POPE LEO
ESTB 5 25 PRIMARY 1 26 WILL INCL us CARDS ETC
---
TRUMP KEEPS PICKING FIGHTS?
---
AN 6 26
MAGA erupts as Pope Leo meets with Bad Bunny
---
AN 5 26
MAGA Republicans are vehemently attacking Pope Leo the 14th in response to a diplomatic award given to Iran's ambassador. But according to political insider Christopher Hale, who publishes Letters to Leo, and other experts on Vatican traditions, they are taking the award way out of context and overlooking some key facts.
Hale, in a May 13 post on X, explains, "MAGA is falsely attacking Pope Leo XIV again this morning after news emerged that the first U.S.-born pontiff gave Iran's Ambassador to the Holy See a diplomatic award. However, by itself, the award is not unusual. By Vatican custom, the Grand Cross is ordinarily conferred on resident ambassadors to the Holy See after roughly two years in post, and Mokhtari presented his credentials to Pope Francis in December 2023 — two and a half years before Cardinal Parolin signed this certificate."
The U.S. in Holy See account offers further explanation on X, emphasizing that Iran isn't getting any type of special honor from the Vatican.
According to U.S. in Holy See, "Contrary to news reports, Pope Leo has not bestowed an exclusive special honor on the Iranian Ambassador to the Holy See. This decoration is given to all accredited ambassadors to the Holy See after 2+ years of service and has been standard practice for many years. It is a personal recognition and does not imply support or opposition to any policy or country. Thirteen ambassadors were recently given this recognition. Previous U.S. ambassadors have all received the same. Finally, the decoration was not given in person by the pope."
Nonetheless, plenty of attacks on Pope Leo are coming from far-right MAGA Republicans.
Erin Brophy tweeted, "Leo is doing Lucifer's bidding at this point... confers the Vatican's highest honor to the ambassador of the Iranian regime that slaughtered 40,000 of their own people."
MAGA Republican DawnTheColoradan posted, "Pope Leo IS NOT A MAN OF GOD! Awarding vile Satanists horrifically torturing and murdering innocent Iranians is the work of the devil."
Another MAGA Republican, Summer, claimed, "Pope Leo just gave the IRGC regime's ambassador the Vatican’s highest diplomatic honor and praised their 'peace efforts.'"
---
mma
Sean Hannity questions the Pope’s knowledge of the Bible | Media Matters for America
---
---
AN 4 26
When U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy "a whole civilization" in Iran in an April 7 post on his Truth Social platform, the comment drew scathing condemnation not only from countless liberals, progressives and centrist Democrats, but also, from many Never Trump conservatives and libertarians. Even some far-right MAGA influencers, including Infowars' Alex Jones, former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), are calling Trump out.
Yet in far-right white evangelical circles, Trump still has plenty of loyal supporters.
In a biting article published on April 10, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that white evangelicals' feelings of "persecution" are helping fuel a "disastrous" war.
"For over a decade now, the Christian Right has deflected criticism of Trump's immorality and sadism by insisting they are facing persecution for their religious beliefs," Marcotte explains. "In their minds, they are the real victims of a culture gone to hell, and they see the president as their only hope to beat back these imaginary forces of oppression. Nothing, it seems, can shatter this persecution complex. As the Iran war continues to become an ever-bigger disaster, evangelicals are clinging harder than ever to the notion that because they need to defeat their fictional persecutors, Trump's myriad flaws are excusable and forgivable."
Far-right white evangelicals' "paranoid anger," Marcotte argues, is so extreme that they even view "devout Catholics" like Pope Leo XIV as persecutors.
"Regardless of what is being said in private to Catholic leaders," Marcotte observes, "it's clear that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his allies are furious at the pontiff for undermining their efforts to frame this war as a Christian enterprise — and are suggesting that those who oppose it are the equivalent of Christ's persecutors…. (Pastor) Doug Wilson, who heads the denomination Hegseth belongs to, demonstrated how valuable the phony Christian persecution narrative is for conservatives who need an excuse to stick by the (Trump) Administration amid the Iran debacle…. In the real world, Hegseth is a belligerent official who relishes threatening Iranians with 'death and destruction from above.' But in Wilson’s telling, the defense secretary is a humble servant of God, besieged on all sides by the faithless in their ongoing war against Christ's followers."
Marcotte adds, " As the administration's skirmish with Pope Leo shows, though, it's getting harder for the Christian Right to package the Iran war as a product of God's love — even to followers who have a long history of swallowing all sorts of cruelty in the name of Christ…. Some who have been among the president's loudest supporters in the past, like former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcaster Tucker Carlson, are now proclaiming that this war goes against everything Christians should stand for. In an effort to bring critics like these back in line, many evangelical leaders are clinging to false narratives of religious persecution."
---
---
an 4 26
Pentagon denies Trump official threatened war against the Pope - Alternet.org
---
an 4 26
//
Pope Leo XIV chronicler Christopher Hale says he has confirmed that Trump’s Pentagon threatened to declare war on the Vatican.
“In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture,” said Hale.
“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Colby and his associates informed the cardinal. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
As the room temperature grew, Hale said he confirmed that one U.S. official “reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.”
Hale said the report confirms that the Vatican had reason to decline the Trump-Vance White House’s invitation to host Pope Leo XIV for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026 two weeks after the confrontation.
Citing a Free Press report, a writer obtained accounts from Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the Pentagon meeting. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at President Donald Trump. Hale said what “enraged them most” was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
“The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere,” said Hale.
Hale said the cardinal sat through the lecture in silence, but added that “The Holy See has not, since that day, given an inch.”
The Trump administration's contentious relationship with the Catholic Church represents a significant departure from traditional Republican-Church alliances. While Trump secured substantial Catholic voter support in 2016 and 2024 by championing conservative social issues like abortion restrictions, his foreign policy approach and rhetoric have increasingly alienated Church leadership.
Pope Leo XIV has positioned himself as a moral counterweight to Trump's geopolitical aggression, consistently advocating for dialogue-based diplomacy over military intervention. This philosophical clash intensified during Trump's second term, particularly as his administration pursued more hawkish positions on Iran, trade relations, and immigration — issues where Church teaching emphasizes compassion, dialogue, and respect for human dignity.
The Vatican's traditionally neutral stance on secular governance has been tested by Trump's unilateral foreign policy decisions and inflammatory rhetoric. Church leaders have publicly questioned whether American military interventions align with Catholic doctrine on just war theory and the sanctity of human life. Additionally, Trump's administration's hardline immigration policies directly contradict papal messaging that emphasizes welcoming migrants and refugees.
The Pentagon's January confrontation with Cardinal Pierre signals an unprecedented willingness by Trump officials to pressure religious institutions into alignment with administration goals. This represents a potential inflection point: where diplomatic courtesy once governed state-Church relations, coercion may now be replacing negotiation. The Vatican's refusal to participate in the 250th anniversary celebration underscores that even America's most prominent religious institution will not compromise its moral authority for political expediency.
---
AN 4 26
'This is scary!' Experts alarmed at Trump firing respected general - Alternet.org
AN 4 26
As the war on Iran continues to spiral into yet another Middle East quagmire, a growing number of voices from across the political spectrum are voicing their outrage. Now, the call is coming from inside the house.
On Thursday, Deputy Executive Director of the Taskforce on National and Homeland Security David Pyne had some strong words for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, declaring that he is “ashamed” for supporting the warmongering White House official.
“I defended Secretary of War Pete Hegseth from all of his scandals right up until the invasion of Iran,” Pyne tweeted. “He was America First and reportedly counseled Trump against starting a war with Iran a year ago. Since that time he has gone full neocon warmonger and prayed publicly that God would help us kill the Iranian people. I am ashamed I ever supported him.”
Pyne attached this admission to a video clip of a 2024 interview with Hegseth in which he criticized past American military ventures, saying, “The foolishness with which we ricocheted around the world intervening, thinking it was in our best interest when really we just overturned the table and created something worse."
Hegseth of 2024 offers starkly different messaging as Hegseth of 2026, who on Wednesday tweeted, “Back to the Stone Age,” a reference to President Donald Trump’s assertion during his national address the same day that the U.S. was going to “bomb them back to the Stone Age,” which many have interpreted as a thinly veiled threat to commit war crimes.
In his criticism of Hegseth, Pyne pointed to a sermon delivered by the former Fox News anchor on Wednesday morning, in which he prayed that God “make their land a desolation” and grant American soldiers “overwhelming violence … against those who deserve no mercy.”
Pyne wasn’t the only one to take issue with Hegseth’s violent prayer — so too did Pope Leo XIV, who days later delivered a Palm Sunday homily that many suggested was a direct response to the defense secretary.
“Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” said the Pope. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’.”
After tweeting his criticism of Hegseth, Pyne followed up with another post about White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who he claimed “is reportedly urging White House aides to stop censoring reports of US military losses and Iranian military successes as well as plunging poll numbers and gas price trends from President Trump to make him realize what a disaster his great power war with Iran has become.”
---
---
an 3 26
Brendan Carr, the Donald Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is threatening retaliation against broadcasters who offer negative coverage of U.S. war operations against Iran. After Carr threatened to take away their broadcast licenses, President Trump applauded him on his Truth Social platform — writing that he was "thrilled" that Carr was "looking at the licenses" of some "Highly Unpatriotic 'News' Organizations."
But Robert Francis Prevost, AKA Pope Leo the 14th, has very different viewpoint.
In a Monday, March 16 post on X, formerly Twitter, the Catholic Church's first American pope urged journalists to cover the Iran war honestly and not sugar-coat its harsh realities.
Pope Leo tweeted, "In the dramatic circumstances of war, information must guard against the risk of turning into propaganda. It is every journalist's duty to verify the news, so as not to become a megaphone for power. They must show the suffering that war always brings to populations, which entails showing the face of war and recounting it through the eyes of victims."
Journalist John Harwood noted the Pope's candor, tweeting, "The Pope calling out Trump's authoritarianism."
Patrick Strother, CEO of Strothers Communications Group, posted, "This is the 33rd conflict the US has started or participated in during my life. Propaganda played a vital role in selling these wars, but they didn't even bother with the Iran invasion, so journalists have a golden opportunity to change some minds about the ever increasing futility of murdering 'enemies.'"
---
AN 2 26
DECLINE 250TH INVITE JDV, BD OF PEACE BS
---
an 2 26
Mike Johnson tries to give Bible lesson to Pope Leo XIV
---
3X DOWN ON RENEE GOOD SHOOTING
'Moral stain': Catholic outlet questions VP's faith after his Minneapolis shooting speech
AN 1 26
===
---
an 3 26
gingrich sick lang in iran spew // hegs xian natl
Pope Leo 'deeply concerned' about US war in Middle East: 'Assume the moral responsibility'
---
---
AN 1 26
Pope Leo condemns 'Orwellian-style language' in veiled jab at Trump admin
---
//
November 17, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Frontline with Carl Higbie
CARL HIGBIE (HOST): U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issuing a special message to our country on immigration.
First of all, stay in your lane, guys. This is why we separated the church and the state. After all, the church loves not paying taxes. Second, isn't the Vatican literally protected by wall — oh yes, it is. It has walls all the way around it. Big ones at that. Do you want our country to be open up to everyone? I tell you what, lead by example. You tear down your walls. I mean, why not? Matter of fact, how many immigrants are you offering to house in your churches or even your own home? A few have done it, but not in the rectory. Brianna Lyman, election correspondent at The Federalist, and David Medina, founder of Project Libertas. Brianna?
BRIANNA LYMAN (GUEST): You know, Carl, first and foremost, they're not actually upset or concerned with immigration. They're upset about the fact that President Trump's administration took away all their funding that they got under Biden.
Second of all, it's a little disingenuous for these Catholic bishops to come out and talk about humanity. They say nothing when abortion is running rampant in this country. But they're so-called devout Catholics, aren't they? They said nothing when devout Catholic Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi were over here encouraging abortions and Planned Parenthood, but they speak up as soon as their funding gets threatened.
HIGBIE: That's actually an excellent point.
---
---
an 11 25
How Pope Leo puts 'virtue outside and above politics' to fight Trumpism
---
Catholic bishops linked to Trump admin accuse him of violating 'religious liberty'
AN 11 25
---
AN 10 25
Pope Leo tells Catholic bishops to be 'more forceful' pushing back on this Trump policy
---
AN 10 25
CRM?
'Truly horrendous': MAGA melts down at 'awful' Pope Leo XIV for denouncing Trump policy
In a rare moment of direct commentary on American politics, Pope Leo XIV ignited a firestorm among conservative Catholics and MAGA-aligned figures after defending Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich’s decision to honor longtime Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill) — a pro-choice Democrat — for his decades of public service.
Speaking to reporters at the Vatican on Tuesday night, Pope Leo XIV called for a broader, more consistent interpretation of Catholic social teaching, particularly around what it means to be "pro-life."
“I think that is very important to look at the overall work that this Senator has done during, if I'm not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate,” the pope said.
“I understand the difficulty and the tensions, but I think, as I myself have spoken in the past, it’s important to look at many issues that are related to what is the teaching of the Church," the pontiff said. "Someone who says 'I'm against abortion but I'm in favor of the death penalty' is not really pro-life. So someone who says 'I'm against abortion but I'm in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States' — I don't know if that's pro-life.”
The remarks came just days after Cardinal Cupich announced that Durbin would receive the Archbishop Bernardin Award for Public Witness, praising the Illinois Democrat’s “lifelong commitment to human dignity, social justice and the common good.” The reaction from the MAGA wing of the American Catholic community to Pope Leo XIV's remarks was swift and vitriolic.
Conservative influencers, commentators, and clergy accused both Cupich and Pope Leo XIV of "selling out" the pro-life cause and elevating politics over doctrine.
MAGA filmmaker and anti-DEI advocate Robby Statbuck wrote: “Pope after Pope has been a disappointing profile in cowardice who I just can’t look to as a leader. If Robert Sarah was Pope, this would not happen. Many would come back to the church then. Leo sounds like another Francis.”
Joe Rigney, an associate pastor, wrote: “I know that Protestants are supposed to be sheepish in the face of Catholic social teaching (‘deep in history,’ layers of tradition, antiquity, etc), but when the ‘Vicar’ of Christ and the successor of Peter morally equates abortion, deportations, and the death penalty for heinous crimes, and then proceeds to bless a block of ice in order to save the planet from climate change, I admit to being decidedly unimpressed with the ‘seamless garment.’”
Far-right podcaster and self-described traditional Catholic Matt Walsh wrote: “Really terrible answer from Pope Leo. God Himself prescribes the death penalty in the Bible. Is the Pope saying that God is ‘not pro-life’? And who exactly is advocating for ‘inhumane treatment of immigrants’? What sort of inhumane treatment is he referring to? Deportations? Also, how can he say that ‘nobody has all the truth’ on any of these issues? We know the truth on abortion. It isn't complicated. Awful stuff from the Pope. Truly horrendous on about five different levels.”
He continued: “Even if you disagree with the death penalty, to draw a moral equivalence between executing convicted murders after a fair trial and dismembering children in the womb is moral madness. Reddit-tier nonsense coming from the Pope. Very disturbing.”
Michael Heinlein, a Catholic commentator, wrote: “A terribly unclear question made this all the worse. As Cardinal George used to say ‘don’t tell me how you feel, tell me what you think!’”
Christopher Hale, a former Democratic nominee for Congress, mocked the MAGA backlash and wrote: “Maybe if he said it in Latin while wearing the papal tiara, MAGA would listen to him.”
---
AN 9 25
ROBT R
It’s too easy to accept the conventional view that the widening polarization of our society, and the decline of democracy, are due to the demagogue in the Oval Office.
That conventional view is way too simple. Follow the money. The underlying cause is the tsunami of legal bribes flowing from huge, wealthy corporations (and their oligarchic CEOs and major investors) into American politics.
That tsunami has grown dramatically over the last forty years. It underlies the crisis of democracy. It is fueling polarization. Democracy and social cohesion are impossible to sustain when big money is dictating political outcomes.
Over the last four decades, corporate political spending has more than quadrupled, adjusted for inflation.
Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union PACs contributed about as much as corporate PACs. In the 2024 election, corporations outspent labor by more than 3 to 1.
According to a landmark study published in 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at allon legislation emerging from Congress.
Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion:
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Gilens and Page found that lawmakers listen mainly to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals — those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.
It’s far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002 —before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super PACs, before “dark money,” and before the Wall Street bailout.
Decades before Trump, corporations were already getting a high return on the money they invested in politics. I know. I was there. I had a front-row seat.
Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers, small investors, and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.
Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations, such as universal health care and paid family leave. They’ve attacked labor laws — reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a 35 percent forty years ago to just over 6 percent now.
They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Tech, Big Ag, Wall Street, and the largest military contractors now dwarfs welfare for people.
The profits of big corporations have reached record highs, and the ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to nearly 300-to-1 now.
Most Americans, however, are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was forty years ago when adjusted for inflation.
The biggest casualty has been public trust in democracy.
In 1964, only 29 percent of voters thought government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” By 2013, 79 percent of Americans thought so.
A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy that they believe the blatant lies of a self-described strongman and support a political party that no longer stands for democracy.
Capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fuels despotism.
Ironically, the CEOs of many large American corporations are now finally confronting this reality. Despotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy.
My message to every CEO in America: You need democracy but you’re actively undermining it by polluting it with big money and throwing much of your support behind a tyrant whose arbitrary and capricious decisions are threatening your businesses. It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement.
This is not only about economics. Widening inequality and a weakening democracy take a toll on the moral wellbeing of the nation, on the implicit social contract that binds us together, on the trust and cohesion we need to accomplish anything worthwhile.
In one of his first interviews, on September 14, Pope Leo XIV — history’s first U.S.-born pope — talked about the causes of the deep polarization he sees in America and elsewhere:
“Very significant is the continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive. …Yesterday the news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world. What does that mean and what’s that about? If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.”
Trump is not the cause of the growing cynicism about democracy and the deepening polarization of our society. He’s the consequence and culmination of decades of neglect. We could not have remained on the road we were on toward ever-widening inequality and ever-greater political corruption.
If there’s a silver lining to this darkening cloud, it is that Trump may finally force us to confront this long-term crisis.
---
---}:
AN 6 25
The ascendancy of Cardinal Robert Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV – to become the global head of the Catholic Church is an inherent threat to the worldview of the American religious right, according to one Christian pastor.
In a recent essay for Religion News Service (RNS), the Rev. Jennifer Butler — who is the senior pastor at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Corvallis, Oregon — argued that the far right is railing against Leo XIV specifically because of the dilemma he presents to their belief system. Butler wrote that the MAGA faithful is not opposed to the new pontiff because he's a liberal like his predecessor Pope Francis, but because he's a traditional conservative Catholic who nonetheless holds radically different views than Christian nationalists.
"Leo has become a MAGA flashpoint not due to any dramatic break from Catholic doctrine, but because his worldview directly threatens the Christian nationalist engine behind the rising authoritarianism of our time," Butler wrote. "He threatens to become a transnational counterweight to a rapidly expanding authoritarian religious network."
READ MORE:'Destroyed their credibility': MAGA turns on Trump officials unable to prove conspiracies
Not long after Prevost was elected to the papacy, Vice President JD Vance traveled to the Holy See to meet the first American pope in history. But Butler pointed out that Leo XIV and Vance are in direct contradiction with one another when it comes to Christian nationalism. While Vance has argued that Americans should put their country first before the rest of the world, Leo XIV — who was a longtime priest in Peru — has said that "Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others."
"This was no minor theological dustup over the proper 'order of love' Christians should obey," Butler observed. "It was a direct rebuttal to the ideological foundation of Christian nationalism: that faith should serve state nativist power and preserve national sovereignty at the expense of human rights."
The United Church of Christ pastor called the Christian right a "transnational" movement that has also found footing in authoritarian regimes like Vladimir Putin's Russia and Viktor Orbán's Hungary. And she characterized its goal as one in which its proponents impose a "rigid moral order" on the rest of the world that serves to "polarize the public and erode democratic institutions." However, she said Pope Leo XIV's tenure could be one in which the Christian right's use of religion "to justify authoritarian consolidation and frame dissent as sacrilege" is upended.
"The election of Leo XIV signals that not all global religious institutions are capitulating," she wrote. "... MAGA influencers understand that when Leo speaks, people listen — not just Catholics, but others looking for spiritual leadership grounded in clarity. His critics know how powerful that can be."
READ MORE:'Not going to buckle': Republican warns Senate he'll tank Trump's bill over this provision
Click here to read Butler's full essay in RNS.
---
---
AN 6 25
Divine trolling': Pope schedules Chicago mass on the same day as Trump's military parade
---
AN 525
When the Vatican announced that 69-year-old Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, would be replacing the late Pope Francis, many moderate and liberal Catholics in the United States applauded the choice as historic. Chicago native Prevost is now the first American pope in the long history of the Catholic Church.
But far-right MAGA Republicans responded to the announcement with anger and are disappointed that Pope Leo has similar views to Pope Francis and isn't a far-right social conservative.
In an article published on May 21, The Guardian's Julian Coman notes the ideological differences between far-right MAGA Catholics — including Vice President JD Vance and "War Room" host Steve Bannon — and the new pope.
READ MORE: MAGA Catholics 'not a fan' of Leo as new Pope calls 'for a united church'
MAGA conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was quick to attack Pope Leo after the announcement, describing him as "anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis" on X, formerly Twitter. Loomer is Jewish, not Catholic, but according to Coman, MAGA Catholics share that view of him.
"The comic-book casting of the new pope as a globalist villain in the U.S. culture wars is traceable back to his predecessor's impact on liberal opinion a decade ago," Coman explains. "Pope Francis' sometimes-lonely championing of progressive causes, such as the rights of migrants, gave him a kind of liberal celebrity and led Time Magazine to name him 'Person of the Year' in 2013. Pope Leo, born in Chicago, has been pre-emptively caricatured by much of the MAGA right as a continuity pontiff who will, in effect, front up the religious wing of the Democratic Party."
Coman continues, "Leaving the simplistic conflation of religious perspective and political positioning aside, the truth is far more interesting than that. It may also be more challenging for Catholic MAGA luminaries such as the vice-president, JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump's sometime adviser Steve Bannon if they are serious about their faith."
The Guardian journalist describes Vance (who was raised Protestant but converted to Catholicism) and Bannon as "representatives of a traditionalist movement in the church" that "sought to undermine Francis' papacy at every turn and has become a kind of theological vanguard for the America First era."
READ MORE:'Open up those archives': Abuse survivors demand accountability from Pope Leo
"Enter Pope Leo," Coman writes. "The most geographically diverse conclave in church history was surely aware that in choosing an American to succeed Francis, it was setting up a potential showdown between the Vatican and Trumpian nationalism."
Nonetheless, some right-wing Catholics are defending Pope Leo, including Philadelphia-based immigration attorney and political columnist Christine Flowers.
In a May 9 column for Broad & Liberty, Flowers stressed that while she was hoping for a more "conservative" pope and has disagreements with Pope Leo, she admires him as a person. Flowers wrote, "This Pope is one for the 21st Century, and if he is the last one that I encounter before I am consecrated with last rites, I will die a happy woman."
READ MORE:'Cruelty is the point': Trump’s Capitol Hill rant panned as MAGA warns 'Johnson hasn’t done his job'
*Read Julian Coman's full article for The Guardian at this link.
---