How will the 267th Bishop of Rome deal with the 47th US President?

RTÉ News​

09-05-2025

The election of the first US Pope in history is huge news in America. Every TV network, cable news channel and most major newspaper is leading with the story. And the story is going to get bigger because of politics and pageantry. Pageantry first.
Americans love a bit of pomp and splendour, preferably freighted with venerable tradition. The Vatican is close to unbeatable on that score.
Days of wall-to-wall coverage of the papal funeral and conclave - complete with picture-in-picture live shot of the chimney on the Sistine Chapel - shows the appetite in the American audience for the colour, the splendour, the tradition, the ritual.
It's the same with the British Royal Family. The coverage of Queen Elizabeth's funeral was similarly lavishly covered by the American networks. The show, the spectacle looks even better on large format flat panel TV screens. The bigger scale of the Vatican looks even better.
For the US TV stations, especially the cable stations, its hours of free material, lavishly produced by Vatican TV. And it's so out of the ordinary for America.
The marble, the gold, the artwork, the uniforms, the robes. Foreign and yet somewhat familiar – it's the Christian religion after all.
And it's an election – plenty of speculative guff, and plenty of time to relay it all help to build up to a grand finale – the installation of a new Pope.
Who doesn't like a competition – even if the stakes are considered low for America and Americans?
But then suddenly – it's an American Pope!
Suddenly the guy in the white robes who lives in a renaissance palace next to the biggest church in the world surrounded by Swiss guards in armour is American.
All that pomp, all that ceremony, all that ritual – an American is now the boss of all that until the day he dies. A guy from Chicago, no less. A graduate of Villanova on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Like, wow!
It's only starting to sink in how big of a deal this is.
First US interview will be profound moment
We have heard him speak in Italian and Spanish. But the real impact will come when he does his first TV interview for an American network (I assume he will do one) and speaks in the vernacular of the United States – English.
With a Chicago accent. It's going to be a profound moment in the life of this country.
That's when it will really hit home – America has won the Pope.
The most famous religious figure on the planet is now an American. And Americans love fame. It was the commodity that fuelled Donald Trump's ascent to supreme political power here.
He had the kind of name recognition that all politicians strive for well before he entered politics because of his role in the popular cultural life of the country – from the gossip columns of the New York tabloids, to a cameo in a Home Alone movie to reality TV – hell, even the bankruptcy cases: they all contributed to Donald Trump's fame. That's what brought the "low propensity voters" out to vote for him. Fame first, then politics.
The fame of the papacy is now manifested in an American. And that brings us to the politics of Leo XIV's appointment: is he going to become the Anti-Trump?
Catholics a group worth getting close to for Trump
Andrew Breitbart's famous dictum that politics is downstream of culture now comes into play. As Mr Trump rose politically through his long-term presence in popular American culture, Leo XIV has risen to the top of the Catholic culture that comes with an added perk of being a head of state.
A tiny, and weak state in the conventional measure of the term. But a very powerful one in terms of religious culture – and the moral authority that comes from 2,000 years of accumulated philosophical enquiry. And it's a key diplomatic listening post and intermediary (those images of Mr Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meeting in a corner of St Peter's at Pope Francis's funeral).
How will the 267th Bishop of Rome deal with the 47th President of the United States?
Mr Trump has moved close to the Catholic Church in America, mostly for political reasons.
First there are the numbers: one in five Americans now describe themselves as Catholic. It's the biggest single Christian denomination in America. So, there are lots of votes to be had.
Surveys indicate that 53% of US Catholics are Republican voters. 43% are Democrats. That's a big spread, way bigger than the 1.5% margin between Mr Trump and Kamala Harris in the Presidential election.
So, Catholics were a group that was worth getting close to. Picking a Catholic Vice President was probably helpful also. Catholic is in some ways a proxy for that part of the Trump agenda that promotes church going, school prayers, traditional family values, and anti-abortion laws as virtues in American public life. It is part of the culture that is upstream of the Politics.
Change the culture, change the politics, as Breitbart used to say. The eponymous media organisation he founded is now led by Steve Bannon.
Politics is a numbers game and US Catholic numbers are too big to ignore.
Indeed for the politically agile, they are numbers that simply have to be rounded up and corralled into a winning coalition. Pope Leo XIV himself is reported to have voted in Republican Primaries, as well as general elections (though not in 2016 and 2020).
His brother Lou told ABC News: "I wouldn't call him a conservative: I wouldn't call him a liberal. I think he's open minded enough."
The other big numbers Mr Trump was able to make gains with were the demographic numbers – specifically the growing number of US Latinos – the demographic that has driven growth in the US Catholic church over the past half century.
But across all demographics, Mr Trump scored big for his promise to stop more Latinos (and others, but mostly Latinos) from coming into the US. Deportation – sometimes to the very harsh world of El Salvador's anti-terrorism prison – is now the order of the day. The idea is appealing to many Americans, but the ugly reality is turning many others off.
It may be a cruel form of show and tell, deporting a relatively small number with baroque cruelty to discourage the others and on the surface at least, it appears to be working, as the numbers of people trying to cross the southern border in irregular fashion has dwindled to virtually nothing.
Mr Trump has often been described as the producer of his own reality show, using images to support his message. But he is not the only one.
The Catholic Church is a past master at the art of show and tell. Symbolism – visual messages – is a very important part of its communication technique. always has been.
The pageantry has a purpose, and it is now deployed in support of an American Bishop of Rome.
The open question is what will he use it for? The subtext is how will he navigate the relationship with the President of the United States. His President.
ABC's Nightly News TV programme tracked down two of the new Pope's brothers for their reactions to the news. Like most Americans they were shocked at first. Conventional wisdom here is that no American could be Pope as America possesses so much political, military and economic power in the world already – why add to it with spiritual and cultural power?
But the conventional wisdom has been overturned as so much conventional wisdom here has been, at least since Barack Obama was elected President, and Mr Trump began his relentless march on Washington.
They used to say that only Richard Nixon could go to China, so maybe only an American Pope can act as a moral check on the President and his MAGA movement's most extreme positions.
This could be one of the most interesting cultural out workings of our times.
The Catholic Church, universal in approach, is a global organisation – perhaps the original multinational. At a time when the MAGA message - and much of the new right in European politics - is fuelled by talk of a pushback against "Globalists", and "Elites", and politics risks its own brutalisation in its response to the very serious problems of mass migration.
The election of an American Pope may in itself be one of the most consequential political and ethical messages of our time.
And a lot of it is going to come down to the position of migrants, and how they are treated by governments.
The new Pope's brother John, who still lives in Chicago, told ABC News: "The big thing for him is immigration, and is it right what's going on. I think that'll be a challenge for him, because I think he'll say something about it too."
A skilled diplomat and political actor
The new Pope – Bob to his friends from college, Rob to his brother Lou – is also a South American Pope, a naturalised citizen of Peru.
That is bound to influence his outlook. He is regarded as a conciliator, someone who played a moderating role in the division in the Peruvian Bishops between followers of Liberation Theology on the left, and members of Opus Dei on the right.
And then there is the name he has Chosen – Leo XIV. The last Pope Leo was noted for his emphasis on Catholic social teaching: workers' rights, trade unions, a dislike of Laissez Faire capitalism and its excesses.
But Leo XIV was also a skilled diplomat and political actor, pushing French Catholics to support the third Republic (against the monarchist tradition there), standing against the new Italian state over the loss of papal lands, and notably easing the Kulturkampf - the cultural struggle -in Germany: Bismark's rough handling of the Catholic church in the rise of a unified Reich.
The Trump/MAGA/Breitbart kulturkampf-in-support-of-politics in America has rippled out across the world, its techniques mimicked in smaller polities elsewhere. Is another Pope called Leo not going to interpose himself in this cultural struggle?
Minds made up
Reportedly reserved by nature, quiet "not a show pony", as one friend told TV news, the new Pope doesn't sound like someone who wants to take on the President in public.
Besides, the Vatican prefers to work out of sight. Confrontation seems most unlikely.
But some prominent Trump supporters have already made their minds up. Laura Loomer, the MAGA conspiracy theorist who has the ear of the President (and got four top national security staff fired) posted about the new Pope.
"His is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis. Catholics don't have anything good to look forward to. Just Another Marxist puppet in the Vatican".
This was over a 2015 article from the Washington Post by New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, under the headline; "Why Donald Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric is so problematic".
The then Bishop Prevost had reposted it on Twitter.
More recently he reposted on X, an article from the National Catholic Reporter headlined 'JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others'.
Cardinal Dolan was one of the electors in the Conclave that chose Bob Prevost as Pope. Last week Donald Trump appointed Cardinal Dolan to a new White House advisory panel on religion.