The conclave that led to the election of Pope Leo XIV was more geopolitical than its participants were willing to admit. It also demonstrated that the Catholic Church is capable of making timely decisions in response to global emergencies when taking a stand within a world order undergoing profound transformation, if not outright disintegration.
The feared scattering effect of Pope Francis’s strategy in appointing cardinals did not materialize. In fact, this strategy provided an opportunity to rally support for the new pope worldwide.
This global sentiment has clearly identified Trump’s United States as a decisive issue for the next papacy. It has done so by choosing the approach that best allows the Catholic Church to present itself as a point of reference for a world that risks plunging into an uncontrolled vortex of conflict without governance.
Church and papacy after Francis: Two ways
The conclave faced two possible paths regarding the Trump’s concern. Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York and representative of the American Catholics most openly in conflict with Pope Francis, suggested the cardinal electors consider the Trump administration a US issue to be left to the American Episcopal Conference and its majority’s desire to return to a pre-Francis Catholic Church. For this group of cardinals, the ideal candidate was Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Budapest.
The second track found its point of reference in Cardinal Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, with the support of American cardinals who are more aligned with Francis’s papacy: Cupich of Chicago and McElroy of Washington, in particular.
Here, the ecclesial and geopolitical vision was completely overturned. Trump’s United States is a matter for the Holy See because it cannot be classified as a purely American issue. In the global disorder organized by the current U.S. administration, the mandate entrusted to the next pope was to undertake a profound renewal of the Church’s social teaching — one that would allow it to be effective globally after modernity, which has now come to an end.
On July 8, 2013, Pope Francis traveled to the island of Lampedusa. There, he made migrants and refugees the symbol of the real social challenge to which the world (and the Catholic Church) must respond with a sense of justice that transcends any economy or partisan interests. In doing so, he began to implement this unprecedented social teaching of the Catholic Church, which still needs to be developed further and put into practice.
Faced with these geopolitical and ecclesial imaginaries, the cardinal electors quickly chose the Tobin’s option, making the Holy See the ecclesial interface with Trump’s United States on the one hand and shifting the weight of the Catholic Church’s public stance from individual morality to social justice at global level on the other.
Cardinal Prévost must have seemed like an obvious choice to the majority of cardinals in the conclave. In dealing with American bishops who are closer to Trump than to Francis’s Church, a pope was needed who could (literally) speak their language but should not be assimilated into the American ecclesial system. This system has proven to be stubbornly hostile not only to Francis but also to the Holy See and its institutional bodies.
Prevost guarantees a triple distance from the new Catholic Americanism. He presents himself as a guarantee for even the most distant and marginalized territories of the Catholic faith worldwide: he comes from a religious order, was bishop in Peru, and head of a Dicastery of the Holy See.
His election to the papacy also signals that global Catholicism’s tolerance for an American episcopate that adheres to the Trump’s way of using religion and is in constant conflict with the Holy See has reached its limit.
Leo XIV and the American Church
The American Nation was genuinely amazed to see a US citizen ascend to the Chair of Peter for the first time in history, and this amazement constitutes a valuable asset that Prevost must handle with care and wisdom. He must use it in accordance with the mandate he received from the conclave and the name he chose for his Petrine ministry in service to the Catholic Church worldwide.
From his very first speeches, Pope Leo XIV addressed the Church and bishops of the United States, while speaking to believers and people throughout the world. He has done so by speaking their language and making unmistakable references to those in the American Church who see Trump as a path to new privilege. A privilege that would allow them to realize a model of a Catholic Church for the strong, at the expense of the weak and of those who live on the margins of global society and the ecclesial institution itself.
His message that social justice comes first and cannot be traded for measures that seems to support questions of individual morality or for the benefit of the American Catholic Church was clear. The American Church was immediately tested on this issue by the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
While the Catholic Episcopal Conference offered a condescending critique—approving cuts in funding for pro-choice associations, on the one hand, and the increase of federal founding to private schools (willing to comply with Trump’s standards), on the other, while criticizing the bill’s impact on social security—some Catholic bishops (including Cupich and McElroy) signed an ecumenical statement condemning the entire budget law. They argue that it is elitist and detrimental to the nation’s weakest and most vulnerable people, including immigrants.
In light of Pope Leo XIV’s clear instructions, the room for maneuvering is shrinking for the segment of American Catholicism that wants to present itself as a cornerstone of Catholic orthodoxy while largely acquiescing to Trump’s agenda. This segment of the US Catholic world cannot emerge as a force of opposition to a pope who is a son of the American Nation — and whom it sincerely admires — at this moment.
Neither Prévost nor the American cardinals who brokered his election intend to sideline Catholics who support Trump’s policies. In fact, his appointment aims also to resolve tensions within Catholicism in the United States and elsewhere. However, the direction of mediation between the different Catholic souls is changing, as is which groups are called upon to justify their positions in public debates and political choices.
Most importantly, the criterion governing the Catholic Church’s stance in the contemporary global context is changing: it is about social justice and equity. This requires a collective effort to implement procedures that effectively pacify dramatic war scenarios—where diplomatic realism and prophetic faith must work together, not against each other.
The cardinal electors deemed Leo XIV the most suitable person to mediate between the various souls of global Catholicism, a task with significant repercussions for the effectiveness of the Holy See’s diplomacy. In this regard, Prevost, overwhelmed by the expectation to be either a clone of Francis or a replica of Ratzinger, adopted a dual approach.
He adopted an aesthetic of self-presentation that was reassuring to those uncomfortable with Pope Francis’ style of exercising the Petrine ministry; as well as an ecclesial discourse that recovers the key elements of his predecessor’s style. While this decision may be considered a Solomon’s choice, it is likely that Prevost did not have much choice in the matter.
In a global society of images, the aesthetics of appearance can easily take precedence over the content the new pope wants to implement as the hallmark of his leadership of the Catholic Church. This is all the more true when global medias takes the reassuring tone of his public image as the key to understanding his pontificate.
Finding the right balance between these two aspects represents an important challenge at the beginning of his pontificate, one that Prevost has found himself partly forced to undertake. There is a risk that the new American pope will lose the “people of many” whom Francis brought together as an integral part of the people of God in the Catholic Church. These are men and women who, thanks to Pope Francis, felt an unexpected closeness to the mission of a church that was emerging from its certainties and habits as a chosen people.
Pope Leo will need these people during his pontificate; they are important allies who cannot be easily dismissed. In the United States and elsewhere, he must earn their trust through concrete gestures because idealistic speeches that align him with his predecessor’s global vision are not enough.
The goal is not to repeat what Francis did, but rather to find practices of the Petrine ministry that demonstrate to this “people of many” the surprising closeness to and of the Church that Francis was capable of letting them feel.
At a time when global disorder and a profound constitutional crisis seem to reign in the United States, Pope Leo XIV must gather the best forces of the human spirit around himself and the Catholic Church, wherever they may be.
The crisis of the American Nation
For his second term, Donald Trump presented himself as the great fixer of ongoing wars (Ukraine and Gaza) and of the United States’ identity crisis. Six months later, his presidency seems to have become bogged down on these fronts. The international turmoil created by his decisions and counter-decisions has accelerated the end of an era in the West that had long been in decline.
The price paid for this realignment is certainly high—perhaps too high for an increasingly volatile international balance to bear. The inability of major multilateral institutions—from the United Nations to the European Union—to adapt to these “new times” paves the way for Vatican diplomacy to take on a leading geopolitical role. Furthermore, the unreliability of political leaders, combined with the lack of a clear American strategy toward Asia, could allow Pope Leo XIV to play a prominent role in constructing a new world order.
The Catholic Church, now led by an American, has a short window of opportunity to take advantage of this geopolitical and evangelical chance in a world thirsty for justice and equity. However, this opportunity cannot be seized by opposing the current US administration; rather, it must be seized through a constructive and critical dialectical relationship with it.
From this perspective, the first American pope is an opportunity for the US—a Nation that cannot stop being hegemonic, even if it wants to. American Catholicism as a whole recognizes itself in the ecclesial journey that brought Robert Prevost to the Chair of Peter. At this moment, it is called upon to respond to the civil duty of Catholic faith in establishing a “global new deal” — from politics to economics, from care for the creation to education, from formation of consciences to freedom of expression (also the religious one). Even at home.
There was a time when the Holy See viewed American Catholicism with suspicion — specifically, their practice of democratic civil and political engagement. However, with Pope Francis and the American episcopate’s attraction to Trump’s policies, the positions have been reversed.
Today, the Holy See sees not simply democracy, but the constitutional state as something more than a mere instrument for organizing political bargaining among the privileged few. Faced with this fact, American Catholicism’s task is paradoxically more difficult today because, to align with the Holy See’s democratic convictions, they must invent a new constitutional era that reshapes the nation’s power structures.
Executive supremacy in the United States has roots in both past and recent history. The Supreme Court’s immunity granted to Trump (under investigation) during the final phase of the Biden administration has likely broken the institutional and constitutional balance that currently allows Trump (president) to use sometime executive power in arbitrarily way. This circumvents a system of checks and balances presupposing a willingness of the executive branch to exercise political restraint.
Nowadays, the American judiciary is split: the Supreme Court tends to preserve Trump’s expansionism in the use of executive power, while federal judges seek to keep that power within the bounds of the rule of law through ordinary rulings.
The state of the Nation today also presents itself as a great theological stage, with Trump fitting into the role of the king-messiah sent to restore the original promise of the American land. Meanwhile, the judges act as katechon, a power that seeks to curb an executive supremacy pushing beyond the boundaries of the law.
This situation cannot be sustained for long. American Catholicism must invest all its civil and spiritual resources to prevent the collapse of the American experiment that has shaped the world, for better or for worse, in the last hundred years.
