President Donald Trump’s feud with Pope Leo XIV is “deeper than politics,” wrote academic Walter Russell Mead on Monday — and that depth helps explain the Pope’s dominance over the president.
While both men were born in the United States (Trump in Queens, Leo as Robert Prevost in Chicago), the Pope has spent most of his career in Peru, explained Walter Russell Mead, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal. Because he spent his formative professional years in Latin America, he can in some respects be better thought of as a second Latin American pope (after Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis) than as a strictly “American” pope.
“In diagnosing the problem, the wing of Latin Catholicism that both Francis and Leo represent saw the church’s historical links with elite power structures and oligarchical families as a key vulnerability,” Mead wrote. “This wing sees creating a ‘church of and for the poor’ as an ethical imperative as well as a way to keep the church relevant. To that end, both within and beyond the movement known as Liberation Theology, many Latin Catholics promote visions of solidarity, inclusion, anticolonialism and anticapitalism to increase the church’s appeal across Latin America.”
He added, “This vision does not, to put it mildly, mesh well with Mr. Trump’s MAGA worldview. The administration’s agenda of restoring Washington’s dominance in the Western Hemisphere rubs most Latin Americans the wrong way and intensifies anticolonial and anticapitalist sentiment.”
In addition to these political differences, Mead pointed out that the Pope is more in touch than the president with the strains of Christianity that resonate more with disenfranchised people — and the more conservative Catholics like Vice President JD Vance feel threatened by this.
“Nostalgia for the Latin Mass and the pomp and paraphernalia, doctrinal and otherwise, of traditional Tridentine Catholicism is connected sociologically and politically to the chief opponents of the left-coded Catholicism now dominant across Latin America,” Mead explained. “The ‘postliberal’ Catholicism that has electrified a new generation of right-leaning American converts, many of them supporters of Vice President JD Vance, emerges from the kind of Catholicism that men like Francis and Leo have fought all their lives.”
Indeed, the bishop in Trump’s own backyard has denounced Trump and the conservative Christianity he promulgates. Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez, the sixth bishop of Palm Beach (the Florida community that is home to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate), said in a recent sermon that he sides with the pontiff over the chief executive.
"The Diocese of Palm Beach stands firm with our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, and strongly rejects the disrespectful and violent attacks that Donald J. Trump has directed against the Holy Father," Rodríguez said. "These attacks also constitute a grave violation of the religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution of the United States and, as such, harm the rights of the American Catholic faithful. Please pray for the safety of the Holy Father."
Speaking to AlterNet last week, Christendom College associate professor of history Dr. Christopher Shannon explained that Trump’s anti-Catholic rhetoric is part of a larger history of U.S. anti-Catholic sentiment.
“Anti-Catholicism is baked into Anglo-American political culture,” Shannon told AlterNet. “During the Revolution, patriot leaders from [future president] John Adams to Thomas Paine repeatedly denounced British oppression in language drawn directly from earlier denunciations of the Catholic Church. For example, in Common Sense, Paine likened monarchy to ‘popery.’”