So who had Robert Francis Prevost on their bingo card?
No one, right? The election of the cardinal to succeed Pope Francis as Leo XIV came so far out of left field as to be outside the park of the Chicago-born Leo’s beloved White Sox. And yet, it didn’t take long to see that the choice of Leo – calm, centered, bespectacled, math-studying, multilingual, trumpet- and tennis-playing ,Republican primary-voting, Francis-mentored Leo – was the perfect one to countermand the rising American nationalism under President Donald J. Trump.
By now it’s clear that the coalition of the Roman Catholic Church, evangelical Christianity and Trump that overturned Roe versus Wade, outlawing the right to an abortion federally, was never more than a one-issue movement. For opponents of the right to choose, that was fine, since that was all they were interested in. But it also meant – and I’m sure this never occurred to Trump as narcissists have no core self and thus no self-awareness – that once Roe was defeated, the president’s sell-by date was stamped as far as the Church was concerned.
Indeed, without sex – including the gender and sexuality issues under that umbrella – Trump and the Church have nothing in common. Now the two find themselves at odds over a number of key issues, particularly immigration and the poor.
The Church, being a universal one – that’s the meaning of the name “Catholic” – must, like the universe itself, expand or it will slowly die. It’s not going to increase its flock through women having one or two kids in their 30s while juggling careers. As with a workforce or any movement faced with a low-birth reality, the Church must look, as it has always done, to missionary outreach in the developing world. This is not to suggest that the Church doesn’t believe in its mission. But it also needs the poor black and brown people that mission brings in.
Trump, however, doesn’t want these people, be they legal or illegal. The only immigrants he wants are the white South Africans who reportedly had their property taken away by the black South African government. Trump says they’re survivors of genocide. Refugee experts say they don’t meet the standard of refugees. In the South African government’s clash with farmers, blacks as well as whites have been killed. But these blacks have not been granted refugee status and fast-tracked to the United States. The whites who have are not any worthier than brown and black people who have been economically disadvantaged or deprived of religious liberty and political safety.
The Church’s embrace of migrants, the poor, the otherwise dispossessed and its DEI approach to bringing in more laypeople, especially women, is antithetical to Trump’s autocratic style of governance. Hence the Church’s need to counterprogram him. And in Leo it has someone who is younger, fitter, more personable, more accomplished and instantly more popular, with real compassion. (Contrast Leo gently urging the press to report the news fairly and Trump calling reporters who questioned his acceptance of a $400 million jet from Qatar “stupid” and “fake.”
Look for a rocky road between the president and the papacy, one that may ultimately lead Leo to become to the Trump Administration what John Paul II was to the old Soviet Union – a catalyst for change and ultimately its demise.