President Donald Trump’s undermining of democratic institutions poses a difficult challenge for Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pope. Since World War II, the Catholic Church has endorsed democracy as an effective way to advance two of its foundational principles, human dignity and the common good. How should the Vatican respond when the world’s most powerful leader flouts democratic norms by abusing executive authority, violating basic human rights, and questioning the legitimacy of free elections?
The question is complicated by the Church’s commitment to political neutrality. As a religious institution with a mission to spread the Good News of salvation, the Vatican respects the autonomy of the secular political sphere. Popes are committed to working with diverse governments, many of them autocratic, to safeguard the Church’s mission and protect its institutions and members. Historically, however, this respect for the secular realm has not meant agnosticism when it comes to political systems. For centuries, popes accepted autocracy as the preferred way to promote order, peace, and the common good. They opposed the French Revolution, universal human rights, and religious freedom as incompatible with those principles. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did Leo XIII encourage Catholic accommodation with democracy (while still insisting that the ideal polity embrace Catholicism as the official religion.) It was not until 1944 that Pius XII, responding to the catastrophe of war and dictatorship, threw the Church’s moral authority behind democracy as a promising way to advance human dignity, the common good, and peace in practice.
The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) went further. While its key documents did not mention democracy by name, they acknowledged the constitutional principle of religious freedom, celebrated human rights, and affirmed political systems with elected leaders and a separation of powers. During his long pontificate, John Paul II made the Vatican’s most explicit endorsement of democratic institutions as the foundation for a just society in his native Poland and around the world. In a major encyclical in 1991, two years after the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, he praised a democratic system that “ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices” and gives them “the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them.” For John Paul and his successors, core democratic institutions—civil rights and free elections—were not enough. Governance should also uphold principles of Catholic social teaching embodying a moral order. Human dignity, for example, required protection for the unborn and for migrants, not just citizens. And the common good should encompass the welfare of all, especially the poor and vulnerable. Among recent popes, Benedict XVI was the most critical of democracies for violating these principles, warning of a “dictatorship of relativism” in the West. But he, too, upheld democratic institutions as a proven way to advance human dignity and the common good in practice.
During the past decade, those institutions have come under increasing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. Growing economic insecurity, surging migration, and political polarization have favored the rise of nationalist populists with an authoritarian streak, including Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance (a practicing Catholic). Their disregard for democratic institutions has been evident in their refusal to recognize Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat; attempts to bypass Congress on issues from tariffs to war; weaponization of the Justice Department against political enemies; and efforts to deport millions of immigrants who may have once entered the country illegally but have proven themselves productive and law-abiding members of American society. Trump and Vance’s autocratic style has parallels among populist, far-right leaders in Europe—Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, Reform UK under Nigel Farage, and the recently defeated Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Their transatlantic ideological affinity, most pronounced in an anti-immigrant stance, found clear expression in the White House’s National Security Strategy, published November 2025. It called for “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” and welcomed “the growing influence of patriotic European parties.”
Trump, Vance, and other leading representatives of this nationalist populism see themselves as defenders of the people against the powers of an overweening liberal state. In their narrative, secular elites disdainful of Western civilization have been imposing their values on a Christian populace on issues including abortion, transgender rights, and multiculturalism. Those elites have encouraged migration to shift the political balance in their favor and, in the case of Europe, to dilute Christian culture through a greater Muslim presence. And they have sought to impose a “woke” ideology, punishing the free expression of ideas. In this optic, Trump’s expanding executive power, mass deportations, and “America First” stance are saving the country by targeting the enemies of Christian civilization. Efforts to square such strident nationalism with the universalist horizon of Catholic teaching are certainly problematic—think of Vance’s contorted use of Augustine’s order of love as license to ignore the plight of many migrants and refugees, or of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s invocation of God in war. Still, nationalist populism with Christian coloring is proving a formidable political force.
As the spiritual leader of more than a billion Catholics around the world, Pope Leo has been steadfast in his opposition. Like Francis before him, he has criticized anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies in Europe and the United States and spoken out against nationalism and military aggression—most recently in his pointed exchanges with Trump about Venezuela and Iran. At the same time, however, Leo has been cautious about diagnosing a wider crisis of democracy in the West. In the annual major address to diplomats at the Vatican this January, for example, he referenced St. Augustine’s warning against “excessive nationalism and the distortion of the ideal of the political leader” and insisted on protections for free speech. But he did not explicitly mention the fate of democratic institutions in the United States and Europe. Instead, he reserved his references to democracy for Haiti and Myanmar, noting that “democratic processes must be accompanied by the political will to pursue the common good, to strengthen social cohesion and to promote the integral development of every person.”
There are several good reasons for Leo to proceed cautiously. He may want to keep the Church out of the partisan fray, as any defense of democracy could be read as a direct intervention against Trump and in favor of his opponents. Or he may believe that the political culture that has long sustained democratic institutions in the United States is fundamentally sound and that it is premature to raise the alarm. Interestingly, the three popes before Leo came from countries with legacies of dictatorship in living memory: Poland, Germany, and Argentina. In addressing the imperative of democracy, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis could draw on their personal experiences and that of their fellow citizens. While Leo has spent decades in Latin America and experienced dictatorship there firsthand, he is the first pope to have been raised in a country with a long and continuous history of democracy.
There is an additional reason for Vatican caution: divisions within the Church in the United States. During Francis’s pontificate, tensions emerged between the Vatican and the more conservative U.S. episcopate, which had taken shape under John Paul and Benedict. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which had been openly critical of the conservative economic and foreign policies of the Reagan administration during the 1980s, subsequently shifted to the political right, mainly in prioritizing abortion, but also in other policy areas. The Catholic electorate, an anchor of the Democratic coalition through the 1970s, has since grown more conservative. More than fifty percent of U.S. Catholics voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. Against this political backdrop, differences flared between Francis and conservative U.S. bishops. Points of contention included the importance of abortion and migration as policy issues, disagreements over the permissibility of same-sex unions and Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, and the wisdom of a more deliberative and inclusive “synodal Church.”
These tensions have diminished considerably during the first year of Leo’s pontificate. He has developed strong working relationships with leading U.S. bishops, even while moving forward with synodality, insisting on both abortion and migration as vital issues, and replacing Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who had compared the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk to St. Paul. In the same period, the USCCB leadership has distanced itself from Trump, vigorously defending Leo against personal attacks amid the Iran war and expressing opposition to the “indiscriminate mass deportation of people” during their annual assembly in November 2025. Still, it is striking that a majority of U.S. bishops, aligned with the Trump administration on abortion and transgender rights, have been reticent to critique its disregard of democratic norms. At their assembly, for example, the bishops called for “meaningful reform of our nation’s immigration laws and procedures” and said nothing about the administration’s deployment of the National Guard in major cities against the wishes of local governments. Other antidemocratic practices, such as election denial and use of the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies, went unmentioned.
Amid these divisions, Leo speaking out more forcefully in defense of democracy—without calling out anyone by name—might maintain Church unity while encouraging opposition to authoritarian trends in both the United States and Europe, where bishops have expressed greater concern about the political environment. It would also respond to a global crisis of democracy that extends well beyond the transatlantic area. The Church remains an influential force in Latin America, where democracy is contested, even as it has lost ground to Evangelical competition and secularization. In much of Africa and Asia, which have seen a resurgence of autocracy over the past two decades, the Church is growing, particularly in sub-Saharan countries. Rising authoritarianism and worsening human-rights crises have impacted Catholic minorities who face discrimination in countries like India and China and who are vulnerable to sectarian violence, as in Nigeria and Pakistan.
As the Church grows more global and the world grows less democratic, Leo has an opportunity to rearticulate the Church’s positive teaching on democracy, the outcome of long historical evolution. A significant moment in that evolution took place a century ago, in 1926, when Pius XI condemned Action Française, an antidemocratic nationalist movement supported by many French Catholics and some clergy. Charles Maurras, the charismatic leader of the movement, rejected the Third Republic and called for a return to monarchy and the ancient alliance between throne and altar. Pius renounced Maurras’s militant nationalism and encouraged French Catholics to break with him and his movement. The condemnation of Action Française was an important milestone in Catholicism’s historic transformation from an antidemocratic to a prodemocratic force in world affairs. Today, when democracy is again in crisis on a global scale, the Church should count itself among its vocal defenders.
We welcome your comments about this article. Please send your response to letters@commonwealmagazine.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment