10 hours ago
7
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
The last several months for American Catholics have been a story about the ascent of the Catholic right. In January, a parade of right-wing Catholic power began streaming into President Trump’s remade Washington. Just weeks later came the hospitalization and decline of Pope Francis, who often seemed to stand alone in offering a different vision of global Christian influence.
Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic in the new conservative style, was one of the last people to see Pope Francis alive, a brief meeting between representatives of two contrasting visions for Catholic values in the world.
Then came the stunning arrival on Thursday of a new pope: an American, Chicago-born — and a prelate whose priorities for the church seemed to place him in the mold of Francis. He is potentially another countervailing voice against the country’s newly powerful strain of right-leaning Catholics.
The elevation of Robert Francis Prevost, known to some as Bob, to the throne of St. Peter electrified Catholics across his home country on Thursday afternoon. But the first American pope arrives at a time of extraordinary complexity and tension in the church in the United States.
Now the new pope, Leo XIV, faces the task not just of shepherding the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, but of unifying a fractured American church where the church hierarchy, ordinary Catholics, an influential right-wing Catholic media ecosystem and Catholic power in Washington are often at odds.
The pope assumes the role at a moment of extraordinary muscle and visibility for a certain kind of Catholicism in American public life. More than a third of the members of President Trump’s cabinet are Catholic. So are two-thirds of the Supreme Court, which has issued a remarkable run of rulings expressing an emphatic vision of religious liberty, often favorable to Christian interests.
