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Speaker A: By the time you hear this show, it will be Easter Monday, the end of the most sacred week in the Christian calendar. But I gotta say, it was also a very weird Holy week, if you were paying attention. For instance, when the president held an Easter lunch at the White House last week, he used the occasion to go on a racist rant about Somal.

Speaker B: Then one of his spiritual advisors took the mic and I just wanted to share this thought and pray over President Trump.

Speaker A: This is Paula White. She used the moment to compare Donald Trump to Jesus.

Speaker B: He showed us great leadership. Great transformation requires great sacrifice. And, Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested.

Speaker A: Meanwhile, at the Vatican, the message sounded very different.

Speaker C: So how big of a deal is it that Pope Leo kicked off Holy Week by slamming the Iran war?

Speaker D: Well, it’s pretty much in alignment with what he often does, I’ll say that.

Speaker A: Colleen Dully of America Media covers the Vatican. She’s been clocking the way the Easter season has become a vehicle to make bigger points. She says now that Pope Leo has been helming the Catholic Church for nearly a year. He seems ready to speak out about immigration, the needs of the poor, and especially the war in Iran.

Speaker D: I mean, we’ve seen him shoehorning it into even the most unlikely places. So, for example, a couple weeks ago, he was giving a speech to priests and seminarians about the sacrament of confession, where he says, I wonder if the Christians who are responsible for the wars have the courage to go to confession.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, on Palm Sunday, he basically made headlines for delivering a homily to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square. There’s this one line in particular that I think stood out to people, where he said, brothers and sisters, this is our God, Jesus, King of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. That feels very pointed at the United States of America, does it not?

Speaker D: Well, certainly especially after the, I think, you know, religious language has been invoked by people in the Trump administration to justify this war quite a lot lately. But I actually think that the. The bolder line from that homily on Palm Sunday was the one right after it where he says that Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying. And then he quotes from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of bl. I mean, having grown up going to Catholic school, I don’t think we were ever taught that God rejects the prayers of anyone. And so to hear a pope come out and say, like, yeah, not only is God not listening to your prayers, but God is rejecting them is. It’s a huge call.

Speaker C: Here’s what’s weird. J.D. vance, the Vice President of the United States, is a prominent Catholic. So is Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State. It feels like they’re speaking from completely different hymnals here.

Speaker D: Yeah. And many people have taken especially the Pope’s appeals about Catholics who are responsible for wars should go to confession, for example, have taken these as specific responses to Rubio and Vance. Popes will very rarely name the aggressors in a situation. They very rarely call people out by name. And so this is probably the most direct that you could expect a pope to get. There has been a lot made, even since the Pope was elected about a year ago on May 8, of him as kind of the global counterweight to Trump, the most prominent American on the global stage, and then in a specific way, the most prominent American Catholic, kind of replacing J.D. vance.

Speaker C: So will the real Catholicism play style stand up?

Speaker D: If the real Catholicism is not the Pope, then we might have a problem.

Speaker C: Today on the show, the Pope is finding his voice.

Speaker A: The GOP might not like that. I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next.

Speaker C: Stick around. Foreign. Let’s back up a second. For those who don’t know Pope Leo or maybe just know him as like Chicago Pope. He’s been Pope for almost a year. How’s he been acting as Pope? Because I know when he took the role, it was big dilly, who’s American? And it was also, it was, it’s people weren’t planning on an American Pope and they didn’t know if he would be continuing in the Francis tradition of talking a lot about progressive issues. How has Leo sort of extended into his role as Pope?

Speaker D: Sure, I would say it’s been a really slow opening up. Right. So it’s really only recently that we’ve seen these very, very vocal interventions about war. For example, Leo gave a big interview to an American journalist named Elise Allen pretty early in his papacy last summ, where he said there’s a big learning curve for him becoming a world leader. And so to that extent, he has, like, relied a lot on the Secretary of State and kind of the Vatican’s whole diplomatic apparatus to do a lot of the speaking for him.

Speaker C: Yeah. When did you first begin to feel like you knew who he was becoming as pope?

Speaker D: So he gave some hints right off the bat. I’ll say like as soon as he was elected, like you said, there were all these questions, will he continue the Francis trajectory? And that’s not just a trajectory of speaking out about progressive coded issues, but also it’s the question of the changes that Francis was making in the Catholic Church. So he has this whole movement called synodality, which is about kind of getting lay people more involved in the church, making the church’s mission less the responsibility of just the hierarchy. So there was a big debate in the pre conclave meetings, we now know from some of the reporting over whether to continue the Francis trajectory. And Leo gets up on day one, his first public speech as Pope and uses a bunch of the Francis buzzwords, including synodal. He says, we’re going to be a synodal church. Right.

Speaker C: That is such a deep cut.

Speaker D: It’s such a deep cut. I’m so sorry. This is my niche. But so basically the read has been that Leo is going to continue the Francis initiatives, but that he has a different style from Francis.

Speaker C: So what does that mean?

Speaker D: He’s like very much not off the cuff the way that Francis always was. Right. It was always kind journalist field day when Pope Francis would get on a plane because he would do these papal press conferences and he would say things like, who am I to judge a priest who’s gay? And that would go all around the world. You never knew what the guy was going to say. The Vatican communications, you know, operation, never knew what he was going to say.

Speaker C: That sounds fun.

Speaker D: Leo, on the other hand, pre wrote his speech for that first day. Like when it became clear that he was going to get elected Pope, he sat down and wrote out that speech. He was reading it from the balcony slowly. We’ve seen him get more comfortable with speaking off the cuff, to put a finger on it. I would say like around September, I felt like we saw a big shift in him coming out publicly and saying things a lot more often. And then I would say ever since the Venezuela escalations with the U.S. the Pope has also been quite vocal. That’s meaningful to him because he spent time in South America, certainly he gave a big talk to all of the diplomats who are accredited to the Holy See. So like from different countries around the world that have diplomatic relations with the country of the Vatican, where he talked about kind of this post World War II global order, you know, the so called Pax Americana. Right. And he laments to all these diplomats how that is just being thrown in the trash basically. And he talked about, you know, territorial violations. He talked about kind of the. The buildup of military. This mentality that might. Is right. Right. And all of that was seen as a. As a pushback against Trump.

Speaker C: It’s interesting that you talk about Pope Leo as, like, not being as off the cuff, because I really do see that. But at the same time, because he’s American and because he speaks American English, he reads as more outspoken in some ways, to me, just because, like, when he talks, I understand what he’s saying.

Speaker D: It’s also significant when he chooses to speak English because it’s clearly that’s what he wants the Americans to hear.

Speaker C: That’s really interesting, but it’s just been an interesting evolution where. I agree, like, something happened in the fall. This giant document came out that was actually something that was started by Pope Francis and then came out through Pope Leo. And it was a statement about the poor, essentially saying, we need to front the poor in Catholicism. Obviously, that’s an incredibly different message than you have seen from the Trump administration. And. And then, like, from then, it just kind of rolled. Like, we saw statements about climate change. We saw statements about immigration. Immigration seems incredibly important to this pope, certainly.

Speaker D: Well, I mean, if you look at the time he spent in Peru, it kind of was the same time that Peru was getting a lot of people coming from Venezuela. And so suddenly, his parish and his diocese was. Were full of immigrants. And he went out of his way to make sure that those folks, especially during, like, the COVID pandemic, got the same resources and were, you know, given enough care by the church, you know, in terms of material assistance, but also, like, spiritual. This was a big priority for him. So he’s seen how it works also. And we have to keep in mind that, like many Americans, he is the descendant of immigrants. I’m recording this from New Orleans, where his grandparents lived, and his great grandparents, his great grandmother came here from Haiti.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so that brings us to now the Iran war. And we’ve talked about how this war has been positioned as a bit of a holy war. Like, we did a show where we listened into an evangelical, like, YouTube stream and could hear people talking about the Iran war as, like, a mass conversion event, potentially. It sounds like from the beginning, this Pope was like, no, yeah, certainly.

Speaker D: And that’s. That’s exemplified by exactly what he says on Palm Sunday about, you cannot use God to justify your war making. You cannot use Jesus’s name to justify your war making.

Speaker C: You said that the Pope often doesn’t call out people by name, but there are people to call out by name here. Like, whether you’re. You want to talk about Pete Hegseth, who has, like, these monthly prayer circles where he talks about using overwhelming violence against America’s enemies. Whether you want to talk about Trump’s personal pastor who went to CPAC and talked about Trump having a spiritual obligation to bomb Iran. Like, there are individual actors to speak about here.

Speaker D: Yeah, it’s interesting because we have to read it in the context of the Vatican’s, like, broader diplomatic apparatus, too. Right. We know that they would love to get in touch with Trump.

Speaker C: How do we know that?

Speaker D: Because his secretary of state has said so. He met with. I believe this came after he had a meeting in Sweden with the King of Sweden. And he said in an interview about it that they talked about their contacts in the U.S. administration. So, like, the Vatican, from what little we can tell, from their very secret diplomatic processes, is trying to get through to the US Is trying to get through to these folks, because I think they know that the Pope is a moral authority and could perhaps have some kind of influence, although to what extent they can, it’s hard to say. Right.

Speaker C: Do they feel like they’re being rejected by the Trump administration, just sort of said like, no, sorry.

Speaker D: Well, I would say the one thing we can point to here is the fact that pretty much every world leader called the Pope or has met with him in some way since his election, but Trump has never spoken to him, huh? Yeah. No, I think that they know that their message is falling on deaf ears here. I think they also know that it could bring a certain degree of difficulty in their interactions with the US to be too direct. And so the question is, at what point does that balance tip? At what point does the Pope call out Trump or Hagseth or whoever, by name? He takes every Tuesday off, it’s kind of his weekend, and goes down to Castel Gandolfo, which is a papal house, basically an hour outside Rome. And every Tuesday night, he would come out and talk to reporters and stop doing that for a minute. And I spoke to a friend of his who was like, well, he’ll resume doing that when he has something to say. As soon as this war broke out, he started doing it again.

Speaker A: When we come back, the White House may be blowing the Catholic Church off, but they are not staying silent.

Speaker C: You talked about how the Trump administration seems to be giving the Vatican the cold shoulder here, which is interesting to me, because members of the administration aren’t saying nothing about Catholicism in general. Like, just in the last week or so, we’ve learned that JD Vance is set to publish a book called Communion, which is gonna be all about his relationship with his faith, which is Catholicism.

Speaker D: Yeah. His conversion to Catholicism.

Speaker C: Yeah. How do you expect that to go down at the Vatican? And do you see that as a positioning of, like, trying to kind of even out the scale here, Be like, okay, sure, there’s the Pope, but there’s also this interpretation of what this religion is all about.

Speaker D: Yeah. And I think that’s just the continuation of a dynamic that we saw really strongly under Pope Francis when there was in the US this very well funded conservative resistance to Francis, pretty much as soon as he started critiquing the free market.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: As soon as he was elected. So since then, there has been this effort to establish, like, a parallel authority to the Pope that is more in line with American conservative values. At times, that has been. They’ve invoked the late Pope Benedict, when he was still alive at the same time as Francis, as like, oh, he’s the true pope. At times, it’s grafted onto conservative cardinals who are very prominent. I think the journalist Christopher Lamb wrote a great book about the resistance to Pope Francis called the Outsider, in which he points to Cardinal Serra, who’s an African cardinal, who’s seen as a conservative, as like, he was kind of the figurehead leader of this. At times it’s been Cardinal Burke, who is an American cardinal, who’s very conservative. So, you know, putting J.D. vance up on that pedestal could be a continuation of that movement. I think you can easily read it in that context.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I remember when the Pope was first elected, his Americanness was partially considered a big deal because of the conservative strains within the American Catholic movement. There had been open fissures between more conservative bishops. These fissures, they still exist. Like this past week, during Holy Week, President Trump had an event at the White House, and it was controversial because there were a whole lot of leaders there, not just Catholic evangelical as well. Trump compared himself to Jesus Christ.

Speaker D: I think Paula White did too.

Speaker C: Yeah, Paula White was there. And then he was blessed by a Catholic bishop from Minnesota.

Speaker D: Right. Robert Barron.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I just thought, huh, this is interesting because clearly these tensions still exist. And I’m not really sure who’s winning the battle for American Catholics at this moment.

Speaker D: I’m not sure either. In terms of who is most vocal, in terms of who is most numerous. It’s difficult to say. I personally am of the opinion that, like, most Catholics don’t actually care about the church politics that much. They just want to go to Church on Sunday or on Christmas and Easter and like that’s it. It’s an important part of their culture. But, you know, these internal fights don’t matter. They probably couldn’t tell you the name of their local bishop.

Speaker C: I mean, a Pew survey of American Catholics found 60% wanted the church to be more generally inclusive. So that would speak to what you’re saying.

Speaker D: Yeah, right. I mean, the thing is that we know this from surveys that there is no Catholic vote. Right. Generally, if you look at Catholics and the way that they vote, it is much more predicted by the things that predict everybody else’s votes. So it’s correlated to your race, your social class, your education level, your gender, and the Catholicism. It seems like to the extent that it enters into the conversation or the consideration of how you’re voting is mostly just to affirm what you believe based on those other things. So, yeah, really, like, I think that Catholicism doesn’t have all that much of an impact on politics. You know, I think maybe for many years we saw that a lot of Catholics were your single issue voters on abortion, but I don’t know that that was a majority of Catholics even, you know. And when you look today at how Catholics are voting on abortion, it’s again, generally correlated with those other things, more so than with their religion.

Speaker C: But it seems like Catholic priests are more conservative.

Speaker D: They are. The data shows that the younger priests especially. So you have like kind of your Vatican II era, older priests that generally lean more liberal and then your younger ones lean more conservative. And that’s self reported.

Speaker C: What does that mean about like how the Church is assembling itself within the United States? And does that mean that someone like Pope Leo sees himself as like a corrective to this because he doesn’t believe that the current leadership, I mean, who knows what he believes? But like the, the current Catholic leadership within the United States might not actually represent either what the Vatican wants or what the people it’s serving wants. Which means like that’s a tight spot to be in.

Speaker D: Yeah, there’s a couple things I would say here.

Speaker C: One is that Catholics generally, if they’re following all of the Church’s teachings, which surveys show, you know, nobody does, sounds kind of impossible to be itch.

Speaker D: Right. Should be politically homeless. You know, they, they don’t map onto just one or the other party.

Speaker C: Right. There’d be anti death penalty, that’d be anti abortion. You know what I mean? They’d have all these things.

Speaker D: Right. Which Pope Leo also spoke to that exact thing in one of those kind of off the cuff talks with journalists outside Castel Gandolfo. He said, people who say, I’m against abortion, but I’m pro death penalty, he said, I don’t know if that’s pro life. So he’s calling out this mismatch. I think Leo is going to be reshaping especially the US Bishops in the same way that John Paul II was able to do so. John Paul II is pope for several decades. I think it’s like 27 years. And during that time, he’s appointing bishops who really fit with his worldview, which was primarily having been a Pole, a man from Poland under the Soviet rule was very anti communist. And so he was appointing men who generally were more politically conservative according to US Standards. Pope Leo was managing for Pope Francis in the last few years who became bishops. He was his top advisor on that. And time and again, we saw Francis appointing bishops to the US who were more progressive minded. If we want to, you know, stick with these. Only helpful, to an extent, political terms. Leo has done the same. Right. And some of that is that he had a lot of guys kind of in the pipeline to become bishops from his time under Francis, but it’s also now he’s kind of onto his own people, I think. And who does he appoint? He’s appointing people who speak out about migration, people who are immigrants themselves, people who are critical of the Trump administration. And then he’s been kind of encouraging the bishops in the ways that he can to speak out about social justice. So I think that that mismatch between kind of the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic population of the US Politically will very gradually be corrected by who’s becoming bishops. How that affects the priests, it’s harder to say, I think.

Speaker C: I mean, there was this one interesting sign a few months back when the Conference of Catholic Bishops met and they did talk about immigration. And to me, when I heard about this, I just thought, huh, these changes that started under Francis and are continuing under Leo, maybe they’re bearing fruit. Do you want to explain what happened?

Speaker D: Yeah, sure. So the US Bishops got together for their regular November meeting and there was this proposal to put out what they call a special statement, which they almost never do. The last one was done decades ago on immigration and specifically denouncing the mass deportations that we were seeing across the country. And around the same time, this was around when J.D. vance was kind of dissing the Catholic Church for being outspoken on immigration because many members of the Catholic Church these days, like the main growth area for U.S. catholicism, is.

Speaker C: Is Latino is.

Speaker D: Latino is immigrants.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Yeah. And so the US Bishops voted almost unanimously to put out this statement. And, you know, it could have been a stronger statement, but it did take to task this. This kind of signature Trump policy.

Speaker C: Yeah. Where does this all land? Like, I look at Pope Leo, it seems to me like his influence, partially because he can stay there as long as he wants. And so he has the time to settle in. His influence is going to grow. And I don’t know if the same can be said for Trump and Trumpism.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: But I don’t know if you see it differently.

Speaker D: No, I do. David Gibson, this, like, really great Vatican analyst writing out of New York, he had a piece in the Times a while ago where in which he said, leo is not looking for a confrontation with Trump. He is looking past Trump. Leo knows that he is playing the long game. Right.

Speaker C: He is relatively young, for he has the luxury of playing the long game.

Speaker D: Exactly. He is in this job until death, or should he choose to resign, Although that’s really, really rare. Benedict was the first person in, like, 500 years to do it, and he is. He was 69 when he was elected. He’s 70 now. Right. He’s got a ways to go. He has time to reshape the US Episcopate. He has time. Sorry, episcopate Bishops. The body of bishops. Yeah. Trump will probably be long gone. And I think, you know, this is up to maybe more savvy political analysts to say whether I’m right on this or not. But I think that the conservative movement in the US Is already struggling to find, like, what comes after Trumpism. Can Trumpism outlast this administration? Here’s the other thing I would say. Leo would probably not dig this conversation that we’re having.

Speaker C: I’m sorry, Leo.

Speaker D: And that is because he thinks that this polarization in the U.S. church, right. This whole deal where, like, your preferences about the Mass, your preferences about politics, whatever, like, they all become one thing. You know, if you’re leaning right politically, maybe you also like the Latin Mass and so on. He is really about, like, his primary concern is unity. It’s peace in the world. It’s unity in the church. And he has this reputation as being a bridge builder. So I remember, like, one of my friends the day of the election emailed Pope Leo. Leo was responding to emails and texts that day, which is crazy. I’m sorry, what? Okay, continue. And Leo replied to the email and signed his name, Leo ppxiv. The PP is an old papal title that means Pontifex pontificam, which means bridge builder. So, like, from day one, he saw himself as that. I’m looking forward to what he says. On July 3, he’s getting this big liberty medal from the National Constitution Center. Oh, in Philly. Yeah, in Philly, Yeah. So on July 3rd, he’s going to give a speech live from the Vatican to a, like, 250th anniversary of the US gathering in Philly. That’ll be a time to see what exactly he wants to say to America.

Speaker C: You mean he’s not doing a UFC fight on the Vatican lawn?

Speaker D: Shocker. But, yeah, there’s this. There’s this great moment right after Leo was elected. So, like, the Monday after the election, he had an audience with like, like all the journalists who had come in from around the world. And one of them threw him a question at the end where she was like, I think it was a woman. She was like, what’s your message for the US Church? He just goes, I have many, and then leaves. So we’ll see what those are, but I think we’re starting to see them.

Speaker C: Colleen, this was a delight. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker D: Thank you so much, Mary.

Speaker A: Colleen Dully is the Vatican correspondent over at America Media, a Jesuit news and culture magazine. She’s also the co host of their Inside the Vatican podcast and the author of the memoir Struck Down, Not Destroyed. And that’s our show. What Next is produced by Elena Schwartz, Rob Guenther, Anna Phillips, and Madeline Ducharme. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of what Next and what Next tbd.

Speaker C: Mia Lobel is the executive producer, producer of podcasts here at Slate.

Speaker A: Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations.

Speaker C: And I’m Mary Harris.

Speaker A: Go track me down in blue sky. I’m at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening.

Speaker C: Catch you back here next time.