Pope Leo XIV’s recent remarks praising “healthy secularism” initially garnered little attention from the American media. But given that they were delivered one day before his implicit criticism of the Trump administration, particularly on migration issues, his words may take on a whole new meaning in the U.S. political context. 

Leo’s initial observation was made in a Sept. 29 address to a working group of the European Parliament. “European institutions,” the pontiff observed, “need people who know how to live a healthy secularism. That is, a style of thinking and acting that affirms the value of religion while preserving the distinction—not separation or confusion—from the political sphere” [emphasis ours]. His remarks are consistent with previous statements of Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI while developing them further. 

At first glance, Leo may have seemed to be repeating Vatican boilerplate. Pope Benedict, speaking in 2010 about Middle Eastern Christians, a minority that often suffers persecution under non-secular Muslim governments, commented: “Healthy secularity ensures that political activity does not manipulate religion, while the practice of religion remains free from a politics of self-interest.” During a 2024 visit to Corsica, Pope Francis envisioned secularity as “promoting constant cooperation between civil and ecclesial authorities for the benefit of the whole community.”

But notice that Benedict and Francis praised secularity, not secularism. Indeed, Benedict distinguished the two: “In its extreme and ideological form,” he wrote, “secularity becomes a secularism which denies citizens the right openly to express their religion and claims that only the State can legislate on the public form which religion may take.” 

Addressing a gathering of U.S. bishops at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., in 2008, Benedict decried American secularism for “subtly [reducing] religious belief to a lowest common denominator.” He also once likened secularism itself to fundamentalism. Francis, for his part, viewed secularism as akin to atheism. In a 2024 address to the Dicastery for Evangelization, he linked secularism to “the loss of a sense of belonging to the Christian community.” For Francis, secularism was an ideology that virtually amputated the soul, severing human identity from its origin as a creation of God.

But there was Pope Leo on Sept. 29, praising secularism, not secularity. At first, that may have been significant only to those who scrutinize the Holy See the way ornithologists study birds. The next day, however, the world took note when Leo declined to echo criticism of Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago for his decision to grant a lifetime achievement award to U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, for his solidarity with immigrants, in spite of his support of legalized abortion. In what many took as a reference to Donald Trump’s MAGA political movement, Leo then noted the inconsistency of claiming to be “pro-life” while supporting capital punishment and the “inhuman treatment of immigrants.”  

Many members of the MAGA movement ostensibly abhor secularism, viewing it as an obstacle to the codification of conservative Christian worldviews in law and culture. So was Leo’s defense of secularism meant to send a message to them? 

In order to answer this, we must first figure out what Leo meant by secularism. To the writers of this essay, a Catholic graduate student interested in political theology and a Jewish professor who specializes in secularism, his approach suggests neither the soulless separationism sometimes implied by Benedict nor the atheism sometimes deplored by Francis.

We are reminded of a classic binary within Christian political thought of which Leo, Francis and Benedict have all been aware. Catholic theologians have traditionally conceptualized the earthly polity as divided between two branches: the religious authorities and the civil authorities (or, as Francis put it above, the ecclesial and civil authorities). According to this view, both domains are God-ordained, and both have a role to play in the fulfillment of the divine plan.

This longstanding binary has perennially raised questions: How are these two branches to interact? What are the legitimate functions of each? And, when push comes to shove, does the religious or secular arm call the shots? Catholic history is littered with popes, kings and emperors who disagreed, sometimes violently, about these dilemmas. 

Leo does not intimate that the secular arm ought to be subservient to the religious arm (a position championed by popes like Gelasius and Pius IX, in the fifth and 19th centuries respectively). Conversely, he does not affirm that the church must concern itself strictly with spiritual affairs and never engage in worldly politics (as demanded by medieval theologians like Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham). 

Catholics, Leo suggests, should neither attempt to dominate the political sphere nor separate themselves from it. Rather, they must recognize that there is a distinction between politics and religion. Healthy secularism allows for faithful Catholic thought and action that can be distinct from politics. This approach is anti-theocratic on the backstroke; it suggests that the relentless quest for political power may effect an amputation of the soul every bit as severe as the one suggested by Francis in his criticism of secularism.

In his Sept. 29 oration, Leo invoked several Catholic titans of Europe’s Christian democratic tradition: France’s Venerable Robert Schuman, Germany’s Konrad Adenauer and Italy’s Alcide De Gasperi. Each helped reconstruct their nation’s democratic order after the devastation wrought by fascism. Each offered European Catholics a way to think of religion and politics as potentially distinct. As Christian democrats, they provided an exit ramp from the revanchism that characterized politically right-wing Catholics’ response to the Enlightenment and the democracies that it birthed. 

During the 19th century, many Catholics had favored a reactionary, integralist politics, supporting traditional monarchies against the republican forms of government born of the French Revolution. By introducing Christian democracy as a viable option within liberal, multi-confessional political frameworks, Schuman, Adenauer and De Gasperi showed that faithful Catholics need not demand that the state reflexively endorse their religious convictions. Their politics was faith-based, but they forswore the temptation to align the institutional church with state power. Francis put it well in 2016, when he opined: “confessional states finish badly.”

By lauding these Christian democrats, Leo finds common ground with scholars who define the ideal secular state as committed to formal disestablishment, in which a neutral government obliges itself to treat all religions equally. In this way, secularism is meant to protect religious minorities—which would explain why Leo would call it “healthy.”

Note that Leo does not enjoin Catholics to check their faith at the door of civic engagement, as would some proponents of political secularism. Instead, he encourages them to bring the values of the Gospel with them as they build bridges with people of different backgrounds. Once in the public square, “openness, listening and dialogue” are the watchwords. The faithful can and should draw upon Catholic social teaching to inform their political action. Yet they should accept, with grace, that in pluralistic democracies not everything they believe will necessarily be enshrined in law—and they should appreciate that this distinction protects their rights and beliefs as well.

Leo may have made these comments in a European context, but it’s not far-fetched to assume that the first American pope’s musings on secularism might also concern his nation of origin. Our suspicion is that he is concerned about unhealthy anti-secularism in the United States. 

Is he issuing a caution to Catholics who are aligning themselves with a Republican administration that includes many members of a theocratic bent? Leo may well be asking these Catholics to consider the possibility that, by failing to distinguish their faith from politics, they may blemish the moral witness of the church.