If I told you to imagine a situation in which a man from the United States were elected pope, you might think it would be natural and good for that pope to make an official visit to his home country as soon as possible. But what if I told you the scenario was taking place in a less hypothetical world, one where America’s president was waging war on multiple fronts, in flagrant defiance of international law, while also abusing, detaining, and denying basic rights to minority populations in his own country? What if you added to that president’s public profile a history of sexual assault, racist insults, and vulgar language? What if, days after the death of the previous pope, that president had joked about being his own “number-one choice” for the job and disseminated an image of himself dressed in papal vestments? In that case, would you expect the pope to prioritize a visit to his home country, or would you instead urge him to keep his distance?
In April, the website The Free Press published a story with the headline “Why the Vatican and the White House Are at Odds.” The reporter, Mattia Ferraresi, described a contentious meeting at the Pentagon in January between Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby and Apostolic Nuncio Cardinal Christophe Pierre. The details, thinly sourced though they were, prompted blogger Christopher Hale to conclude that “some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.”
I’m not sure those travel plans Leo supposedly shelved actually existed in the first place. We know President Donald Trump sent the new pope an invitation to attend a celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, which Vice President J. D. Vance delivered in person when he traveled to Rome for Leo’s installation Mass. But if Leo responded, he didn’t do so publicly.
In any case, I’m not looking for a hidden reason there might be tension between the Trump White House and the Vatican. There are plenty of good reasons right out in the open. (In addition to everything we’ve seen from Trump, recall that one of Pope Francis’s last official acts was to reject and rebuke Vance’s specious claim that Catholic teaching supported his administration’s abandonment of human rights and aid to the poor.) In the light of everything we know, the question I keep asking is: Why should any of us want the pope to visit America now?
A papal visit is a diplomatic event. It involves meeting with government leaders and paying respect to local authorities. Imagine Pope Leo smiling tightly as Trump, delivering his official welcome remarks, wanders off-script to condemn “transgender for everybody” or boast that people are afraid to go fishing in the Caribbean (the joke is that they know the U.S. military might kill them). Not many who stand next to Trump walk away with their dignity intact. Smart people avoid it altogether.
Perhaps the reason Americans root for a visit from Leo is that they envision him giving our feckless leaders the talking-to they deserve. But if you listen, he’s doing that already. When he talks about nations waging war and invoking God with blood-soaked hands, it’s us (though not only us) that he’s talking about. Even Trump can see the resemblance—“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela,” he sulked in a wild social-media post on April 12 (the same one that memorably described Leo as “WEAK on Crime”). “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the President of the United States.”
The less the pope concerns himself with what Trump wants to hear, the better. The rest of us need to hear a perspective that isn’t filtered through our president’s toxic narcissism, or, for that matter, through ordinary American exceptionalism. If we see ourselves as the country that produced the pope, land of the free and home of the brave, the rest of the world sees a country rounding up immigrants, murdering protesters, building concentration camps, invading sovereign nations, bombing noncombatants, threatening allies, and detaining tourists in airports. Those are good reasons for anyone to cancel their travel plans. For the pope to come here under present circumstances would, in my view, be far more scandalous than his staying away.
We may have to settle for a virtual visit, and it so happens there is one scheduled for July 3, when Leo will accept an award from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and deliver a livestreamed address. That’s when he will be speaking unequivocally to and about the United States, and he won’t have to share a dais with Trump to do it. In the meantime, there’s plenty of work cut out for us if we want the United States to be a country a pope can be proud to come home to.
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