In 1899, Pope Leo XIII sent a letter to the Catholic bishops of the United States condemning the errors of what he called “Americanism”—a temptation, he warned, to embrace pluralism, religious liberty, and freedom of expression and other dangerously “Protestant” ideas in an effort to help Catholics assimilate to the surrounding culture. Not only did the Catholic Church eventually embrace most of the concepts that Leo deplored, but even at the time, the American bishops assured him that his objections were unfounded. In their view, Catholics in their country could be both good Americans and good Catholics. The bishops were right, and what became known as “the phantom heresy” of Americanism was largely forgotten.
But if Leo XIII was wrong about what would corrode the religious identity of Catholics back then, it turns out he was right to worry about American Catholic identity; he was just a century ahead of his time. The recent clashes between Pope Leo XIV—who took that name to signal his commitment to advancing the previous Leo’s better-known teachings on social justice—and the Trump administration have underscored how U.S. Catholics have come to behave as though they are religious authorities unto themselves. This ecclesiological framing best explains the unprecedented drama between Washington and the Vatican and the challenge facing the first American pope as he marks the one-year anniversary of his election.
President Trump sparked the war of words with a characteristically blustery social media post blasting Leo as “WEAK on Crime” and warning that Leo “should get his act together as Pope” because he was “hurting the Catholic Church.” It sounded as if Trump were lambasting a local official who had disobeyed a party boss rather than a Roman pontiff who had critiqued the president’s genocidal threat to send Iranians “back to the stone age, where they belong.” Trump refused to apologize for the post and doubled down on his insults (even as he deleted another post that depicted him as Jesus working a miracle, an AI image that offended many in his Evangelical base).
What was striking was that, despite some initial tone-policing from Trump’s Catholic allies, many prominent Catholics in the United States soon shifted the focus to debates over just-war theory or the proper relationship between church and state, and some of them suggested that it was Leo who had stepped over the line. “I love the Catholic Church,” border czar Tom Homan told reporters. “I just wish they’d stick to fixing the Church because there’s issues—I know because I’m a member—instead of politics.” Vice President J. D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, went so far as to tell the pope that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality” and “what’s going on in the Catholic Church.” Later that week he warned the pope to “be careful” when he “opines on matters of theology.”
This episode is not just about the outsized egos of politicians or even policy differences, nor can it be chalked up to the naïveté of converts. Yes, Church leaders likely regard Vance’s pronouncements on theology the way epidemiologists view RFK Jr.’s opinions on vaccines. But the split really goes back to a deeper alienation between the U.S. Church and the rest of the Catholic Church. While the Catholic Church in the United States started as a “church of immigrants,” many of these newcomers followed the classic American progression from Democratic urban ethnic enclaves to mainline Republican suburbs, and from social liberalism to establishment conservatism. Throughout the relatively conservative papacies of John Paul II (1978–2005) and Benedict XVI (2005–2013), the emerging leaders of this rightward-leaning Catholicism could plausibly claim favored status in Rome. But there were awkward tensions even then. Occasionally conservative Catholics in the United States had to redact a papal teaching to make it align with GOP economic orthodoxy and culture-war politics. They often spoke as if their zealous commitment to the Church’s teaching about abortion gave them leeway to disregard inconvenient papal statements—like John Paul II’s forceful denunciation of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003. Notwithstanding their own differences with John Paul II and Benedict XVI, they insisted that any Catholic not aligned with the pope was a “bad” Catholic and unworthy of inclusion in the workings and ministries and even sacraments of the Church.
Then two things happened. First, the conclave of March 2013 elected an Argentine cardinal, Pope Francis, who upended those conventions. Francis ended special access for conservative Americans and insisted that the Gospel message demanded that they, like all Catholics, welcome the stranger and care for the most vulnerable. Suddenly many self-styled “orthodox” Catholics could no longer claim a papal mandate for their ideology but neither could they claim a “good” Catholic had to agree with the pope because they obviously did not. One popular response to this predicament was to argue that not only was the pope wrong, but that he was promoting heresy and fomenting schism and might not even be a legitimate pope. This was not just dissent but a thoroughgoing dismissal of the papal magisterium.
The second development was the rise of Donald Trump. Having loosened the ties binding them to the wider Catholic world, many conservative U.S. Catholics attached themselves to Trump’s nationalist populism and then to the increasingly powerful Christian nationalism of his Evangelical base. Each step drew them further away from Rome’s orbit. In response to Mater et magistra, Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical on the Church’s role promoting social justice, William F. Buckley’s National Review famously retorted, “Mater si, Magistra no,”—mother yes, teacher no. The slogan of many conservative Catholics in 2026 might be “MAGA si, Magistra no.” U.S. Catholics these days can talk about Rome the way anti-Catholic Protestants used to, and they seem to think this is normal. Their first loyalty is not to the pope or any bishop, but to the leaders of their anti-globalist political movement. Consider that Vance’s backer and mentor, the idiosyncratically Christian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, says he worries about Vance’s “popeism” and counsels the vice-president to distance himself from Rome, which he sees as the source of a potential “Caesaro-Papist fusion” that could usher in the anti-Christ.
The election of Pope Leo a year ago has not reversed this trend. Though different from Francis in various ways, Leo has made it clear from the start that he intends to maintain the missionary impulse and prophetic stance of his predecessor. Conservatives convinced Francis’s pontificate was anomalous were shocked that the College of Cardinals voted for continuity, not revanchism. Much of the Catholic right has spent the last year trying to interpret Leo as one of their own, but Leo eludes easy categorizations, and recent weeks have shown that he is no less willing to speak his mind than Francis was. Many Catholics in the United States would rather he didn’t.
The fierce response to Leo’s words represents a historic shift in the religious sensibility of American Catholicism, away from the communal toward a radical individualism, from the universal to a tribal nationalism. MAGA Catholics act as if they are arguing with some guy dressed in white running an NGO in Rome; they are in fact rejecting what the pope speaks for, and from: a tradition developed over centuries and a “sense of the faithful” representing some 1.4 billion other Catholics around the world (U.S. Catholics constitute just five percent of the Church).
The wealth and influence of U.S. Catholics has certainly contributed to this mindset, giving many an outsized view of their own might and righteousness. Some, like the bloviating Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, may declare themselves done with Catholicism. But most will stick around, while continuing to believe that, whatever any pope says, they themselves know best. Even if Trump falls out of favor with American Catholics, as he has with nearly every other sector of the electorate, what was once a phantom heresy will remain an uncomfortable reality.
Can the trend be reversed? One way forward would be for American Catholics to look outward. In Leo XIII’s day, the concern was to keep American Catholics connected to Rome. For Leo XIV, the challenge is to connect them to global Catholicism. It was perhaps providential that Leo embarked on his first marathon foreign trip, an eleven-day journey to Africa, just as the American president was taking aim at him. Much as Leo tried to tamp down the narrative that his every utterance was a direct response to Trump, the issues he highlighted during his four-nation journey were ones that also resonate in the United States—violence, corruption, economic inequality. In strife-torn Bamenda in northwest Cameroon, Leo told those gathered in the cathedral that, “in a world turned upside-down” and “ravaged by a handful of tyrants…today you are the city on the hill, resplendent in the eyes of all!” Here was the first pope from the United States conferring the foundational American identity—an image drawn from the Gospel of Matthew by the Puritan leader John Winthrop—on an African country that Donald Trump probably considers a “shithole.”
Similarly, on July 4, as his native country celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Leo will be celebrating Mass on a rocky Mediterranean island where desperate African refugees first find safe haven if they survive the perilous crossing. The pope’s visit to Lampedusa could be seen as a declaration of interdependence, a message that American ideals are inclusive, not tribal, as well as a vivid demonstration of how to be both a good American and a good Catholic.
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