Michael Higgins, Toronto, ON

With Pope Leo XIV and U.S. President Donald Trump on a potential collision course, the future promises more than a modicum of upheaval.

There has never before been an American pontiff and there has never been an American president so shamelessly totalitarian in instinct and behaviour.

The Vatican has been here before. In 1925, Georgy Chicherin, the Soviet foreign minister, told the Jesuit Michel d’Herbigny that “we Communists feel pretty sure we can triumph over London capitalism, but Rome will prove a harder nut to crack.” While years later the Russian leader Joseph Stalin mocked the Vatican’s might (“How many divisions does the Pope have?” he was reputed to have asked) Cicherin knew better. “Without Rome religion would die but Rome sends out for service of her religion propagandists of every kind. They are more effective than guns or armies.”

Rome outlasted Soviet Moscow and Nazi Berlin, two implacable foes that sought its extirpation, and it has weathered other hostile powers since, but the Trump presidency has posed fresh challenges for Pope Leo precisely because he is an American.
The Vatican was looking for an improved Francis model, and just might have found one in Leo XIV

As part of his political outreach, Leo, who hitherto had very limited exposure to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, is doing catch-up. He has met with his nuncios or ambassadors; he has addressed envoys in training at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, the training school for church diplomats; he has paid close attention to the work of Study Group 8, a synod-created body responsible for reviewing the role of papal representatives; and he has met with numerous ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, building on a foundation of mutual understanding.

He needs this armour to engage the Potomac’s culture warrior, a President who is not inclined to grant quarter if it means losing face.

Leo has key men in place: the veteran nuncio in Washington, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Robert McElroy, the only American prelate with a doctorate in political science (from Stanford University). But he also needs the complete American episcopacy to be onside – and that has proven to be a daunting task.

The American bishops are a divided lot; many of them were insufficiently supportive of the Francis pontificate; some are closely aligned with Mr. Trump (Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield and Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend sit on the President’s Religious Liberty Commission); and the majority wait in trepidation to see which way the wind blows.

Who is Pope Leo XIV? The American longshot has a Latin missionary heart, but many of his views remain a mystery.

On the issue of immigration, the wind blows in a very clear direction. Following the elections of the new president and vice-president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on Nov. 11, an election closely watched by Catholics loyal to Leo and by those skeptical of his leadership, the results were at best Solomonic. The bishops chose Paul Coakley, Archbishop of Oklahoma City, as their president and Daniel Flores, Bishop of Brownsville, Tex., as their vice-president. Archbishop Coakley is an amicable conservative, while Bishop Flores has been publicly critical of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown given the proximity of his diocese to the Mexican border and his strong social-justice convictions.

After the elections, the USCCB issued a strong statement deploring the treatment of immigrants: “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety [and] we are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and vilification of immigrants.”

Leo affirmed the thrust of the statement and personally observed that immigrants were being treated in an “extremely disrespectful way.” This, in turn, prompted the bullish and inelegant Tom Homan, the White House border czar and a practising Catholic, to publicly repudiate the bishops by noting that “the Catholic Church is wrong and the bishops” – and by implication their boss, the Pope – “need to spend time fixing the Catholic Church.” Ouch.

It is not uncommon and is strategically savvy for Mr. Trump to deploy the Catholic members of his circle – Vice-President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Brian Burch, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt – to run interference for him with the Vatican. But on the matter of immigration, the U.S. bishops and the Bishop of Rome are on the same page.

Other factors militate against a united front. Many in the American hierarchy are philosophically sympathetic to the conservative backlash afflicting their country, are prepared to excuse the moral cavity at the heart of Republican misrule, are in thrall to Catholic billionaires driven by a surfeit of piety, and are disinclined to constrain the evangelizing role of zealous Catholic youth influencers with their advocacy of a restorationist Catholicism keen on settled certitudes and archaic rituals.

If Leo is to wear the mantle of his late 19th-century namesake predecessor, Leo XIII, he must embrace the temerity of that first social-justice pope and call out the perfidy of political and economic systems that enslave humanity. Writing in October in The Tablet, British journalist Clifford Longley urged the current pope to follow Leo XIII by proposing universal norms and bluntly denouncing those who break them. If this was true of the economic excesses of capitalism that prompted Leo XIII to enter the political arena, it is even more pressing now with few international leaders capable of mustering the authority the current Leo has to address it. But now it is more than a matter of economic inequity. As Mr. Longley noted, “the time is right for a similar treatment of democracy. Before it is too late.”

If Leo becomes the public champion of democracy, expect more than a castigation from Mr. Homan. Presidential expletives are sure to fly.