leaders have rebuked President Trump for his reckless and ill-advised conflict of choice with Iran, some explicitly like Mark Carney of Canada, others indirectly by refusing his calls for military commitments by their nations to his war effort. When Carney described the end of the rules-based international order in a speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos this year, he was making the geopolitical case as a world leader against Trump. But that is the stuff of policy, and Trump’s supporters can and do argue policy is debatable.
What isn’t up for debate are the morality, character, and human decency Trump has repeatedly demonstrated he lacks. And the pope, who is after all a world leader due to Vatican sovereignty, is uniquely positioned to argue on that stage that these things matter. Some have said that Trump is the anti-Christ; one could conclude that after reading Paradise Lost by John Milton whose Lucifer is intolerant of any authority other than his own: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” But I think they have it backward. Pope Leo XIV is the anti-Trump.
When Leo condemns the war it is not in the highfalutin political language of strategic waterways and the global price of oil. Instead, Leo, who holds a doctor of canon law degree from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, is also Bob from the south side of Chicago, a White Sox fan. Presidents often begin speeches with the phrase “my fellow Americans.” Pope Leo is one of those – an American. An American speaking with moral clarity. On the world stage.
The pope speaks of “masters of war” whose hands are so “full of blood” that God does not hear their prayers. He talks of a world “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” and chastises those who drag “that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” Prime Minister Carney may make a compelling international political case against Trumpism, and good on him for doing so. But the so-called “Christian” nationalists who are the devoted core of Trump’s American MAGA base, need reminding what Christianity has to say about things like killing, and immigrants, and the poor. And they are hearing it from an American Christian. They could argue that Pope Francis’ admonitions were those of an outsider, an “alien” from a foreign land. That is harder to do when the man taking them to task loves a slice of Chicago-style deep dish pizza.
It’s no exaggeration, and nothing new, to say that Trump not only embodies but revels in the very worst of human nature. He is the poster boy of flaws – what I as a young Catholic was taught by the good nuns to call sins; whether religiously motivated or not, most of us try to tame them within ourselves. Not Trump: his self-regard, self-aggrandizement, and vanity is beyond the pale and somehow we’ve grown used to it, or at least not found a way to counteract it in a meaningful way.
Until Leo, the American pope from the American city who likes the American pastime, and a slice, takes a stand against needless war, prejudice, vanity, indecency, callousness, mendacity, and avarice. Until Leo, somewhat of an expert in it, lays bare the Christianity of Trump and his MAGA followers as just decoration for the cameras: gaudy and un-American as the gold which now adorns the Oval Office.
I also don’t know whether to describe this as “early Saddam” or “late Gaddafi”…
maybe I’ll just go with “dictator chic”
Donald Trump believes that the conclave elected Augustinian friar and cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV on May 8, 2025 because of Donald Trump.“He wasn’t on any list to be Pope,” Trump posted on April 12th this year,“and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
He may be right.
“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Henry II was reputed to have muttered in 1170 about Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke critically about the king. Pope Leo has emerged as a modern-day Thomas Becket, and his pointed condemnations have landed harder than courtroom verdicts, perhaps because there is no higher appeal. “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!” said Leo this month, “True strength is shown in serving life.”
The last pope to take the name Leo (left, Leo XIII) was known as “the labor pope” because he insisted on the rights of poor workers at a time when the Industrial Revolution was riding roughshod over them. So the American Robert Prevost, a Christian, chose his papal name well, to underscore that when you strip away the outfits and the ritual and the buildings with their pipe organs and those cool statues Christianity is about the common man or woman and common decency.
And like John Paul II in 1978 (and Leo XIII in 1878), the cardinals chose well the man needed in the moment.
