Republican converts of the JD Vance variety are coming up against the reality of a Pope who doesn’t do their politics
It is politely forgotten now but we are occasionally reminded that the United States was born in part in a fit of anti-Catholic paranoia. Among the “Intolerable Acts” of King George III and parliament identified by the authors of the Declaration of Independence as the basis for their revolutionary urge was the Quebec Act of 1774. After victory over the French in Canada in the Seven Years War, Britain had the thorny task of managing a colony whose inhabitants were predominantly Roman Catholic. And so the act established for the first time wide-ranging civil rights for Catholics under English rule.
This was regarded with alarm by colonists in neighbouring New England. John Adams, son of a deacon of the Congregational Church in Massachusetts, and later the second president of the United States, declared it “Dangerous to the Interests of the Protestant Religion and of these Colonies”.
It was only one of the colonists’ objections to British rule, of course, and when they wrote their constitution a decade later the founding fathers placed freedom of worship near the top of the Bill of Rights. But it is a helpful reminder that the US is a Protestant creation, forged by settlers of a puritan sensibility whose pilgrimage west had been driven by consternation that the Anglican church was far too Romanish for their tastes.
No one would mistake Donald Trump for a puritan but his skirmish with Pope Leo XIV is another hint of the lingering American suspicion that God’s country is only a popish plot away from subjugation by the Bishop of Rome.
hat the pontiff is an American adds a piquancy to this church-state tension. Leo’s condemnations of the war against Iran have sparked outrage among Trump supporters and calls that the pontiff should keep his ferula out of the Oval Office. Trump denounced the Pope, treating him like a political opponent who he said was “weak on crime” and “terrible on foreign policy”. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” he posted.
Calls to keep religion out of politics sound odd from a Republican Party that has become more or less the political wing of evangelical Christianity in the past 50 years. Trump’s comments came days after a Holy Week prayer event at the White House in which Franklin Graham, a preacher whose services are barely distinguishable from Maga rallies, compared the president to a heroic biblical figure. God had “raised up President Trump” to defeat the modern day Persians, as he had with the prophet Esther. Paula White, the White House’s official “spiritual adviser”, who has built a highly lucrative ministry on televised public exorcisms and speaking in tongues, suggested Trump was like Jesus Christ on Good Friday — “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused”.
This harnessing of religious doctrine and symbolism to a political cause is nothing new. But the rift between the Republican leadership and the Catholic church is fresh and comes in the context of a sharp elevation of Catholic thinking in elite conservative American circles in the past 20 years.
Unlike evangelicals, American Catholics tend to vote like the country at large, split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. But since the turn of the century the Pope’s flock has been augmented by conservatives, political and doctrinal, who have seen in the church a more hospitable home for their beliefs. A steady flow of prominent converts (perhaps most famously JD Vance, the vice-president) have been attracted by the intellectual framework for faith developed from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Merton, and a traditionalism in rite and dogma that sits comfortably within the conservative mindset.
Many of the so-called “postliberals” who have been in the forefront of rationalising modern populist nationalism, such as Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame, are also Catholics. Conservative Catholics have come to dominate the upper reaches of the judiciary — five of the six-member conservative majority of the Supreme Court are Catholics.
Just as important, Rome’s part in the victory over godless communism at the end of the Cold War fostered a sense among conservative Americans that the church was their ally. St John Paul II, the fierce anti-communist credited with helping bring down the Soviet Union, was also an outspoken intendant of traditional moral teaching on issues such as abortion, gay rights and euthanasia.
All this seems to have created the mistaken impression for a lot of religiously inclined Americans that the Catholic church was the new Republican Party at prayer. But they had forgotten or ignored that the church’s fundamental social principles were all along rooted in the message of Jesus Christ and the primacy of Christian charity. For all his doctrinal and moral conservatism, John Paul frequently reminded followers of the church’s commitment to social justice, with condemnations of material inequality and the excesses of capitalism, asserting the moral imperative of support for the poor, the immigrant, the marginalised — as well as a strong aversion to wars of choice.
Some years ago a wag on Twitter captured this dissonance for many American Catholics. “Every lifelong Catholic I’ve ever met is like ‘I think we’re supposed to give this food to poor people’ and every adult convert is like ‘the Archon of Constantinople’s epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the eucharist clearly states women shouldn’t have driver’s licenses’,” wrote @agraybee.
For Maga-first Catholics Leo’s apostasy is a dismaying revelation that the Pope is after all a “Marxist”, as more than one prominent Trump supporter has described him this month. They may even start to consider that those colonists had it right all along.
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