Catholics

Thursday

Damian Thompson

What’s really behind Trump’s clash with the Pope?

Donald Trump’s latest clash with the Catholic Church stunned even the most hardened veterans of culture-war X. According to the President of the United States, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, the conspicuously holy spiritual leader of 1.3 billion people, is “WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy.” He also claimed that, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” For commentators accustomed to the fog of modern diplomatic platitudes, such trash talk was the equivalent of a Holy Roman Emperor hurling insults at a medieval pontiff.

trump pope damian thompson

Friday

Margaret Mitchell

Donald Trump’s papal style

The election of the first American pope, Leo XIV, comes at a strange time when a Catholic establishment is running the show in his home country: vice president J.D. Vance, of course, as well as health secretary RFK Jr., border czar Tom Homan, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, secretary of state Marco Rubio, to name the most prominent few. Melania is allegedly one as well. They are American exceptionalists who want to Make America Great Again and, in the process, Make Catholicism Great Again too. MAGA and Catholicism seem like strange bedfellows at first glance. Donald Trump has been divorced twice and married thrice. The rich may have a difficult time entering the kingdom of God, but they’ve had no trouble finding roles within Trump’s administration, which hosts 13 billionaires.

Trump

Monday

Damian Thompson

Americans should feel uneasy about the new Archbishop of Washington

For an eighty-eight-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most of his life he was, like a typical Argentinean, viscerally but vaguely anti-American. By the time he became pope in 2013, he and the Democratic Party had embraced the ideology of the globalist left. And so they forged an alliance — one the Pope may soon regret, now that Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill are beginning to grasp the scale of the Vatican’s corruption. In 2016, Francis gave his blessing to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Catholic front organizations, motivated not just by their shared obsession with anti-racism and climate change but contempt for Donald Trump.

Archbishop

Monday

Ella Johnson

Donald Trump ‘the anointed one’ at the Road to Majority Conference

Donald Trump spoke at the Faith and Freedom Coalition on Saturday, with a few speakers deeming him “the anointed one.” Trump spoke for approximately one hour and twenty-five minutes. The coalition slotted multiple hype-men right before he appeared, including Republican governor Kristi Noem. The former president hit all his usual talking points — the economy, the border and immigration, Joe Biden, Ukraine, Israel, his cute "tic-tac" trick — and made sure to mention the Ten Commandments, and said, “We answer to God in heaven,” not to political leaders. There were at least two impressive instances in which Trump expertly responded to the inclinations of the crowd.

faith freedom donald trump

Sunday

Will Collins

What did the Habsburgs ever do for us?

Do you have a favorite Habsburg? Mine is Maximilian I, the first and last ruler of the Second Mexican Empire. Americans may be vaguely aware of him because a defeat of his French allies is commemorated annually on Cinco de Mayo. His struggles echo the experience of many unlucky rulers supported by fickle foreign patrons: Abandoned by the French and besieged by belligerent locals, the ill-fated emperor stubbornly refused to abandon a throne he hadn’t much wanted in the first place. His last words to the firing squad were, “Aim well, muchachos.

habsburgs

Tuesday

Patrick Ruffini

Here come the Hispanic Republicans

A coveted working-class demographic that has been loyally Democratic for generations stands poised to vote Republican in record numbers. Its voters are upwardly mobile, having risen from the deep poverty of their immigrant ancestors to a decent middle-class life. Their incomes are rising quickly and are soon expected to reach the national average. They start businesses at rates that exceed the native born. Recent government data shows them moving into the suburbs from ethnic enclaves in the cities. All of this has coincided with their political shift to the right. This demographic is family-oriented and deeply religious.

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Tuesday

Casey Chalk

How Catholics became the new WASPs

Close to a century ago, in 1928, Alfred E. Smith, the governor of New York, became the first Catholic nominee of a major political party. A predominantly Protestant America was suspicious of Smith, who, among other things, opposed Prohibition. New York lawyer and Episcopalian Charles C. Marshall published a letter questioning Smith’s fitness for office. Among other criticisms, Marshall quoted papal encyclicals that denied the legitimacy of religious freedom as popularly understood by most Americans. “What the hell is an encyclical?” Smith is reported to have responded. Concerns about the irreconcilability of American republican government and Catholicism were nothing new.

Monday

Bill Kauffman

Rum, Rome and rebellion

As a piss-poor Catholic I am about the last person who should express an opinion of the propriety of President Biden receiving Holy Communion, but as a native of the county whose nineteenth-century women’s college (Ingham University) employed the chancellor whose phrase “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” may have flipped the 1884 presidential election to Grover Cleveland — how’s that for a tenuous connection? — I feel it within my competence to say a word about anti-papism in American politics. I had a bibulous lunch with Senator Pat Moynihan, my long-ago boss, several months before his death in 2003. Over more Pinot Grigios than I can remember, Moynihan said that he was disturbed by rising anti-Catholicism in the Democratic Party.

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Monday

Jane Stannus

Trump and the Catholic deplorables

What do you do when you need the Catholic vote, but mainstream Catholic leadership wants nothing to do with you? Easy: you make friends with the Catholic Deplorables. Recently, the presidential Twitter account has tweeted out support for two figures that might be considered Catholic Deplorables: Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, an ex-papal nuncio to the USA, currently in hiding, who famously accused Pope Francis and other senior Vatican officials of helping to conceal the crimes of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and Dr Taylor Marshall, a popular blogger and Catholic author. The term 'basket of deplorables' backfired spectacularly on Hillary Clinton last election season, when Trump supporters seized upon it as a badge of honor.

catholic deplorables