In January, in an interview with CBS, Vice President J. D. Vance questioned the U.S. bishops of the Catholic Church about their use of federal funds to resettle migrants. “Are they worried about humanitarian concerns?” he asked, accusing the group of neglecting the safety of the Americans within the country’s borders. “Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” When the late Pope Francis issued a stark letter the next month affirming the universal dignity of migrants—and all but directly responding to Vance in the process—most observers saw the document, coming swiftly on the heels of a national news story, as an unusually political statement from the Vatican. Francis, though, may have known it would be his final salvo in a battle he had been fighting his entire pontificate.
The letter, addressed to the U.S. Catholic bishops but intended clearly for a broader audience, acknowledged a “delicate moment” in the country’s politics but remained firmly rooted in its pro-migrant position. It cited a 1952 encyclical from Pius XII, which held Jesus as a migrant and refugee: “the model, the example and the consolation of emigrants and pilgrims of every age and country, of all refugees of every condition who, beset by persecution or necessity, are forced to leave their homeland, beloved family and dear friends for foreign lands.” Through that explicit avowal of migrants’ humanity (using language usually reserved in U.S. Catholic circles for the unborn), it reflected—and retrenched—a half-century-long disagreement stretching back to John XXIII.
Conflict was familiar terrain for Francis, who in his twelve years as Pope had refused to moderate his teachings on migration, sexuality, interreligious dialogue, and economic inequality, often inviting outright hostility from traditionalists—particularly those in the United States—in the process. It remains to be seen what the conclave’s selection of Robert Louis Prevost, now Leo XIV, will mean for them. Will the new pope relax the tensions, or will he continue to ratchet them up? Barely one week into Leo’s tenure, it is difficult to say, but one thing is certain: he was not picked with the Trump- and Vance-aligned bishops’ interests in mind.
With his final letter, Francis has given Prevost a high-visibility starting point. While the letter’s tone, which registered a palpable alarm at growing North Atlantic anti-immigrant sentiment, was rare for a papal communication, its contents were anything but unusual for a man who, at every step, had placed migration at the center of his thought. In Hope, his recently published autobiography, Francis opens with the story of his Italian parents and grandparents missing an ill-fated voyage on the Principessa Mafalda, the doomed Buenos Aires–bound passenger ship that became known as “Italy’s Titanic,” in 1927. (They instead took a later ship to Argentina.) It’s difficult to ignore the connections between that near-miss and Francis’s choice, at an address delivered on the island of Lampedusa at the beginning of his papacy, to publicly honor the scores of North African migrants who had drowned crossing the Mediterranean.
But it was not only his family’s brush with death—nor an early life spent with Jewish and Muslim neighbors in an Argentine working-class neighborhood—that endowed Francis with a soft heart toward migrants. That came first from a deep anti-fascist conviction passed down by his grandmother, Rosa Margherita Vassallo. During the early years of Mussolini’s regime, she held political meetings with girls and women throughout Asti, the province the family lived in; on one occasion, after the Duce’s Blackshirts closed the parish she was set to deliver a speech at, she gave the talk on a table she had dragged into the middle of the street. In her activism, Nona Rosa surely had in mind the set of Catholic social teachings dating back to Leo XIII that emphasized individuals’ duty to work through associations for society’s common good—and how the state, while “protecting private individuals in their rights,” ought to give “chief consideration” to “the weak and the poor.”
Francis’s efforts to follow in his grandmother’s path immediately caused tensions with wealthy Catholics in the United States—starting with his very first authoritative document, the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), which warned that solving the world’s problems ran through “rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality . . . the root of social ills.” Francis’s broadside against trickle-down economics—which he referenced by name—earned him particular ire. On the Fox Business Channel, Larry Kudlow condescended to “remind His Holiness Pope Francis, charity is a gospel value: and that puts free-market capitalism on the right side of the Lord.” Indeed, continued his colleague Stuart Vaney, the market was a “great liberator”—and besides, he added, “I personally do not want my spiritual life mixed up with my political life. I go to church to save my soul.”
Sometimes, rejection of Francis’s teachings simply came down to money. Later in the year, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in the midst of raising money for the renovation of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the marble-clad midtown church built in 1879, soft-pedaled Francis’s core message after learning that an anonymous big-ticket donor had expressed concern for the pope’s criticisms of the market economy. “The pope loves poor people. He also loves rich people,” Dolan clarified.
Republican Catholics had a similarly hostile reaction to Laudato si’, a long encyclical Francis published in 2015 that, through its 246 individual sections, called unrestrained economic growth into question and forcefully laid out a vision for a balance between ecological sustainability and human development. The pope, they protested, should not politicize the faith—at least not on issues other than sexuality and the family.
On this latter score, Francis—who declined to make fights against abortion, gay marriage, and contraception central pillars of the Church’s politics—had left conservatives confused and fuming since the beginning of his pontificate. “The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time” he said in a 2013 interview with the Jesuit magazine America.
If the traditionalists only knew where to look, though, they’d find no shortage of definitive statements from Francis on sexuality. Even while advocating pastoral flexibility to include sexual minorities in the everyday life of the Church—for instance, allowing communion for divorced and remarried Catholics on a case-by-case basis—he remained opposed to what he called the West’s “hedonistic atheism.” He vigorously affirmed the existence of only two complementary biological sexes; his doctrinal office went so far as to condemn the erasure of these differences as “ideological colonization.” And Laudato si’, which environmentalists credited with helping facilitate the 2015 Paris Agreement, made sure to note that support for abortion was “incompatible” with support for environmentalism.
Clearly, U.S. Catholics did not oppose Francis solely because of his position on traditional family issues. They resisted him because of his unwillingness, in the process of affirming traditional Catholic teachings, to overlook the dignity of every human person—and the larger systemic issues stripping people of that dignity. For traditionalists, the moral guardian of the faith could not play down sexual ethics in his teachings, no matter how closely he hewed to Catholic doctrine. In the words of historian Udi Greenberg, they feared that “sexual laxity would inevitably eradicate spirituality as such.” The state, moreover, was never meant to dangerously reduce social inequality: it was only to be used to “restrict sexual emancipation.”
Nowhere did the selective compassion of Francis’s detractors’ show through more than in their approach to migration, an issue which, following Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency atop promises to crack down brutally on the “rapists” bringing “crime” and “drugs” across the U.S-Mexico border, would rise to the forefront of the political divide among U.S. Catholics. Three months after Trump uttered those words at the GOP presidential debates, Francis stood in front of Congress, in the first ever papal address to that body, to issue a stark warning about using the fear of outsiders to break down civil liberties at home. “We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within,” he said. “To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.” In his 2016 pastoral trip to Mexico, Francis even held Mass on the U.S./Mexico border wall, addressing a crowd of over 200,000 in the city of Juarez.
Many bishops, on the other hand, were willing to look past Trump’s cruelty. In an address, Philadelphia’s Charles Chaput nodded to the “many good people” whom immigration had made “very uneasy about the direction of our country.” Providence archbishop Thomas J. Tobin wrote on Facebook that “only with strong Christian values can we ‘make America great again!’” Cardinal Raymond Burke, who suggested that Trump supported the “fundamental goods” advocated by Catholics, argued that he had no “hatred” toward immigrants but simply wanted to raise “awareness of who the immigrants are.”
In the early years of Francis’s papacy, his opponents had struggled to consolidate much power in the United States. But after Trump’s first election, public collaboration between critics of the pope and U.S. political heavyweights—led by Burke and top Trump advisor Steve Bannon—began in earnest. That was enough for Francis’s allies in the Vatican to acknowledge the storm that had long been brewing. In a long essay in Rome’s leading Jesuit magazine, Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa, two close friends of the pope, condemned the U.S. “theoconservative” movement birthed in the George W. Bush years. Right-wing Catholics, they wrote, in seeking to demonize whole swaths of society—in the past, Black civil rights activists, communists, and feminists; today, migrants and Muslims—wanted to tip the country into outright “spiritual war.”
The fight was on. The next year, a significant portion of the U.S. bishops backed former papal nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò, who had issued a letter calling for Francis to resign over allegations he blocked punishment of the serial abuser U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick. (The charges against Francis were largely unfounded: popes prior to Francis had imposed no formal punishment on McCarrick, Viganò himself failed to take action in 2012 when allegations surfaced, and when new allegations surfaced in 2017, Francis defrocked him.) By 2019 Francis had grown more willing to acknowledge that opposition: when shown a book written by a French reporter that outlined a scheme to oust him, he joked that he was “honored” to be the subject of such attacks.
While traditionalist Europeans and U.S. conservatives embraced his predecessor Benedict XVI’s view of Islam as non- or irrational, Francis had always advocated an openness to multicultural faith expressions and even interreligious dialogue. In 2019 he collaborated with Al-Azhar University’s Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, an Egyptian scholar of Islam, to do just that, producing a document denouncing “religious extremism, national extremism and also intolerance” and emphasizing that “pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom.”
Such an outward embrace of multiculturalism became a principal point of tension between the traditionalists and a pope who had long championed a “Theology of the People” that emphasized popular religiosity. That conflict came to a head at the Amazon Synod, a meeting in Rome of bishops from across South America, in October 2019. At a ceremony, Francis blessed an indigenous statue of a woman with child that a missionary said represented “Our Lady of the Amazon.” To his enemies, Francis’s decision to honor what they accused of being a pagan symbol—an indigenous pagan symbol, no less—was a bridge too far, an encapsulation of the dangerously modern, anti-Catholic world the pope had brought into being.
Among those entering the fray was Burke, who joined with the right-wing Brazilian group Tradition, Family, and Property to oppose the incident. Weeks later, at the Vatican, one of the group’s followers, the ultra-right Austrian activist Alexander Tschugguel, seized two indigenous statues—one of them the figure Francis had blessed in October—and threw them into the Tiber River. In an interview, Tschugguel thanked U.S. Catholics, many of whom had praised his theft, for serving as a “backbone” for likeminded Europeans.
Indeed, across the Atlantic, the mainstays of the U.S. Catholic press were doubling down on ethnonationalism. In a scathing 2019 manifesto in the right-wing (and stridently anti-Francis) Catholic magazine First Things, a host of signatories—including torchbearers of post-liberalism and Catholic integralism such as Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and Matthew Schmitz—announced their rejection of a “dead” conservative consensus that had prized “individual autonomy” and embraced a “poisonous and censorious multiculturalism” as well as “free trade on every front, free movement through every boundary.” The letter accused progressives of fomenting a view of U.S. citizens as “less hard-working, less fertile, in some sense less worthy than potential immigrants,” and embraced a “new nationalism” that would stave off a “borderless world that, in practice, leads to universal tyranny.”
The outbreak of pandemic in 2020 seemed briefly to cool the flames, as Catholics united around Francis’s pastoral approach. (Even Vance had to admit he found one of those sermons inspiring.) But as Covid raged on, the old fissures started to open back up. Before long, outspoken conservative priests—most vocally, Texas bishop Joseph Strickland—were opposing COVID-19 measures and condemning vaccines on the grounds that their development entailed the use of aborted fetuses. Viganò re-emerged to accuse the Vatican of participating in part of a globalist conspiracy to impose a world government through vaccine mandates. José Gomez, head of the U.S. bishops, openly bucked Francis’s call to make the faith less partisan by issuing a blistering statement against Joe Biden on Inauguration Day 2021—a document so incendiary it triggered Vatican intervention to prevent it from coming out on the bishops’ letterhead. (Undeterred, Gomez went out of his way later that year to brand Black Lives Matter as a “pseudo-religion” and threat to Catholicism.)
Francis had had enough. In 2021, he heavily restricted the use of traditionalists’ preferred Latin Mass, arguing that liturgical diversity had been used to politically undermine important precepts of the Second Vatican Council. In 2023, he removed Strickland from his post and installed a close Argentine confident at the Vatican’s chief doctrinal office. And he capped off the year with one of his most controversial orders yet: a proposal to bless gay couples, if not their marriages, that enraged traditionalists (and even a few moderates).
Still, for all his efforts, Francis could never quite fully reshape the U.S. Church, which in the first months of Trump’s second presidency seems ready to fully shrug off any traces of his influence in favor of a closed-off, parochial nationalism. He promoted U.S. bishops aligned with his vision, including to the College of Cardinals, the body that has elected his successor, but was slow to replace retiring ones. As a result, Francis-aligned bishops have consistently lost strategic votes within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
By 2024, the reactionary fervor gripping much of the Catholic right was taking its conservative media stars further down the rabbit hole. Last May Robert Barron, the ultra-famous bishop whose YouTube channel commands nearly 2 million subscribers, hosted an hourlong interview with Deneen, listening approvingly as he discussed the work of the reactionaries Louis de Bonald, Louis Billot, and Juan Donoso Cortés—figures, neither of the men cared to mention, who were some of the ideological pillars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic antisemitism. After the interview, Barron posted the exchange to Twitter. “The Church,” he declared, “must now read the signs of the times and be willing to examine and critique liberal democracy.” Recently, both Barron and Dolan, the New York cardinal, have joined a presidential commission on religious liberty chaired by Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick and former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson, where they will be joined by Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, and right-wing author Eric Metaxas.
As a whole, though, the cardinals seem set to follow Francis’s steadfast championing of “encounter” in a world of ever-growing walls by electing Prevost, a binational cardinal born in the United States who has spent much of his life in Peru. President Trump has tried to spin the announcement as a “great honor” for the United States—but meanwhile, the ideological battle lines drawn during Francis’s pontificate are already being retraced. Bannon called Leo’s selection the product of an “anti-Trump vote” from “the globalists that run the Curia.” Even in welcoming Leo, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board took a swipe at his predecessor’s willingness to challenge inequality, dismissing him as an uninformed Global South voice blind to economic common sense. The new pontiff, the editorial hoped, would not be “hostile to free markets, as the best way to alleviate poverty and much suffering,” in contrast to Francis, who “believed that the corruption he saw in Argentina was called capitalism.”
Such charges will not possibly land with a Chicago-born-and-raised pope. The question is whether Leo is willing to use his Americanness as protection in order to go on the offensive. Will he rein in the U.S. Catholics who believe they are holier than both their own bishops and those in the countries whose immigrants they revile? Some of his pre-election social media posts show a willingness to criticize the Trump administration’s rollbacks of immigrants’ rights, but that was back when he was a cardinal: how outspoken he will be as a pope remains to be seen. Francis blazed the path to a more global and welcoming Catholicism; Leo XIV must decide if he will continue to walk it.
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