A quiet cold war is happening across America — one that many Americans might not be aware of if they’re not tuned into the changes underway in America’s Christian communities.
On one side is the religious right’s use of scripture and faith to justify and defend President Donald Trump’s agenda — and growing Christian nationalist sentiment. On the other side is the reshaping of the American Catholic Church, under Pope Leo XIV.
Through new appointments, orders to his bishops to speak out about immigration, and public comments critiquing the direction of the US under Trump, the pope is setting up his bishops and priests to be evangelizers, to be vocal about human dignity, and to be a counterweight to the authoritarian and nationalist tendencies of the right.
While the church has long played a role in US politics, Pope Leo’s interventions, according to Christopher Hale, a Catholic writer and political activist who writes the Letters from Leo Substack, represent something new.
In the absence of a well-organized “religious left” in America, he told me, Leo’s moves to reform and shake up the American Catholic Church are reinvigorating a “Catholic left” to engage in the moral struggles of the 2020s, specifically around immigration and creeping authoritarianism.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the first thing to understand about how Pope Leo is changing the American Catholic Church?
Pope Leo is first and foremost a priest and a bishop. He was Pope Francis’s go-to man for appointing bishops for two years, and his education was on the theology and practice of being a bishop, so it’s very crucial to his worldview. He has very strong opinions about what it takes to succeed in these roles, but the most important thing he has emphasized is closeness to the people.
That’s a contrast to the really bad habit in Catholicism to take functionaries and bureaucrats working deep in the weeds and elevate them to be bishops. In New York City, for example, Cardinal Timothy Dolan spent more time as a seminary educator and president of a university than he did as a pastor, a parish priest. There’s been fewer, historically, parish priests that get elevated to the role of bishop, and Pope Francis wanted to change that. Leo is continuing that.
But it takes a long time to actually get one’s personnel in place — there’s thousands of bishops around the world. From what I can tell right now, Leo is working with a pipeline of Francis-era priests and bishops that he is very familiar with, and everyone who’s been named an archbishop and a bishop was on his desk before he was elected pope.
Is it fair to read the flashy appointments and changes Leo has made over the last year as an attempt to move American Catholicism to the left? Or is something more gradual taking place?
Leo’s big concern, very clearly in my opinion, was that the US Catholic Church had become identified as reactionary. New York is an interesting case: Dolan was affable, charming, and friendly, but very clearly identified with the political right. His successor, Archbishop Ronald Hicks, is a bit less comfortable in front of the media, but very good with parishioners, very well-loved among rank-and-file Jane and Joe Catholics.
For progressives like myself, it’s a win to replace the bishop of America’s biggest diocese who was very cozy with Fox and Friends, with someone who’s going to be much closer with the parishioners of New York. What’s not going to happen is the liberal pipe dream of replacing right-wing culture warriors with left-wing culture warriors.
But it’s really important to understand that among the Catholic Church, in the United States, priests and bishops tend to be much more conservative than their global peers. So you automatically have an issue if you’re Leo, and if you were Francis, there’s just not a lot of moderates and progressives to choose from. Your bench is pretty conservative to begin with.
The New Yorker recently described the shake-up in New York as a sign that Pope Leo is forming his own “Team USA,” to not just guide the faithful, but speak out against the Trump administration. Is that accurate?
A lot of Americans overestimate and over-index how much the pope is thinking about the particularities of the United States. He’s trying to separate himself from the culture wars that are happening in the United States, and he doesn’t want to be weaponized by either the left or the right.
But when he does speak, it’s hard now for bishops and priests in the US to ignore him, or say he doesn’t understand the US. And immigration, and mass deportations, are one issue where he has spoken up again and again.
Over the summer, Leo himself seemed to be frustrated that the USCCB (the leadership body of the US church) weren’t speaking as one body on this issue, and instead there was just a hodgepodge of bishops taking action.
So he said very clearly, in October, that the church cannot be silent and they must speak with one voice on this issue. And then a month later, the bishops, in almost a unanimous vote, take the hardest stance against the administration that you’ve seen since the organization existed. That would not have happened under Francis. It would’ve been explained away. The responsiveness of US bishops has gone up extraordinarily in the past year, and especially with conservative US bishops. They have spoken out in ways that I do not think they would have during Francis’s pontificate.
For decades, abortion and sexual ethics were the defining moral issue for the global church, but especially for the American Catholic church. Does it seem, based on Leo’s first year, that immigration and border politics are now taking that space?
The characterization that I’ve made, and I do believe this to be true, is that just as the cardinals elected a Polish pope from behind the Soviet “iron curtain” to defeat communism, I do think that God raised up a pope from the Americas to defeat creeping MAGA authoritarianism. However, I want to be very careful: John Paul II did that not on behalf of the Polish people, but on behalf of the global community.
Similarly, I believe Pope Leo XIV sees authoritarianism as perhaps emanating from America, but he’s not trying to defeat it in service of America itself, but for the global community. He gets much more exercised about any kind of American intervention overseas, as strongly as he does about particular domestic issues.
His framework is the idea of a consistent ethic of life: of life’s value from the womb to the tomb. And I think he views authoritarian regimes as a threat to human life. And while his predecessors were very bombastic about abortion, in the year that Leo has been pope, he’s talked about immigration, he’s talked about war, and he’s talked about ecology at rates of a hundred to one, than when he talks about abortion.
I think he is trying to recalibrate. And it reminds me of Pope Francis in 2013, when he said that the church had gotten obsessed with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception, and it became basically an ideological perch of disjointed ideas that we cared about. We’d become a political party. That was his complaint. I think Leo is carrying forward that idea.
That recalibration is coming as strains of Christian nationalism are going more mainstream. Does it appear like Leo is setting up the church to be a counterweight to that?
Yes. It’s very clear to me that Christian nationalism has no place for Catholics within it. Christian nationalism is evangelical Protestant nationalism. And it’s really pertinent to understand that the leaders of that movement do not think that Catholics are Christian, do not think that we have access to salvation.
That is the argument that I’m trying to make again and again. Christian nationalism and its stepbrother MAGA authoritarianism are both inherently anti-Catholic. To be clear, I’m making a classist argument: I’m saying that my class, my ethnic identity, is excluded from this project. So yes, there is a war at play; it’s a culture war I welcome. A culture war between a multi-ethnic American Catholicism versus white evangelical Protestantism is a culture war that, I believe, the left can win.
Is that something Catholic leaders, bishops in the US and in the Vatican are aware of, this cold war?
No, I think it’s definitely on Leo’s mind. I think the pope believes that the authoritarian creep in the United States is more dangerous than any other single issue, including, in fact, immigration itself, even though that’s one he’s most personally, deeply affected by. And even among conservative Catholic bishops, they are seeing the limits of this Christian nationalist project.
And many bishops think that they can butter up and sweeten up the administration. To some degree they have had some success, but it’s my fervent belief that over the long haul that is going to be a failed project. You’re going to have to stand up to these people more directly, and we cannot rely on the goodwill and the whims of the president. There has to be a more head-on battle against these forces.
In Trump 2.0, there has always been a question to me of whether the religious left exists in this country. I’m not sure that the religious left exists in this country, but the second Trump administration has revealed to me that the Catholic left most certainly does.
