On July 9 The New York Times published a long profile of Brian Burch, the ambassador President Trump sent to the Holy See, built on two interviews Elizabeth Dias and Motoko Rich conducted with him in Rome in late June. The piece set out to show a diplomat managing the distance between a pope and a president who have collided over the war in Iran. It captured something more pointed: the president’s man denying, on the record, that the pope had taught what the pope taught.

Leo XIV told reporters aboard his flight to Madrid on June 6 that “in Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.” Burch told the Times that the pope had done no such thing. “The Vatican has not said, nor will they say, declare definitively whether or not this is a just or unjust war,” he said. Leo had said it in public, on the record, three weeks earlier, and he had written the doctrine behind it into an encyclical a month before that.

In The Judas Kiss I described a gesture the Catholic Right -- its bishops, journals, and officeholders, not the schismatic fringe -- has perfected against the social doctrine of the last two popes. These are people who cannot clearly and publicly break with the pope. For them, to say aloud that Leo is wrong about migrants, or about the men killed at sea, or about the poor, is to undermine their own status as representatives of Catholicism and the Catholic Church, and they will not pay that price. Instead, they appear to affirm the teaching and, in the same motion, nullify it by interpreting it in ways that can no longer disturb a policy, a vote or a conscience.

Burch is the purest case of the type. He is a conservative movement Catholic, the co-founder and longtime president of CatholicVote, a pro-Trump advocacy group that fuses conservative politics with the language and the imagery of the Church. The embassy is his first diplomatic post; his career is conservative Catholic advocacy, and his standing rests on his status as a Catholic. So does the ambassador’s post itself. Trump sent him to Rome as the man who had spent the campaign arguing, in a book he titled A New Catholic Moment, that Trump served the Catholic common good. His reverence for the Catholic Church is political capital he cannot afford to jeopardize. An open break with Leo would undermine the Catholic identity that makes him useful to the president and qualifies him for the embassy. He cannot say the pope is wrong. He must honor Leo and unsay him in the same breath.

In May 2026 Leo issued Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical that indicts concentrated private power and the men who grow rich treating persons as inputs. Word on Fire, Bishop Barron’s media apparatus, quickly published an account by its editor-in-chief, telling readers the encyclical’s “foremost priority” is to remind us we are “beloved children of God.” The indictment vanished, and a consolation that threatens no one filled the space. The same encyclical carries, at paragraph 192, the teaching on war that Brian Burch would later report as unspoken.

The firewall goes up around each teaching that needs nullifying. Barron gives the cleanest statement of it: the pope’s task is to “move prudential judgment in the right direction,” and the president makes the judgments, so Leo is honored in full and fenced out of every actual deportation. First Things built the civic version when it answered Cardinal McElroy, who had called indiscriminate mass deportation incompatible with Catholic doctrine. The writer granted that a campaign of camps and broken families “could hardly fail to be cruel and inhumane,” then rested the whole verdict on a prediction: sober men in the administration, the border czar Tom Homan among them, would see to it that none of it came to pass. Events have falsified the prediction.

Burch runs the same maneuver on immigration, where Leo has spoken most plainly and the administration acts most harshly. For the Fourth of July, Leo released a letter to the American people calling the welcome and protection of immigrants a defense of human life and ‘a recognition of the dignity that belongs to every human person.’ He turned down the White House invitation for the holiday and went to Lampedusa, the Italian island where migrants land and drown, to stand with the people the administration deports. That evening Leo came to Burch’s residence for dinner, and Burch told the Times the visit had been ‘an encouraging dialogue on President Trump’s bold leadership’ and ‘a reminder of the closeness of our two nations.’ Leo rebuked the deportations that same day, in the letter and by going to Lampedusa; Burch reported the evening as agreement.

On the war, Ambassador Burch nullifies the teaching himself, in the open, and Dias and Rich recorded the retreat step by step. Burch opens by denying any judgment exists: the Vatican ‘has not said, nor will they say.’ Read Leo’s sentence back to him, and he concedes it: ‘You’re right, he did say that.’ He relocates the authority, arguing the just-war call ‘does rely ultimately upon the prudential wisdom of the legitimately elected sovereign’ who wages the war. Cornered, he divides the pope, insisting Leo spoke ‘not as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ, but only as the sovereign political leader of the Vatican City-State.’

His credentials refute his theology. Burch is accredited to the Holy See, not to the State of Vatican City. Envoys treat with the pope because the Holy See is a sovereign subject of international law, and it holds that standing by reason of his office as head of the universal Church, not by reason of the hundred acres behind the colonnade. Burch presented his letters to Leo as Roman Pontiff in September 2025, and his mission is styled the Embassy to the Holy See. When he tells the Times that Leo spoke “only as the sovereign political leader of the Vatican City-State,” he demotes the pope to the one capacity that neither sends nor receives an ambassador. Burch is accredited to the very office he says the pope did not occupy when he spoke against the war.

The split needs Leo’s words to be a temporal prince’s aside. The doctrine they apply sits in Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical Leo released on May 25. Paragraph 192 states that the “‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” and that “humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.” An encyclical is an act of the ordinary magisterium, the teaching office of the vicar of Christ. The Vatican City-State fields no army and fought no war against Iran; as its temporal sovereign Leo had nothing to decide. He addressed the war in the one office Burch subtracts.

Burch leans on a real distinction and inverts it. The Catechism at paragraph 2309 places the prudential decision to wage war with those who bear responsibility for the common good. It leaves the criteria under moral judgment and leaves the Magisterium free to apply them. Leo teaching that the criteria “are not present” measures the act against the standard, which is the work of the teaching office. He stands in a line. Francis wrote in Fratelli Tutti that it is “very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war,’” and Leo cites the passage in his own footnotes. The teaching cannot be quarantined as one pope’s temperament when two popes carried it in one hand.

The Times did part of the job and abandoned the rest. Dias and Rich caught Burch’s smaller inventions and corrected them on the page: he claimed the pope ‘typically doesn’t directly engage leaders,’ and they noted that Leo has hosted 82 world leaders and has met and phoned Giorgia Meloni more than once. When Burch fell back from his flat denial to the two-popes distinction, the reporters printed it and moved on, as if a man could sort the vicar of Christ from the sovereign of a city-state and obey only the second.

That distinction has no standing in Catholic theology. The two facts that dispose of it -- that an encyclical teaches with the pope’s full authority, and that the city-state Burch invokes had no war to decide -- are the two the article leaves out. Without them Burch’s fallback reads as a fine diplomatic point rather than the evasion it is. The paper set out to cover a diplomat managing a difficult relationship and ended up carrying his misrepresentation of the pope to millions of readers who will never open paragraph 192. A reader finishes the piece knowing Burch’s account of the pope’s words and not knowing whether it is true.

Run Burch through the test, which asks nothing about his heart. He states the weightlessness himself: “I have never once thought for a second that somehow I couldn’t properly represent the president.” His reverence for Leo and his fealty to Trump have never once collided, because he arranged them so they cannot. He adds that the president and the pope share goals that are “very much aligned,” and that “the policies and leadership of President Trump are enabling a moment for the Catholic Church to both grow and thrive.” No teaching of Leo’s has cost Burch a single position. The assent was shaped from the start to prevent the collision.

Burch builds the boldest version of the firewall. Barron routes the pope’s word into prudential judgment; Edward Feser routed the death-penalty teaching into prudential judgment binding no one. Burch goes past both. Barron and Feser leave the pope his office and relocate his words. Burch leaves the words in place and relocates the office out from under them.

The paper’s framing carried the nullification to the reader, and the denial held until Dias read the pope’s own sentence back to him and he had to answer, “You’re right, he did say that.” Dias did there the one thing the article otherwise refused to do. She laid the act before the man and made him look at it, the task Christ modeled in the garden and the one I urged at the close of The Judas Kiss. Burch looked, conceded the words, and reached for the next firewall. The kiss is the false affirmation; the betrayal is the nullification worked underneath it.

On a humid Saturday evening in May, in a red-brick building on Capitol Hill, thirty young men and a few women sat down to politely argue. Most of them were adult converts to Catholicism, and they were united in their admiration for America’s most visible Catholic convert, Vice President J.D. Vance. They belong to the Cicero Society, a debating club that meets on the Washington campus of Hillsdale College, a small conservative Christian school in Michigan known for sending its graduates into Republican politics. The members wore tweed. One carried a cane he did not appear to need. They followed ancient parliamentary rules, addressing one another as “the gentleman” and “the lady,” stamping their feet to signal approval and hissing to signal disapproval. A reporter named Nate Weisberg sat in and described the evening for New York Magazine, in an article titled “The Young Catholic Elite Poised to Take Over MAGA.”

The question they debated that night was whether Christianity is conservative. The side that won argued No. A Christian, they concluded, cannot be content to preserve a society as corrupt as ours; until the country’s laws are remade along Christian lines, a serious Christian must be a radical. One speaker put it in a way that would puzzle most Americans: “Christian ends sometimes require progressive means.” He was not endorsing Bernie Sanders or AOC. By “progressive means” he meant that the right should be willing to seize institutions and rebuild them by force, the way the radical left has been willing to do — a method borrowed from the enemy and aimed now at Christian and conservative goals.

These are not people withdrawing from the world to pray in private. They want political power, and they want to use it to make the United States more Catholic in its laws and its public life. The politician who makes that goal feel possible for them is Vice President J.D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, at age thirty-five, and placed his faith at the center of his 2026 memoir. Some in the room say they hope the club will grow into a staffing network for a Vance administration they expect will govern the country in the near future.

These young converts embody a paradox about the current Catholic Church in America. By ordinary measures, that Church is shrinking. Infant baptisms have fallen by more than half this century. Catholic weddings have dropped further still. Catholic school enrollment is down by roughly a million children. And yet Catholicism has never held more power on the American right. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. So is much of the Trump cabinet, and so is much of the legal and intellectual machinery of the conservative movement. These gains have been fueled by millions of dollars from wealthy conservative Catholic donors prepared to keep spending to grow their influence. Ambitious young people in Washington have noticed, and a significant number of them have concluded that the road to power and success in the nation’s capital now runs through the Catholic Church.

The stranger thing is a contradiction at the center of the movement. These converts came to the Catholic Church for its authority — for a two-thousand-year-old teaching office that does not bend to the fashions of the age and that confidently hands down the truth from above. What they converted to was an idea of the Church: a fixed fortress of order and permanence that would stand against an ever-changing and liberalizing world and confirm what they already believed.

But what they actually joined was the living Catholic Church, which in the person of Pope Leo XIV — the first American ever elected to the office — says almost the opposite of what they believe about nearly every pressing question of the day: immigration, war, the environment, capital punishment, unregulated markets, and the government’s duty to provide healthcare, education, and care for the poor. Converts who were drawn to Catholicism by its authority now spend much of their energy explaining why the Pope is wrong.

The situation is a puzzle, and it looks brand-new, a product of the Trump years. But it is not new. The road these young people are walking — the road by which English-speaking conservatives have reasoned and yearned their way into the Roman Catholic Church — is nearly two centuries old, and it runs in a pattern anyone can trace once they know to look. I have watched people walk it myself.

Crossing the Tiber

I had a friend in college, in the 1970s, who made this crossing long before J.D. Vance or the Cicero Society existed. He did it in two stages: first out of the agnosticism he had grown up in and into the “high church” wing of the Church of England, with its old ceremonies and vestments and incense, and then, a few years later, the rest of the way into Rome. There is a shorthand term for it. To become Catholic is to “cross the Tiber,” the river that runs through Rome. My friend crossed the Thames first and then the Tiber. He wanted then what the young people in that Washington debating club want now — cathedrals and candles and plainchant, an ancient liturgy, a Church old enough and weighty enough to stand against a present he found thin and disposable. He was drawn by the same beautiful idea of the ancient and forever certain Catholic Church as these young adult conservatives in Washington. What set him apart came later. When the actual Church asked hard things of him, he obeyed. He surrendered the Book of Common Prayer, and his individual judgments on what God required of him, and he submitted.

The critic Susan Sontag argued that a style can carry a set of commitments its admirers never openly state. The style of these young Catholics tells you which Church they love. The tweed, the Latin, the reverence for cathedrals and old liturgies all express a longing for a Church that is fixed, hierarchical, certain, and grand — a fortress of permanence in a dissolving age. The attractions of that idea of the Church did not begin with the Cicero Society. It has a history nearly two centuries old, and to understand it we have to follow it back to the man who walked this road almost two hundred years ago.

John Henry Newman was one of the most admired English churchmen of the nineteenth century, an Oxford scholar and Anglican priest with a following among the brightest students of his day. In the 1830s he led what became known as the Oxford Movement, an effort to recover the ancient character of the Church of England — to show that it was a true branch of the one historic Church, holding the same sacraments and the same apostolic authority as Rome, older by far than the Reformation, and lacking only the Pope. His whole early project was to rescue the Church of England from modernity by proving that it was already Catholic. He called this middle position between Rome and Protestantism the Via Media, the middle way. The Via Media was his own idea of the Church, and it was the idea he would have to give up.

In 1841 he published a pamphlet, Tract 90, arguing that the Thirty-Nine Articles — the Reformation-era statements of official Anglican belief — could be read in a sense compatible with Catholic teaching. It was a last attempt to hold his theory together, and the theory did not survive his own scholarship. Studying the early Church’s bitter fights over the nature of Christ, Newman kept seeing the Anglican position sitting where the ancient heretics had sat, and Rome standing where the whole Church had stood against them. A single sentence of St. Augustine’s, written about a fourth-century schism, lodged in him and would not leave: securus judicat orbis terrarum — the settled judgment of the whole world is not to be doubted. If the verdict of the universal Church was the test, then the small, national, separated Church of England stood on the wrong side of it.

The book he wrote as he worked this problem through, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, is the record of a man reasoning himself out of the Protestant church he loved. Newman argued in it that Christian teaching genuinely develops over time, unfolding and maturing across the centuries while remaining continuous with what came before, so that the later doctrines of Rome are the early faith brought to maturity. Having convinced himself, he acted against his own comfort and his own affections. In October 1845 an Italian missionary priest, Dominic Barberi, received him into the Roman Catholic Church at Littlemore, outside Oxford.

That act cost him nearly everything. He lost the Oxford he loved, his university fellowship, and friendships that never healed. And Rome, once he arrived, did not embrace him. A powerful faction of Catholics — the party historians call the Ultramontanes, who wanted the maximum possible authority gathered into the hands of the Pope — found Newman too English, too individualistic, too attached to the rights of conscience. For much of his Catholic life he lived under suspicion. When the First Vatican Council defined the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870, the definition was aimed, in part, at men like him, who put great value in individual conscience. Vindication came only at the very end. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII made him a cardinal, an old man honored at last for having been right and patient. The Catholic Church declared him a saint in 2019.

Like the conservative Catholic converts at the Cicero Society debate, Newman came to Rome because he was looking for the home of an enduring truth. But unlike these new conservative converts, Newman submitted. He entered a communion that did not welcome him and bent to an authority that treated him with suspicion for decades, because he had come to believe that the Church had the right to teach and that he had the duty to obey. He had held his own idea of the Church, the Via Media, and when the evidence destroyed it he did not cling to the idea; he submitted to the Church that actually existed. His most quoted line is the one his supposed heirs now use to justify defying the Pope. Raising an imagined toast in 1875, he said he would drink “to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.” People cite this as though Newman were placing his private judgment above Rome. He meant almost the reverse. Conscience, for Newman, was the faculty that binds a person to the truth, and the truth had bound him to obey the Church. Once his conscience convinced him that the Roman Catholic Church was the true Church founded by Christ, his own sense of moral integrity demanded his submission to the Pope as an act of obedience to God’s own voice within him.

After Newman, the road to Rome filled with travelers coming for the Church’s trappings and tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Catholicism still carried a whiff of the exotic and the forbidden in Protestant England, a set of aesthetes and decadents was drawn to its incense and its drama — Oscar Wilde, received into the Church as he lay dying in 1900, and lesser figures like the artist Aubrey Beardsley and the poet Lionel Johnson. In the twentieth century came the novelists: Ronald Knox, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and above all Evelyn Waugh, who converted in 1930 and gave the whole sensibility its monument in Brideshead Revisited, a novel about a doomed Catholic aristocratic family and the strange persistence of grace. When the Second Vatican Council modernized the Mass in the 1960s and replaced the old Latin liturgy with worship in the vernacular, Waugh felt the change as a personal grief. He wrote his objections. Then he stayed, and obeyed, inside the Church that had wounded him, and died on Easter Sunday in 1966 after hearing Mass one last time in the old rite. The same pull drew Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the greatest poets in the English language, who converted under Newman’s influence in 1866, became a Jesuit, burned the poems of his youth as a kind of sacrifice, and lived out a hidden, obedient, often anguished life. These men were drawn to Catholicism by the beauty of the Church, but when the Church asked hard things of them, they obeyed it.

The conservative pull of Catholicism — its antiquity, its authority, its ornate beauty, its promise of a stability more permanent than the anxious modern self — is embodied most famously by G.K. Chesterton, and no figure is more revealing of the young men now claiming him. Chesterton, the huge, jovial English writer who entered the Catholic Church in 1922 and created the priest-detective Father Brown, is the patron saint of the tweedy convert. His contemporary admirers have attempted to mimic his manner and discarded most of his convictions. Chesterton spent his Catholic years defending the poor against the rich, distrusting empire, and promoting an economic idea he called distributism: the belief that property and productive wealth should be spread as widely as possible, into as many small hands as possible, against both big business and big government. The young men who wear his kind of hat and quote his paradoxes now serve the politics of billionaires.

The sheer number of these conservative converts, and the fact that they are arriving now, call for explanation. The usual explanation blames the Second Vatican Council, the great assembly of the world’s Catholic bishops from 1962 to 1965 that modernized Catholic worship and practice and that traditionalists have mourned ever since as the moment the Church went soft. That story misses something important. The same post-Council Church that the traditionalists blame is the Church that spent forty years advertising for exactly these converts and building special doors for them to enter.

The Catholic Church Welcomes Refugees from a Liberalizing Protestantism.

Pope John Paul II, who reigned from 1978 to 2005, planted a flag. In Veritatis Splendor (1993) he defended the existence of unchanging moral truths against a modern culture he saw dissolving into relativism. In Evangelium Vitae (1995) he set the Church against abortion and euthanasia and proclaimed a “culture of life.” To a conservative Protestant watching his own denomination make concession after concession to liberal ideas, Rome looked like a fortress that would hold. In 1998, in Fides et Ratio, John Paul told the world that faith and reason were partners rather than enemies, which spoke straight to the clever young person who had assumed that religion was for people who could not think.

A whole machinery of welcome grew up for these refugees from an ever-liberalizing Protestantism. Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who became a Catholic priest, founded the journal First Things in 1990 to house a conservative alliance of Catholics and like-minded Protestants. A genre of convert memoirs turned the crossing into a public drama others could follow step by step. Then came Pope Benedict XVI, who reigned from 2005 to 2013 and spoke directly to the lovers of the old beauty. In 2007, in a decree called Summorum Pontificum, he freed the old Latin Mass for wider use and told the young traditionalists that their hunger for it was legitimate. In 2009 he created a formal structure, the Ordinariate, that let entire groups of Anglican clerics become Catholic priests while keeping their marriages and the liturgy they loved, the very prose of Thomas Cranmer carried whole into the Catholic Church.

For forty years, then, Rome said to refugees from liberalizing Protestantism: your church has surrendered to the spirit of the age. We have not. Come to us. Millions came. But the invitation was to join the whole Church and to receive all of its teaching, not only the parts that felt grand, fortress-like, and conservative. The Church that John Paul and Benedict held out was at once a fortress and a cross. The same John Paul who condemned abortion also condemned the death penalty and unbridled capitalism and the mistreatment of the poor and the migrant. Evangelium Vitae and the Sermon on the Mount came from one Gospel and one Church. The grand fortress was the Church they imagined, but Rome offered the fortress and the cross and trusted that converts knew they were embracing both.

The Church Teaches the Dignity of All Human Life.

Consider what the Catholic Church now asks of these converts who crossed the Tiber to escape liberalism. The Church asks the faithful, including its converts who fled from liberal Protestantism, to embrace the whole of Catholic teaching, including its view of the dignity of all human life. Pope Francis — and perhaps even more so Pope Leo XIV — have reminded the faithful of the centrality of the Church’s commitment to the sanctity of every human life from conception to natural death. It is because of this unwavering and inclusive commitment to life that the Church opposes abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and unjust war as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This perspective, rooted in Catholic social teaching, seeks to unify the Christian response to diverse social issues under a single premise: that all human life has inherent dignity and is sacred.

The convert who crossed the Tiber cheering the first of these has to reckon with the rest. He must reckon with a Church advancing toward sainthood the cause of Dorothy Day, the anti-war, anti-capitalist friend of the poor who was arrested more times than she could count; with a Church that in 2018 revised its Catechism to call the death penalty “inadmissible,” closing a door Catholic teaching had long left ajar; and with a Church that increasingly doubts whether any modern war can meet the ancient conditions for a just one. In 2023, in a document called Fiducia Supplicans, Pope Francis permitted priests to bless people in same-sex relationships — taking care to bless the persons and not the relationship, a distinction that satisfied no one and enraged the very converts who had crossed the Tiber to escape a liberalizing Protestantism in the first place.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, elected in 2025, has spent his first year preaching the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, where Christ says the nations will be judged by how they treated the hungry, the stranger, and the prisoner — “the least of these.” Leo has called the treatment of migrants in the United States impossible to square with any honest claim to be pro-life, condemned an economy that “kills,” and denounced the American and Israeli war on Iran, reminding the faithful that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war. In his first encyclical he declared that wealth and technology must be treated as a common good rather than hoarded by a corporate few, insisting that “instead of waiting for the benefits of growth to reach the poor eventually, decisions need to be taken to ensure that growth becomes inclusive from the outset,” and calling for “just laws and methods of redistribution.” Set these teachings in front of the American Catholic right, and its devotion to the Church looks less like the loving submission of John Henry Newman and more like the angry protest of Martin Luther.

There is a word, ultramontane, for the Catholic who gives the Pope the maximum possible deference; it means “beyond the mountains,” beyond the Alps, looking always to Rome. On the questions that discipline their liberal culture-war enemies — abortion, sexuality, the meaning of marriage — these converts are perfectly ultramontane, quoting the Catechism like men who believe every word of it. But on the questions that touch how the powerful and the wealthy treat what Christ called “the least of these” — the migrant, the condemned prisoner, the poor — the same converts suddenly discover that a papal statement might be merely prudential, or mistaken, or a private opinion, or a sign that the Pope himself has misunderstood the faith. What they want from the Church is a weapon for their politics. They did not cross the Tiber in search of salvation. Its authority is honored when it agrees with their politics and ignored when it does not. Their politics governs their faith, and not the other way around.

The Barron Doctrine.

Limiting the Pope’s authority is an old move — French kings and German emperors built whole doctrines on it for centuries — but these converts have a newer and more convenient instrument. Let us call it the Barron Doctrine, after Bishop Robert Barron, who has become a favorite Catholic cleric of the Trump administration. The Barron Doctrine is a broad extension of the doctrine of prudential judgment that draws a hard boundary between universal moral teaching and its application to policy. The Church may teach the moral law; the state applies it to particular cases; and how the state applies it lies beyond the Church’s competence to judge. “It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life,” Barron has said.

Conveniently for the new conservative converts who came into the Church at least in part to wag their fingers at sinners, the Barron Doctrine — as actually practiced by its adherents, including Bishop Barron — does not prevent the Church from making moral judgments about particular policies in the areas of sexual matters and cultural warfare, including abortion, same-sex marriage, and the enforcement of strict lines separating the two legitimate genders, while removing war, immigration, the death penalty, and the treatment of the poor to the untouchable realm of prudential judgment.

J.D. Vance, the avatar of the tweedy conservative Catholic convert, has given the clearest demonstration of this incoherent but greatly useful view of papal authority, because he has frequently applied it in public to defend the actions of the Trump administration. Early in 2025, defending its drive to turn away migrants, Vance reached for a concept from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas called the ordo amoris, the “order of love” — the ancient idea that our obligations of charity are ordered, that we rightly care for those closest to us before those far away. He used it to argue that Americans owe their care to fellow citizens before strangers at the border. Pope Francis wrote a rare public letter to the American bishops correcting him, gently and unmistakably, pointing to the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the man who fulfills the law is exactly the one who crosses every line of nation and tribe to help a stranger bleeding in the road. Later, when Pope Leo condemned the administration’s mass deportations as inhumane and contrary to the Gospel, Vance warned the Pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

These converts fled a Protestantism that, as they saw it, kept revising the faith to suit the times, and they crossed the Tiber for an authority that would stand fixed against the age. Then that authority turned and asked hard things of them — mercy toward the migrant, restraint in war, doubt about the executioner, care for the poor, the sharing of wealth, the good of creation before profit — and in that moment they did the one thing their conversion was supposed to have made impossible. They set their own judgment above the living Church and told the Pope, and the public, that the Pope had the faith wrong. The certainty that Rome has gone astray, that one’s private conviction outranks the Chair of Peter, is precisely the Protestant instinct they had claimed to leave behind. When Newman came to disagree with his own Church, he submitted. These converts conclude that the Pope is in error and set out to correct him.

The Sin of libido dominandi, the Lust to Dominate and its Cure.

At the root of it is a sin that St. Augustine, whom Vance has taken as his patron, gave a name to sixteen centuries ago. In The City of God he calls it the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate — the hunger to rule over others that he identifies as the driving passion of the earthly city, the counterfeit of the City of God, which is built instead on the love of God. Augustine saw this lust as the defining passion of political life, so it should not surprise us to find it in a Washington debating club whose members, cosplaying Chesterton and dreaming of a Vance administration, mean to rule the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.

St. Augustine also shows the path away from this sin. It is the ordo amoris — the order of love — that J.D. Vance deeply misunderstood and misappropriated. The lust to dominate happens when a person loves themselves and power more than they love God and their neighbor. The cure is that, through God’s grace, a person comes to love God first, their neighbor second, and material power last.

My old friend, who crossed the Thames and then the Tiber half a century ago, loved in that order. Like the great St. John Henry Newman before him, he bent to a Church that asked hard things of him and sought to rule nothing at all. The young men in tweed have converted instead to a Church of their own imagining, a grand fortress that flatters them, despises those they despise, and asks nothing of them that they do not already wish to give.

Viola Fauver Gregg was born on April 11, 1925, in California, Pennsylvania, the elder daughter of Eva Wilson, a schoolteacher, and Heber Gregg, a coal miner who lost a hand in the mines and taught himself to read after leaving school in the eighth grade. The family chased work south into Tennessee and Georgia. Viola grew up poor and white and watched the color line up close. At six, while her mother managed a small Georgia grocery, Viola took money from the register and handed it to a Black child whose family had less than her own. The impulse to give to others arrived early and stayed.

She married George Argyris in 1943 and had two daughters, Penny and Evangeline, before the marriage ended in 1949. In 1951 she married Anthony Liuzzo, a Teamsters business agent in Detroit, and had three more children. She raised all five. She was baptized into the Catholic Church with her second marriage, unchurched before it and devout afterwards.

A ninth-grade dropout, she enrolled in night classes in 1961 to train as a medical assistant and graduated at the top of her group. She entered Wayne State University in 1963. She joined the Detroit chapter of the NAACP, pressed for reform in schools and wages, and was arrested twice for her protests. Both times she pleaded guilty and demanded a trial so the cause would reach a courtroom and a newspaper.

“Hate hurts the hater, not the hated,” she told her daughter Penny.

In her second marriage, she experienced the tragic loss of two babies — one was stillborn, and another died just a couple of hours after birth. She could not accept the Church’s theological doctrine at the time, which decreed that unbaptized infants were barred from heaven and instead spent eternity in “limbo.” Her daughter, Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, later recounted that her mother fiercely questioned how an all-loving God could deny heaven to an innocent child. Her faith in the Church shattered, but her faith in God held. She tried Protestant evangelicalism for a season, then joined the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit, two blocks from the Wayne State campus, becoming a full member on March 29, 1964.

In February 1965 an Alabama state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion after a voting-rights march, and he died. On March 7, troopers and deputies clubbed and gassed marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Days later a white mob beat James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister who had answered the same summons, and he died too. Martin Luther King Jr. called on people of every faith to come.

Liuzzo phoned her husband to say the struggle “was everybody’s fight,” drove her 1963 Oldsmobile to Selma, and used it to ferry marchers along Highway 80 between Selma and Montgomery. She grew close to a young mother in the ho

On Sunday, March 21, she joined 3,000 other marchers as, five abreast; they marched across the Pettus Bridge, the site of Bloody Sunday, and began the trek towards Montgomery. On Monday and Tuesday she continued her work at Brown Chapel’s registration desk and also made shuttle runs from the airport to the marchers’ campsite. Afterward she served at the campsite’s first-aid station.

On March 24 Liuzzo stayed overnight at St. Jude’s, a complex of buildings including a Catholic Church, hospital and school, just inside the Montgomery city limits. From the church tower she watched the approach of 25,000 marchers. When she came down from the tower, unsettled and anxious, she told Timothy Deasy, one of the parish priests, “Father, I have a feeling of apprehension. Something is going to happen today. Someone is going to be killed.”

Calmer after prayer, she joined the marchers, barefoot, for the last four miles to the capitol building in Montgomery. With everyone else she sang freedom songs and listened to the speeches. When the march was over, Liuzzo met civil rights worker Leroy Moton, who had been using her car all day as an airport shuttle. The two of them drove five passengers back to Selma. When they were dropped off, Viola volunteered to return Moton to Montgomery.

Viola’s biographer, Mary Stanton, describes the ride to Selma. “Between the airport and Selma a car full of whites drove up behind them and banged into the bumper of the Oldsmobile several times before passing . . . When they stopped for gas, Moton remembered, white bystanders shouted insults at the integrated group. Further along, the driver of another car turned on his high beams and left them shining into Vi’s rearview mirror. Members of a KKK “missionary squad”— Collie Leroy Wilkins, Jr., William Orville Eaton, and Eugene Thomas — spotted Liuzzo and Moton stopped at a traffic light in Selma. They followed her car for twenty miles. While she attempted to outrun her pursuers, she sang at the top of her lungs, “We Shall Overcome.” About half way between Selma and Montgomery the four men pulled their car up next to hers. They fired twice into her head, and she died at once. The car ran into a ditch, and Moton survived by lying still until the killers left.

She was the only white woman killed in the civil rights movement. One of the four men in the pursuing car, Gary Thomas Rowe, was a paid FBI informant. The Bureau’s own informant had ridden with the Klansmen who killed her. J. Edgar Hoover moved to keep that presence from staining the Bureau, and he stained Liuzzo instead. Agents spread word that Liuzzo used drugs, slept around, and abandoned her children for the company of Black men. Klansmen burned crosses at Detroit homes, the Liuzzo house among them. Her children grew up taunted and threatened.

Father Timothy Deasy — a priest at the St. Jude complex whom she had confided in hours before her death — became one of her most vocal defenders against public smear campaigns. He stated: “I felt very strongly about this woman and her goodness. She inspired us all. Her energy, enthusiasm, and compassion were contagious and put many of us to shame.”

Alabama juries refused to convict the shooters of murder. Federal prosecutors then charged three of them under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 with conspiring to deny Liuzzo her civil rights, and on December 3, 1965, an all-white, all-male jury found them guilty. They received ten years. Rowe testified against them and walked free under immunity. His work for the FBI stayed hidden until 1978. When the family sued the Bureau in 1983, the court dismissed the case.

Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, less than five months after the murder. He had telephoned Viola’s husband the day after she died to say she had not died in vain. A white mother from Detroit shot dead on an Alabama road moved a country that the murders of Jimmie Lee Jackson and countless Black Alabamians had not.

State courts let her shooters go. Rowe kept his freedom and his secret. Hoover’s slanders followed her children into schoolyards. She had died estranged from the parish that received her, her last profession made in another church’s pews.

Yet the question her death posed for the Church was not only what America owed her. It was also whether the Catholic Church still claimed her as one of its own. Viola Liuzzo died a professed Unitarian Universalist. Whether she also died a Catholic turns on what baptism does and on what the Church did when her body came home to Detroit.

The 1917 Code of Canon Law then in force, canon 1240, let a pastor refuse Church burial to a baptized Catholic who had publicly joined a non-Catholic body without signs of repentance. Liuzzo had been a professed Unitarian Universalist for a year. The Detroit Church looked at that departure and declined to invoke the canon. It buried her as a Catholic instead. The Detroit archdiocesan chancery formally cleared the service, declaring her “worthy of a Christian burial.” Her pastor, Father Albert M. Hutting, publicly defended her, revealing that Liuzzo had actually received the Catholic sacraments at a nearby parish just a week before departing for Selma.

Her funeral filled Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Detroit on March 30, 1965. Martin Luther King, Jr. came, with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, James Farmer of CORE, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, and William Milliken, the lieutenant governor of Michigan. The Catholic Church offered a high requiem Mass.

The priest’s opinion that had turned her away was never a defined doctrine, and the Church has since moved from it. In 2007 the International Theological Commission, under Benedict XVI, set limbo aside and voiced hope for the salvation of infants who die without baptism. The Church came to hope for children like the one her parish had refused.

The Council of Trent taught that baptism imprints a character on the soul that no later act erases. Liuzzo carried that mark from her reception until the highway. In the Church’s own reckoning she never stopped being one of the baptized. The requiem was the Church burying a beloved daughter who had lived and died according to the Gospel.

Cardinal Francis Spellman was the most powerful Catholic in the United States. He ran the Archdiocese of New York for a quarter century, served as Military Vicar of the Armed Forces, and made himself the most well-known religious supporter of the War in Vietnam. Pope Paul VI called for peace and negotiations while Spellman blessed the American escalation and the fighting. Eventually, the American bishops abandoned their most powerful member and followed the pope. As a result, Cardinal Spellman lost his influence and ended his life isolated. Bishop Robert Barron stands today where Spellman stood -- cheering on an increasingly unpopular American president engaged in an increasingly unpopular policy — now of mass deportations rather than napalm — while the pope criticizes the president’s policy as inhumane and unjust. History tells us that the Catholic Church that abandoned Cardinal Spellman in favor of the Pope will not follow Bishop Barron either.

Cardinal Spellman helped to build the alliance between American Catholicism and American power in Vietnam with his own hands. He met Ngô Đình Diệm at a Maryknoll seminary in New York in 1950, promoted him, and helped assemble the Washington lobby that sold the Diệm government to the American press under the joined banners of Catholicism and steadfast anti-Communism. He pressed Eisenhower toward intervention in 1954. As Military Vicar he blessed the American enterprise in Vietnam as it grew, and continued to support it even as many American religious leaders turned against it -- from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Rev. John C. Bennett to members of his own faith, such as Fr. John L. McKenzie, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, Fr. Philip Berrigan, and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

By the mid-1960s Cardinal Spellman had become one of the Vietnam War’s most prominent supporters. He traveled to Saigon in December 1966, spoke to American troops in military dress, told them to fight for total victory, and blessed the conflict as a “War for Civilization.” He described the fight as “Christ’s war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.”

In Rome, Pope Paul VI was begging the world to end that war and all wars. He had gone to the United Nations in October 1965 -- becoming the first sitting pope to visit the United States -- and pleaded that there be no more war. Just months earlier, in July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson had drastically increased U.S. military commitments by deploying an additional 50,000 ground troops. Pope Paul VI’s speech at the United Nations calling for “No more war; war never again,” clearly addressed the escalating American military intervention in Vietnam. He begged the international community to use the UN framework to guarantee security without resorting to weapons and arms. Later that day, more than 90,000 people packed Yankee Stadium to listen to Pope Paul VI call for peace, and an estimated 100 million Americans watched the broadcast on television.

When Cardinal Spellman pressed for total American military victory in Vietnam that December, the Vatican announced that Paul VI did not share his view. Just days after Spellman’s speech, the Vatican issued an unusual and immediate clarification to the global press as the Vatican officially announced that Cardinal Spellman did not speak for the Pope or the Holy See, and that his “total victory” comments were strictly his personal opinion.

Pope Paul VI explicitly used his subsequent public appearances to counter Spellman’s rhetoric. While Spellman was calling for military victory, the Pope addressed massive crowds in St. Peter’s Square, stating that the war could not be won on the battlefield. He repeatedly demanded an immediate cessation of the U.S. bombing campaigns over North Vietnam and urged both sides to enter into immediate, compromise-based peace talks. The Pope used the disagreement with Spellman and U.S. policy to apply Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in terris, and reminded the global Catholic community that the Church had moved away from traditional “Just War” absolute victories in the nuclear age.

Cardinal Spellman reacted to Pope Paul VI’s peace initiatives with furious but quiet insubordination, remaining entirely unmoved and aggressively doubling down on his pro-war rhetoric.

Caught between the ultra-patriotic, anti-communist, and militaristic rhetoric of Cardinal Spellman and the peace pleas of Pope Paul VI, the American Catholic hierarchy underwent one of the most profound institutional shifts in American Catholic history. In 1966, the American hierarchy reorganized into the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) under its first president, the consensus-minded Archbishop John Dearden of Detroit. Initially, the NCCB mirrored Spellman’s staunchly anti-communist, Cold War mindset. In its November 1966 collective statement, “Peace and Vietnam,” the conference formally declared that the U.S. military presence in Vietnam was morally justified. It prioritized national loyalty and the defense of Southeast Asia over the Vatican’s diplomatic calls for an immediate halt to the violence. However, this pro-war consensus cracked rapidly as specific high-ranking prelates began breaking ranks to align directly with Pope Paul VI. Even before Spellman’s controversial Christmas 1966 call for “total victory,” Cardinal Lawrence Shehan of Baltimore issued a groundbreaking pastoral letter titled “Peace and Patriotism.” Cardinal Shehan forcefully warned that an all-out, unrestrained war violated the Christian conscience. Following Spellman’s speech, Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston also publicly rejected the crusade-like rhetoric, demanding that the United States implement the Pope’s framework for a negotiated settlement.

This rebellion against Cardinal Spellman and the war was amplified at the grassroots level by regional groups like the newly founded Association of Chicago Priests (ACP), which collaborated with anti-war leaders to organize peace educational meetings in local parishes. This growing alliance between key archbishops and local clergy effectively isolated Cardinal Spellman, stripping him of his role as the undisputed spokesperson for American Catholicism. Cardinal Spellman died on December 2, 1967, as an iconic but increasingly isolated titan of a bygone era, and a bellicose advocate for military force who was wholly out of step with the Magisterium, the Catholic faithful, and the American people.

After Spellman’s death, the devastating aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive and the radical actions of the Catholic peace movement -- such as the draft board raids led by the Berrigan brothers -- pushed the institutional Church to its breaking point. The NCCB could no longer reconcile the escalating human toll with traditional Catholic “Just War” doctrines. In November 1971, under the leadership of Archbishop John Dearden, the NCCB issued its landmark “Resolution on Southeast Asia.” In a total institutional reversal, the American bishops officially declared that the war no longer met the moral criteria for a just conflict. Fully embracing Pope Paul VI’s stance, the NCCB demanded an immediate, unilateral end to U.S. involvement, solidifying a permanent shift in mainstream American Catholic leadership toward peace activism.

In the conflict between Cardinal Spellman and Pope Paul VI, the American Catholic Church chose the pope. American Catholicism first produced some of the war’s fiercest religious opponents, such as Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers, and the hierarchy eventually followed. In November 1971 the American bishops officially declared that the Vietnam War did not meet the conditions for a just war, reaching the judgment that Pope Paul VI had held for years.

Cardinal Spellman’s isolation and abandonment by the American Catholic Church hierarchy holds a lesson for today. The prelate who fuses the faith with American power can hold the media, the money, and the access, and the Church will still move past him to the pope, when the pope speaks the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Cardinal Spellman had faced off against lay Catholic activist Dorothy Day many times before and during the Vietnam War. In January 1949 the gravediggers who tended the cemeteries of the Archdiocese of New York went on strike. Cardinal Spellman called the walkout Communist-inspired, sent Maryknoll seminarians and his own diocesan students to break the strike by digging graves, and held out until the union accepted the archdiocese’s terms. Dorothy Day stood with the workers. She wrote to Cardinal Spellman in defense of their dignity and their right to organize and pressed him to make peace. “It is easier for the great to give in than the poor,” she told him.

The Catholic Church has since chosen between them. At the request of Cardinal John O’Connor, the Archdiocese of New York opened Dorothy Day’s cause for canonization in 2000 and gave her the title Servant of God. The American bishops endorsed the cause in 2012, Francis praised her before the United States Congress in 2015, and in 2021 the archdiocese closed its local inquiry at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and sent the cause to Rome, where it stands today. Spellman has no cause, no title, and no process. The archdiocese he ran for nearly thirty years is petitioning Rome to canonize the woman who defied him.

The verdict on holiness matches the verdict on the war. Cardinal Spellman’s power and connections won him nothing in the most significant declaration about a person’s life that the Church reserves to itself, and the woman who took the workers’ side against him, and took the side of peace when he campaigned for war, holds the honor he does not.

In our own time, Bishop Robert Barron has built the largest Catholic media platform in the United States. He attended President Trump’s address to Congress in March 2025 and likened the evening to a high liturgy of democracy, faulting only the Democrats who declined to applaud. He prayed at a National Day of Prayer in the Rose Garden and accepted a seat on the president’s Religious Liberty Commission. Like Spellman, he is close to a president who is sharply at odds with the pope. Cardinal Spellman blessed a war in Southeast Asia and the killing it required, and Bishop Barron rationalizes and defends Trump’s mass deportations and his threat to strip U.S. citizenship from the American-born children of undocumented immigrants. While Pope Leo condemned the strikes on Iran and the killings in the Caribbean, Bishop Barron told Ben Shapiro’s audience that the pope was not speaking of Iran, argued that judging a war is not the Church’s task, and kept silent on the boat strikes that Archbishop Broglio called illegal and immoral.

The story of Cardinal Spellman, the Vietnam War, and the American Catholic Church points to how the story of Bishop Barron and Donald Trump will end. The American Catholic Church rallied to Pope Paul VI and left Cardinal Spellman behind, and it will rally to Pope Leo XIV and leave Bishop Barron behind.

There is a recurring temptation for the Church, or for some of its most powerful clerics, to align itself with great wealth, state power, and military force, and history shows the Church’s eventual rejection of this temptation through the guidance of the Holy Spirit working through the papacy, the Magisterium, and Catholic social teaching.

In January 1875, the temperature in the Cassiar Mountains of British Columbia did not rise above freezing for the entire month. On several days it dropped so low that the mercury froze in the thermometer. Into that cold, on January 28, Nellie Cashman set out from Fort Wrangell with five men and fifteen hundred pounds of supplies on a sled, bound for a camp of miners on the Stikine River who were dying of scurvy. The U.S. Army commander at Fort Wrangell sent a detachment after her to bring her back, dead or alive. When the soldiers caught up with her on the trail, Cashman declined to be retrieved. As she told a reporter years later: “I heard they were coming, and I climbed a tree to look for them -- and I was still up there when they came to ‘get my body.’ It was a good joke -- but I gave ‘em a fine feed.”

She reached the camp after seventy-seven days in the snow and distributed the provisions she had hauled through the mountains. She had packed potatoes and limes specifically for the scurvy. As she said of the trip: “We pushed on, however, and in the coldest kind of weather, with hardly any trail to follow... after sleeping 77 days in the snow reached the camp in time to be on service to the men, some of whom were half dead for want of proper supplies.” The miners recovered. The newspapers called her the Angel of the Cassiar. Cashman took the name and kept moving.

Ellen Cashman was born in Midleton, County Cork, Ireland, around 1845, into a Catholic family that was poor before the Great Famine made it desperate. Her father disappeared -- dead or gone, the record does not say -- when she was young, and her mother emigrated with Nellie and her sister Frances to Boston in the early 1850s, joining the wave of Irish families who crossed the Atlantic with nothing and crowded into the dense tenements of the harbor city. Nellie found work as a hotel bellhop and then as an elevator operator, an occupation the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame notes was “reserved for men.” By the late 1860s the family had moved to San Francisco, drawn west along with half of Irish America.

In 1872, Cashman opened a boarding house in Pioche, Nevada, near the silver mines, and established the pattern she would follow for the next fifty years: arrive before the boom, run a tight business, give most of the money away, and leave before the bust. In Pioche she became deeply involved in the local Catholic parish. When she moved to the Cassiar in 1874, she ran her boarding house explicitly as an instrument of Catholic charity -- soliciting donations from her customers for the Sisters of Saint Anne in Victoria, who were building a hospital. She delivered $500 to the nuns herself, traveling to Victoria for the purpose, before she learned on that same trip that the miners upstream on the Stikine were dying of scurvy. The hospital the Sisters of Saint Anne built with those funds became St. Joseph’s Hospital in Victoria -- the same institution where Cashman would die fifty years later. She was twenty-nine years old when she made the Cassiar rescue. She did not regard the rescue as exceptional. She regarded it as what the situation required.

Cashman arrived in Tombstone, Arizona in 1880, already known across the frontier mining circuit. She and a partner ran the Russ House, a hotel and restaurant on Fifth Street, and she used the revenue from it the way she used everything she earned: as a funding source for Catholic institutions and for the people around her who had nothing. Her first project in Tombstone was the town’s first Catholic church. She solicited every business on the main street, including the Crystal Palace Saloon -- one of whose owners was Wyatt Earp -- for Sunday Mass services in the saloon itself while she raised the construction funds. Sacred Heart Church opened in 1881. She then became treasurer of the Miners’ Hospital Association and brought three Sisters of Mercy from Tucson to staff it, working alongside them herself as a nurse at Cochise County Hospital. When miners were killed in accidents, she walked directly to the saloons on Allen Street and solicited on the spot for the widows and children. In 1881, when her brother-in-law Thomas Cunningham died of tuberculosis, she took her widowed sister Frances and her five children into her household. When Frances died two years later, Cashman raised all five children on her own, continuing her business and her charitable work the entire time.

In 1884, five men convicted in the Bisbee Massacre were sentenced to hang. When Cashman learned that a grandstand was being built for public spectators, she organized a crew of miners to dismantle it the night before the execution. The hangings proceeded, but without a crowd. When she then learned that a medical school planned to exhume the bodies, she hired two prospectors to stand watch over the graves at Boot Hill for ten days. The following year, a group of miners attempted to lynch mine owner E.B. Gage during a labor dispute. Cashman drove her buggy into the mob and spirited Gage away to Benson, Arizona. She was not choosing Gage’s side in the labor dispute. She was refusing to let a crowd kill a man outside the law -- the same refusal she had applied to the public hanging grandstand and the grave robbers. The target changed; the principle did not.

The Tombstone record was not exceptional within Cashman’s career -- it was representative of it. Across every mining camp she passed through for fifty years, she funded Catholic hospitals, schools, and churches. She supported the Sisters of Saint Anne in Victoria and the Sisters of Mercy in Tucson. In Fairbanks, when the Episcopal St. Matthew’s Hospital needed funds and no Catholic institution was yet established to serve the miners there, she gave to St. Matthew’s. She supported the Salvation Army when it was doing the work. Her Catholicism was not sectarian in the sense of withholding from institutions that were not Catholic -- it was Catholic in the sense that the obligation to the suffering person came first, and the question of which institution was doing the serving came second. She funded the Catholic infrastructure of the frontier mining West because that infrastructure needed building and she was the person with both the resources and the will to build it. She gave because her faith required it, and she gave across institutional lines because her faith required that too.

In 1898, at fifty-three, Cashman walked the Chilkoot Pass into Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush, opened a restaurant, and worked mining claims on the side. In 1912, at sixty-seven, she became the first woman known to cast a ballot in an Alaska-wide election, walking into the polling place at Nolan Creek before women were legally permitted to vote in the territory. In 1924, a year before her death, she mushed 750 miles by dog sled in seventeen days from her mine at Nolan Creek to Seward to catch a steamer south. The Star Phoenix of Saskatoon reported that she “fully maintained her reputation of being the champion woman musher of the world.”

Cashman died on January 4, 1925, at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Victoria, British Columbia -- the same hospital she had helped the Sisters of Saint Anne fund from her Cassiar boarding house receipts fifty years before. She was eighty years old. When the news reached the major newspapers of North America, every one of them ran a tribute to the woman they called the Miner’s Angel. Her grave at Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria is beside the Sisters of Saint Anne, the order she had funded from her first boarding house. The marker reads: “A friend of the sick and hungry, a hero among frontier miners.” The recognitions that followed her death measured how widely her reputation had spread: inducted into the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame in 1984; featured on a United States Postal Service stamp in the 1994 “Legends of the West” series; inducted posthumously into the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame in 2006, one of fewer than five women among approximately one hundred inductees; inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth in 2007. Tombstone celebrates Nellie Cashman Day on the eve of Women’s Equality Day each year. In 2014, her birthplace of Midleton, County Cork, unveiled a monument with the words “The Angel of the Cassiar Mountains” on its face. The Women Business Owners of Seattle named their most prestigious annual award the Nellie Cashman Award in 1982, and it bears her name still.

The corporal works of mercy -- feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, bury the dead -- are not a precursor to Catholic social teaching. They are Catholic social teaching at its most direct, enacted before the encyclicals gave the tradition its systematic form. Cashman fed the miners dying of scurvy in the Cassiar before Rerum Novarum was written, built the Catholic institutional infrastructure of the frontier mining West with her own business revenue, nursed the sick, raised five orphaned children, and refused on three separate occasions to let a crowd decide who deserved to live. The corporal works of mercy were the organizing principle of her life.

On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, Union Colonel Dennis O’Kane climbed onto a stone wall on Cemetery Ridge and walked the line of his regiment while fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers formed for the assault a mile across the field. O’Kane was a forty-four year old immigrant from Coleraine, in Ireland’s County Derry, and kept a tavern in Philadelphia before the war. He had immigrated to the United States on a coffin ship in the 1840s, during the Famine. Behind him stood the 258 men of the 69th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, most of them, like him, Irish immigrants from that city, carrying along with the Stars and Stripes a green flag with a golden harp, telling everyone that they were proud of their Irish heritage.

A veteran of the regiment later recorded what O’Kane said as he passed down the line. “Hold your fire,” he told them, “until you see the whites of their eyes. You are as brave as any troops you will face, and today you stand on the soil of your own state.” Within the hour a bullet pierced him through the body. He died the next morning.

The 69th held the low wall at the Angle, the ground that Robert E. Lee aimed his last assault at and that historians call the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Union regiments to their right and left gave way. A desperate and determined wall of gray headed straight for the 69th Pennsylvania. Sheltered behind that low stone wall, the Irish American soldiers held their breath and waited for the command to fire. When their first volley ripped into the rebel line, the field dissolved into a mass of bayonets and clubbed muskets. Colonel Dennis O’Kane fell mortally wounded, followed quickly by his second in command, and the line never broke. By the time the survivors of Pickett’s Charge turned and fled, the 69th had lost over half its men. They had become the anvil on which the Confederacy’s last great assault shattered. The Irishmen of Philadelphia who held that line at Gettysburg probably saved the Union.

Nativists spent the decades before the war trying to expel Irish Catholics.

Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic policies were implemented across America during the years before the Civil War. During the 1820s and 1830s, Massachusetts and New York took colonial poor laws descended from the English practice of banishing beggars and turned them into statutes for barring destitute foreigners, such as the Irish, and shipping them back across the Atlantic. The two states expelled roughly one hundred thousand people over the middle decades of the century, most of them Irish Catholics, many of them widows and orphans and the sick. The Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s arose as a direct, xenophobic mass movement against the wave of Irish Catholic immigrants fleeing the Great Famine. Fearing that these new arrivals were part of a papal conspiracy to subvert American democracy and suppress Protestant wages, the secret society, officially named the American Party, weaponized anti-Catholic conspiracy theories to gain rapid political power. Members campaigned to block Catholics from holding public office and sought to extend the naturalization period for citizenship from five years to twenty-one years. This bitter nativist crusade fueled widespread job discrimination, anti-immigrant propaganda, and outbreaks of mob violence against Irish neighborhoods and Catholic institutions. The Famine Irish were the first sustained targets of American deportation policy, removed for being poor and Catholic and unwanted, whatever the manner of their arrival.

Only twenty years before the Battle of Gettysburg, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic nativists in Philadelphia had burned down Irish Catholic churches, killed and wounded dozens of immigrant countrymen and women, and left thousands of Irish Catholic residents of Philadelphia homeless. On May 3, 1844, the American Republican Party held a rally in Kensington, the Irish Catholic weaving district north of the old city. The stated grievance was a proposal that Catholic children be excused from reading the Protestant King James Bible in the public schools. Irish residents broke up the meeting. The nativists returned three days later in the thousands, shots were exchanged, and an eighteen-year-old nativist named George Shiffler fell dead holding an American flag. The nativists made him a martyr for the cause it called America for Americans.

Over the next two days the crowds burned more than thirty buildings in Kensington, among them the Seminary of the Sisters of Charity and St. Michael’s Catholic Church. That evening they crossed into Philadelphia proper and set fire to St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, dedicated in 1801. Mayor John Morin Scott stood before the church and pleaded for calm. The rioters answered with stones and cheered when the steeple fell. A grand jury called to look into the riots blamed the Catholics for provoking the violence.

The Irish of Kensington rebuilt St. Michael’s. The Augustinians sued the city for failing to protect St. Augustine’s, won damages, and consecrated a new church in 1848. The children who grew up in those rebuilt sanctuaries reached fighting age in 1861.

The green flag came from the same neighborhoods the mobs had torched.

O’Kane’s men enlisted while that removal machinery still ran. The republic they defended at Gettysburg had spent two decades trying to expel their mothers as a burden on the public charge. The 69th Pennsylvania mustered in at Philadelphia in August 1861. Its ranks held weavers, laborers, and tavern keepers from Kensington and the districts around it, the streets where the nativist mob had set fires to drive them out of the city and out of the country. Dennis O’Kane, the Coleraine-born tavern owner, rose to command it.

The regiment wanted to join the Irish immigrants of the 69th New York and stand together as one Irish brigade. The governor of Pennsylvania refused. The Philadelphians then took the number 69 for themselves in answer and carried a green Irish flag into every battle beside the Stars and Stripes. The citizens who gave them that flag stitched a golden harp on a field of shamrocks and set an old line beneath it:

Riamh Nar Dhruid O Spairn Iann — Who Never Retreated from the Clash of Spears.

Men whose homes and churches had been put to the torch by people who thought of themselves as the only real Americans marched under both banners at once, and died under both at the wall.

No federal law made the Famine Irish either legal or illegal.

The Famine Irish entered a country that possessed no federal immigration code resembling the modern one and required none of the permissions and documents Americans now associate with lawful immigration. The millions who fled the famine in Ireland carried no visas, waited in no lines, and cleared no quota, because none existed. They bought steerage passage on the vessels the era called coffin ships, endured the crossing, and walked off at the dock without any papers of any kind from federal or state officials. Tens of thousands of these newly arrived immigrants stepped directly off the ships and into the Union Army. The retroactive boast of some that their ancestors came “the right way,” legally, unlike the immigrants of the present, describes a system that did not yet exist when the Irish-born soldiers of the 69th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry gave their all for the United States at Gettysburg.

Father Dennis Corby of Notre Dame blessed the soldiers who many of their countrymen wanted to send back to Ireland.

A second Irish Catholic formation stood on the field at Gettysburg, the Irish Brigade of Patrick Kelly, distinct from the Philadelphia regiment. Its chaplain was William Corby, a priest and a professor who had left the young college at Notre Dame to serve the immigrants in the ranks. On the afternoon of July 2, 1863, as the brigade prepared to enter the Wheatfield, Corby climbed a boulder in front of the men. There had been no time for confession through weeks of marching. He told the soldiers to make an act of contrition, and he raised his hand over the whole brigade.

Corby wrote afterward of what he meant by it:

That general absolution was intended for all — in quantum possum — not only for our brigade, but for all, North or South, who were susceptible of it and who were about to appear before their Judge.

Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, the son of a Baptist deacon, paid the tribute of removing his hat. The brigade went into the Wheatfield and lost close to two hundred of its 530 men within the hour.

On July 9, 1863, Colonel Dennis O’Kane, a fallen hero of Gettysburg, was buried at Cathedral Cemetery, the oldest diocesan cemetery in Philadelphia, built in 1849 to accommodate the massive influx of Catholic immigrants arriving from Ireland and Germany. His remains were carried by sixteen Union officers, under a Requiem Mass sung in the city whose mobs had burned Catholic churches within his own lifetime. Colonel O’Kane and his men had held the wall for a country that had tried to burn Catholic immigrants like himself out of their homes, out of their churches, and out of their adopted country. His grave is marked by a simple headstone bearing a Celtic cross. Visitors often place the Stars and Stripes on one side of the headstone and the Irish tricolour flag on the other, a reminder of his proud immigrant status.

Pope Leo XIV opens his letter to the United States on its 250th anniversary with with “heartfelt congratulations to all Americans” on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He sent the letter to a nation carrying out mass deportation. The first pope born in the United States then procedes to tell his own country that protecting the immigrant belongs to the same duty that protects the unborn child.

The letter gathers the principles Pope Leo XIV asks Americans to carry forward.

American-born Pope Leo XIV reads July 4, 1776 as the day that “gave enduring voice to the ideals of liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness, justice and democratic self-government.” He treats the anniversary as an occasion for examination of conscience, an invitation “to reflect upon the responsibilities that the sons and daughters of this country bear to one another,” and to those not yet born.

He turns first to religious freedom, “the right of every person to worship according to conscience and to practice their faith openly, without coercion or fear.” The weight falls on every person and on “the peaceful coexistence of a diverse people,” language that will not let religious liberty shrink to Christian privilege. Leo credits that freedom for letting the Church take root in America, and he counts what the Church returned: schools, hospitals, and “the preferential care of the poor.”

He then reaches for his namesake. Quoting Leo XIII’s encyclical Sapientiae Christianae, he writes that “no better citizen is there… than the Christian who is mindful of his duty.” Pope Leo rejects the idea that there is any tension between faith and citizenship. Belief, he insisits, “lends new vigor to the pursuit of justice, peace and the common good.”

He affirms “the God-given dignity of every human life,” an inherent worth “that calls for reverence, protection and care.” Leo runs the principle across the whole span of a life, from its “beginning at conception until natural death,” and outward to “a society in which the vulnerable, the suffering and the forgotten are always met with compassion, solidarity and love.”

Leo binds the right to life to both the unborn and the immigrant.

The passage reads: “Defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants, whose hopes, sacrifices and contribution have formed part of the history of this country from its very beginning. In every generation, those who have arrived seeking freedom, opportunity and a place to belong have helped to shape the nation’s character. To receive them with compassion and generosity is not only an act of charity, but also a recognition of the dignity that belongs to every human person.”

The word “also” does theological work. Leo declines to set immigrant welcome beside the protection of life as a separate cause. He folds it inside the Catholic respect for all human life. Alongside the defense of the child in the womb, welcoming, protecting, and assisting the immigrant is one of the ways a Catholic is called to defend human life.

In his letter, Leo XIV speaks from the perspective of the understanding of the right to life that Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Pope Leo’s hometown of Chicago expressed in his landmark lecture at Fordham University on December 6, 1983. Cardinal Bernardin called it the consistent ethic of life. The consistent life ethics means that all human life has inherent dignity and that threats to life — from conception to natural end — are fundamentally interconnected. Abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, war, poverty, and the treatment of the migrant belonged to a single, seamless fabric, and pulling one thread frays the rest.

Leo tells the immigrant’s story as an American story.

The pope — whose own family heritage includes people of French, Italian, Spanish, and Louisiana Creole descent, with genealogical records revealing ancestral ties to free people of color in New Orleans and the Caribbean — describes immigrants by “their hopes, sacrifices and contribution,” which he says “have formed part of the history of this country from its very beginning.” He credits every generation of arrivals with helping “to shape the nation’s character.” He writes to a country whose founding story is the immigrant, and he holds the story up against the country’s present conduct.

The last sentence of the passage refuses the frame of charity alone. To receive the immigrant with compassion, Leo writes, “is not only an act of charity, but also a recognition of the dignity that belongs to every human person.” Welcome is owed. The immigrant carries a dignity that precedes American law and outranks it.

Leo directly addresses the American people and passes over the U.S. government.

Leo addresses the letter to “all Americans.” He identifies no official in Washington and condemns no policy by name. He prays, as Paul instructed Timothy, for “those in positions of authority,” and there his attention to the government stops. The letter delivers its judgment on deportation through its structure, in the decision to seat the immigrant where the unborn child sits.

The letter see America’s treatment of the poor, the unborn, and the immigrant as manifestations of the same commitment to the right to life.

A man born in Chicago and schooled at Villanova congratulates his native country on its 250th year from the Apostolic Palace. Given every theme available to him, he spends his longest paragraphs on the poor, the unborn, and the immigrant. He entrusts the country to the Immaculate Conception, asking her to “watch over America and protect all who dwell therein.” The anniversary of our founding as a nation becomes more than a celebration. It becomes a reminder that defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting, and assisting immigrants. As Leo XIV reminds us, among the clearest tests right now of our country’s commitment to the dignity of human life.

On June 30, 2026, Vice President JD Vance appeared on The Michael Knowles Show to promote his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, about his recent conversion to Catholicism.

Between the memoir questions and the immigration questions, Vance turned to his neighbors' lawn signs.

“One of the really interesting things about the secular, hyper-progressive, hyper-liberal age that we live in,” Vance told Knowles, “is you realize how many of the rituals and institutions and practices of Catholicism show up in the modern world completely divorced from the God part and the grace part of it.” He supplied an example. “We're past the point” -- “thanks to Donald Trump, I would say” -- “where most people hang out those hideous signs in their yard that say, 'In this house we believe blah blah blah blah blah. You know, love is love, science is science, whatever. No person is illegal.'”

Then he summed up with his newly gained Catholic credentials: “That sign is such a disgusting butchering of the Nicene Creed.” People “still have this desire to profess,” Vance continued, “to do it very publicly, and even to do it in this kind of cadence that you see in the Nicene Creed.” And, he added, “they do it in this very politically motivated way.”

Within a day, Fr. James Martin, S.J., a Jesuit priest and bestselling author of numerous books on Catholicism, also known for his pastoral outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, posted a response to Vance on Facebook. It takes the Vice President's theological claim seriously and answers it theologically. Fr. Martin's post repays quotation at length.

Fr. James Martin reads the Creed back to the Vice President.

Fr. Martin opens with a confession of confusion: “It's hard to know what to make of the Vice President's bizarre, almost nonsensical, comments here. It sounds like he is equating the use of these 'hideous signs' to an alternative version [of] the Nicene Creed.”

Then he offers Vance a catechesis. “A little background: The Nicene Creed, formulated by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, is an essential profession of faith used by the Catholic Church (among other churches). It is also the familiar creedal formula spoken by Catholics during Sunday Masses: 'I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth...' It's a statement of belief, mainly about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Then the most sardonic line in the post: “It obviously doesn't talk about 'hideous signs' welcoming people.”

The catechesis then continues: “However, the Nicene Creed does affirm belief in the church as 'one, holy, catholic and apostolic.' (These are the four traditional 'marks' of the church.) This means, among other things, believing that the church comes to us directly from the apostles (it's 'apostolic'). Thus, it derives its authority not only from Jesus Christ, but also through the 'apostolic succession,' an authority passed down from the apostles in the early church to the Pope and to the bishops today.”

The Apostolic Clause in the Creed refers to the teaching authority of the successor of St. Peter.

“Apostolic” in the Creed points to the successor of St. Peter, considered the first pope of the Catholic Church, to whom Christ himself gave the keys. The successor of St. Peter is Leo XIV, elected in May 2025. The successors of the apostles include the bishops of the United States. A Catholic who recites the Creed at Sunday Mass confesses that these men hold a teaching authority in an undisturbed line of succession running back to the Twelve Apostles. The Nicene Creed professes that the Catholic Church is “apostolic” because its authority comes directly from Christ through St. Peter and his legitimate successors.

Fr. Martin draws the consequence: “It's ironic, then, that the Vice President is mocking things like love and the church's teaching on migrants in the same breath that he is professing his faith through the words of the Creed, which includes belief in [the] authority of the church. Because this 'one, holy, catholic and apostolic' church has long proclaimed the Gospel message of love and care for the stranger, which Jesus himself preached during his public ministry.”

The irony that Fr. Martin points out has a long paper trail in the news. In January 2025, Vance defended the administration's deportation program by invoking the ordo amoris: love your family first, then your neighbor, then your community, then your fellow citizens, and only then the rest of the world. On February 10, 2025, Pope Francis answered in a letter to the American bishops. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote. The true ordo amoris, he continued, is the one discovered “by meditating constantly on the parable of the 'Good Samaritan'” -- a love “that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Cardinal Robert Prevost, then prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, shared an article on the same dispute under the headline “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.” Three months later the cardinal became Leo XIV. The apostolic office the Creed confesses has examined the Vice President's theology of the stranger twice and ruled against it both times.

Fr. Martin turns around Vance's charge of butchering the Creed.

Martin then reverses the accusation: “So a butchering of the Creed would mean, in fact, not listening to the church's teaching on these matters and, even worse, not listening to Jesus's own teaching on love and loving the stranger. Because, in the words of the Creed, we also believe in 'one Lord, Jesus Christ.'”

That Lord left instructions on the point. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” he says in Matthew 25, describing the criterion by which the nations will be judged. The Creed Vance invokes confesses that this same Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

Fr. Martin never leaves the text of the Creed that Vance invoked. The Creed calls the Church “apostolic,” and that Church, through Francis and Leo XIV, has told Vance plainly to welcome the migrant. Vance praised the Creed and then mocked the Church's apostolic teaching on immigrants in a single breath. Fr. Martin lets the contradiction stand where Vance placed it: when Vance recites the Creed at Mass, he professes to accept the authority of Leo XIV as derived from Christ and St. Peter -- the same authority that has criticized and corrected his and Trump's policies on migrants.

Fr. Martin returns the charge of butchery to the man who made it. The Creed is butchered when a Catholic will not hear the Church on the migrant and will not hear Jesus on the stranger. The actual butchering of the Nicene Creed that Fr. Martin finds is Vance's own defense of Trump's immigration policies.

This post is also available on Substack: https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/p/fr-james-martin-sj-defends-the-nicene

On June 28, 2026, about four hundred Catholics hiked up a rough desert trail through yucca and creosote to celebrate Mass atop Mount Cristo Rey, where New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico meet. They stood beneath a twenty-nine-foot limestone statue of Christ the King, whose outstretched arms have overlooked the border for nearly a century. Bishop Peter Baldacchino of Las Cruces and Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso led the pilgrimage to protest the federal government’s plan to condemn diocesan land at the mountain’s base so it can complete a section of Trump’s border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Ten months earlier and six hundred miles west, California demolished the twenty-six-foot statue of Saint Junípero Serra that had overlooked Interstate 280 for half a century. The state gave two official reasons. The statue had suffered repeated vandalism, and it failed to meet the standards of California’s Transportation Art Program, which asks that public art reflect shared community values. The same thing lay behind both. Many Californians, including the leadership of the Ramaytush Ohlone, the original people of the San Francisco Peninsula, see Serra as the face of the eighteenth-century mission system and its forced labor, cultural destruction, and enslavement of Indigenous peoples. Among the graffiti that repeatedly defaced the statue were the words “monument of genocide.”

Nevertheless, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco denounced the removal as an act of anti-Catholic prejudice, and conservative commentators portrayed it as another assault on Christianity by the liberal administration of California Governor and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Gavin Newsom.

Conservative media raised no comparable alarm as the federal government moved to seize diocesan land at Mount Cristo Rey for the wall. The National Catholic Register and its EWTN affiliates covered the case, but as an immigration story that led with the diocese’s assurance that it is not against border security, and they gave it none of the persecution language they had spent on Serra.

If the protection of religious expression and the defense of Catholicism were the governing principle for conservative media, one would expect their greater alarm to center on the Christ the King statue atop Mount Cristo Rey.

There, the Diocese of Las Cruces owns consecrated ground. Each fall on the feast of Christ the King, as many as forty thousand pilgrims climb the five miles to the summit, some barefoot, some on their knees. The shrine has drawn the faithful from both sides of the border for ninety years, at Easter and on Good Friday.

The pilgrims who make that climb are the poor and the working families of the borderland, from El Paso, from Sunland Park, from Ciudad Juárez. Their ascent is popular devotion in its plainest form. The Vatican’s Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy calls such devotion “a treasure of the people of God” and “a thirst for God known only to the poor and the humble,” and ties it to patience, to an awareness of the Cross in daily life, and to a generosity that reaches heroism in testifying to the faith.

The seizure is concrete. The Department of Homeland Security has moved to condemn roughly fourteen acres at the mountain’s base for about one hundred eighty-three thousand dollars, to close the last unwalled gap in the El Paso region. The Diocese of Las Cruces answered under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Bishop Baldacchino argued that the condemnation violates canon law, since a diocese cannot licitly sell consecrated land without approval from the Vatican. The diocese wrote in federal court that a wall across the site would obstruct pilgrimage routes and turn sacred space into a symbol of division. When the El Paso Sector Border Patrol posted a video of an explosion on the mountain and promised a face lift, the diocese answered that the only face on Mount Cristo Rey is that of Christ the King. Federal crews building the wall in Arizona had already destroyed an Indigenous ground etching more than a thousand years old.

In sharp contrast, the Serra statue controversy touched nothing consecrated, and its removal disturbed no Catholic rite or act of popular piety. The statue stood alone on state property beside Interstate 280, on California’s Junípero Serra Freeway. The missions that Serra founded still stand. His tomb at Carmel still receives visitors. A Catholic could venerate Serra on the day before the demolition and on the day after in the same way.

The deepest difference is between a memorial and a use. The Serra statue commemorated. Mount Cristo Rey is used. A monument marks a memory that stands whether anyone comes or not. A shrine holds a rite that people perform with their bodies, the climb and the Mass and the prayer, tens of thousands of them each year. Take down the monument and the memory endures. Obstruct the shrine and the worship itself is burdened.

The alarm regarding the Serra statue came from predictable quarters, from San Francisco Bishop Cordileone – among the most politically and liturgically conservative of American bishops, a Trump-appointed member of the advisory board of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission who has advocated for the traditional Latin Mass and has opposed church closures due to COVID-19, and from politically and culturally conservative commentators such as the National Catholic Register and California Catholic Daily. They claimed to be outraged by the removal of the Serra statue, calling it an example of prejudice and marginalization against Catholics.

The people closest to the history of the California missions – also Catholic – answered in a different way. Most native and native-descended Catholics in the region welcomed the removal. Many local native people who described themselves as practicing Catholics had opposed Serra’s 2015 canonization. The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, comprised of all of the known surviving Native American lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay region who trace their ancestry through the Missions Dolores, Santa Clara, and San Jose, read the demolition as an acknowledgment of a painful colonial history in their homelands. Yve Chavez, a scholar, researcher, and professor of the history of the California mission – and a descendant of the Tongva (Gabrielino) people who are the indigenous inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin – has noted that missions remain Catholic whether or not the Serra statues stand. Through the whole episode, no one close to the missions reported a Mass halted or a sacrament denied.

On Mount Cristo Rey the government moves on consecrated diocesan land against a living Mass and pilgrimage. The Serra statue stood on a state freeway, where nothing was worshiped. If religious liberty were the principle at stake, Cristo Rey -- not Serra -- would outrage Bishop Cordileone and the conservative press.

The stakes reach past consistency. The title of Christ the King is a claim over every nation. Pope Pius XI placed the feast on the calendar in 1925 to declare that Christ reigns above every government and every border, and the statue on the mountain says the same in limestone, its arms open over the line that separates El Paso from Ciudad Juárez. A Church that rallies to a colonial memorial on a state freeway and lets the shrine of Christ the King pass to a border wall has inverted its own order. It defends the man who carried the Spanish crown into California and surrenders the King who reigns over the nations the wall divides.

On May 15, 1815, on the day Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral was dedicated on Mulberry Street in New York City, Pierre Toussaint (1766–1853) walked to its door with his wife and an elderly friend, and an usher refused them seats because they were Black. Toussaint had helped pay for the building. He apologized to the usher and turned to leave. A second usher recognized the most sought-after hairdresser in New York and hurried the family to a place of honor, and the president of the church’s board of trustees, Louis Binsse, a white, French aristocrat and colonial planter who became an elite New York painter and educator, and a personal friend of the Toussaints, sent an abject written apology once the slight reached him. But the fact remained: a Black man could fund a cathedral and still be stopped at its threshold by the standing assumption that the pews belonged only to white people.

Born a slave in Haiti.

Pierre was born in 1766 on the Bérard plantation in Saint-Domingue, the French colony that would become Haiti. Roughly half a million enslaved Africans labored there for the benefit of some thirty thousand French planters, and field-hand life killed nearly half the men before they reached forty. Pierre was spared the cane fields as a house slave, reared among the master’s children, taught to read and write by the family’s tutors, and given the run of the library. There he discovered À Kempis and made The Imitation of Christ the book he would quote from memory into old age. In 1787, with the colony sliding toward the rising that would erupt in 1791, the Bérards sent him to New York, where he apprenticed as a hairdresser and quickly became the most fashionable in the city, dressing the hair of its wealthiest women in their homes.

Then the Bérard fortune collapsed in the revolution and Jean Bérard died, and Pierre, still legally a slave, used his own earnings to support the widowed Madame Bérard for years, until her own deathbed in 1807, when she set him free. He was forty-one years old. He bought the freedom of his sister Rosalie and, in 1811, married Juliette Noel, whose freedom he had also purchased. When Rosalie died of tuberculosis, Pierre and Juliette adopted her daughter Euphemia and raised her as their own, schooling her in French and music until she too died of the disease at fourteen.

After gaining his freedom, hee choose his surname himself. The man who had been simply a Haitian slave name Pierre took the surname Toussaint, after Toussaint Louverture, the general who led the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue to the only successful slave revolution in modern history.

What he did with his freedom.

His charity rested on something deeper than generosity. It rested on work. Everything he gave away first passed through his own hands. The fortune that purchased freedom for Rosalie and Juliette, sustained widows, sheltered refugees, and endowed Catholic institutions came neither from inheritance nor speculation but from the skilled labor of a craftsman who earned the confidence of New York’s wealthiest families one appointment at a time. Long before the Church systematically articulated the dignity of labor in Rerum Novarum in 1891, Pierre Toussaint had already demonstrated its meaning. His profession was not merely the means by which he supported his philanthropy; it was the vocation through which he transformed personal excellence into the common good. As a layman living in the ordinary world of commerce and family life, he showed that holiness need not withdraw from society to sanctify it. Faithful work became the instrument through which he built schools, strengthened parishes, welcomed immigrants, restored families to economic life, and quietly enlarged the Church itself.

Fluent in both French and English, Toussaint became the hinge for the French-speaking refugees streaming off the ships from a burning Saint-Domingue. He and Juliette ran what amounted to an employment agency and a credit bureau for the newly arrived, found them work and lodging, arranged the sale of goods so that destitute families could raise cash, and kept their own home as a refuge for orphaned Black children, stranded priests, and travelers with nowhere to go. He was doing the works of mercy at the dock, welcoming the stranger and clothing the naked, decades before any encyclical set the obligation down in Latin.

His earnings flowed into the Church and into his own people. Toussaint helped raise the money for the first Catholic school for Black children in New York, at St. Vincent de Paul on Canal Street. He bankrolled the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore, the first congregation of Black religious women in the United States, whose foundress Mother Mary Lange, like Toussaint a refugee from Saint-Domingue, has a canonization cause of her own. He gave for sixty years at St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, where he heard morning Mass before every day of appointments, and he gave again to build the cathedral that would later turn him from its door. During the yellow fever and cholera epidemics he crossed the quarantine barricades to nurse the sick and dying—a man barred from the horse-cars and from half the public accommodations of his own city walking into the rooms everyone else was fleeing.

He stood for the dignity of labor and the dignity of the human person.

Catholic social teaching had not yet been systematically codified when Toussaint lived it. The dignity of the human person, the dignity of labor, the preferential love for the poor, the welcome owed the migrant and the refugee — the doctrine that Leo XIII would begin to codify in 1891 and that Leo XIV presses on the Church today — was already moving through the streets of lower Manhattan in the person of a freed slave with a comb and a purse. Matthew 25 was his whole program. He fed the hungry, sheltered the homeless, visited the sick, clothed the poor, crossing every line his century had drawn. Protestant and Catholic, white and Black, French and American —he served them without distinction because he could see no line in the face of a person in need.

The hard part of his story is the use the Church has made of him. In 1992, the year his cause formally opened, a headline in The New York Times asked whether canonizing Pierre Toussaint meant honoring a saint or an Uncle Tom, , and white Catholics in his own lifetime had patronized him with the very same phrase, meaning it as praise. The worry carries real weight. A Church that owned slaves in Louisiana and seated Black worshippers at the back can find it convenient to elevate the Black holy man who supported the family that enslaved him, who never agitated, whose charity unsettled no arrangement and demanded no repentance from anyone. His silence about slavery can be made to serve that comfort.

The silence carries a second meaning, though. “They have never seen blood flow as I have,” he told one of the rare interlocutors who pressed him on the subject — a man who had watched Saint-Domingue burn and who declined to perform either gratitude or fury for a white audience that wanted to assign him one or the other. He kept his counsel and kept his name, and the name was Louverture’s. A man who buys other people out of bondage with the wages of his own deferential trade is not performing docility. He is dismantling slavery one purchased life at a time, quietly, under the nose of a society that thought him safe.

Leo XIV brought the matter full circle in May of this year. His encyclical Magnifica Humanitas included a formal apology for the Church’s own complicity in slavery, and Pierre Toussaint is the face of the thing the Church confessed: the Black Catholic who paid for the cathedral and was turned from its door, the freed man who did the Church’s charity while the Church withheld its full welcome. The confession and the man belong together. One names the sin; the other shows what holiness looked like inside it.

John Paul II declared Toussaint Venerable in 1996, and Cardinal O’Connor had already moved his remains from the neglected old cemetery to a vault beneath the high altar of the new St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue, where he lies as the only layperson buried among the archbishops of New York. Thirty years on he is still Venerable. No African American has yet been canonized. Henriette DeLille has waited at the same rank since 2010; Mother Lange and Father Augustus Tolton remain in process. The Church that once refused Toussaint a seat has been slow to open its calendar to him, which is its own quiet continuation of the old delay.

As a Venerable he has no feast on the universal calendar, since canonization is what confers a liturgical feast. He is commemorated on June 30, the day he died in 1853 at the age of eighty-seven, and the Archdiocese of New York keeps a memorial Mass for him at St. Patrick’s on that date, said in the Lady Chapel behind the sanctuary where his portrait now hangs and where, on the cathedral’s great entrance mural, his face takes its place among the immigrants and first responders who built the city.

Leo XIV has made the welcome of the migrant a measure of the Church’s fidelity in our own anxious decade. Pierre Toussaint met that measure two centuries early, at the harbor, with work and a room and a name for the frightened people stepping off the boat behind him. He arrived in New York as one man’s property and spent his freedom buying others out of slavery and standing up the newcomers who had nothing.

We remember Venerable Pierre Toussaint on June 30 because it marks the anniversary of his death in 1853, traditionally celebrated as a holy person’s “birthday into heaven.” It honors his inspiring journey from enslavement to becoming a renowned New York philanthropist who dedicated his life to sheltering orphans, funding charities, and serving the poor.

On December 15, 1823, a thin Cuban priest in a thin cloak stepped off the cargo ship Draper C. Thorndike into a New York blizzard and slipped on the ice of the harborside pavement. Félix Varela was thirty-five, fluent in Spanish and Latin and almost no English, and he carried a Spanish death sentence. A few months earlier he had sat as a delegate in the Cortes in Madrid. He would pass the next thirty years in the tenements of the poor in lower Manhattan, distributing food dinner plates to Irish immigrants and burying the cholera dead.

Félix Varela practiced in the streets what Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 — would set on paper and make the official social teaching of the Catholic Church thirty-eight years after Varela died: the dignity of the worker, the claim of the stranger, the first place of the poor. Pope Benedict XVI, preaching in Havana in 2012, called him “a shining example” of what a believer offers to the building of a more just society, and the Church now weighs him for sainthood.

Born in Havana on November 20, 1788, Félix Francisco José María de la Concepción Varela y Morales moved with his family to St. Augustine, Florida, at the age of two, when his maternal grandfather was appointed commander of the city’s military garrison. There, his first teacher was the Irish priest Father Miguel O’Reilly. Varela’s education under O’Reilly was made possible by the strong Irish presence in Spanish Florida, a community deeply connected to the region’s shared Catholic faith. Varela owed his vocation to Father O’Reilly, the vicar of East Florida. When his grandfather offered him a military academy in Spain, the boy chose the seminary, saying he wished to save souls rather than kill men. He returned to Havana, entered the Seminary of San Carlos and San Ambrosio, and was ordained in 1811 at age twenty-three.

Within a year he held the chair of philosophy, and he also taught physics and chemistry. He wrote his textbooks in Spanish at a time when Latin still governed the lecture hall, and he ran his classroom on experiment and argument in place of memorized authority. His students became the first generation of Cuban progressive thinkers. José Antonio Saco, José de la Luz y Caballero, Domingo del Monte, and the naturalist Felipe Poey studied under him, and Rafael María de Mendive, who would later teach José Martí, was his pupil as well. Varela also argued that girls deserved the schooling given to boys, a position with few defenders in the Havana of his day. José Martí referred to him as “the eternal patriot,” José Antonio Saco called him “the first Cuban,” and José de la Luz y Caballero honored him as “the first to teach us to think.”

In 1821 Varela was elected to represent Cuba in the Cortes Generales in Madrid. Varela arrived a reformer and pressed three causes: self-government for Spain’s American provinces, recognition of Latin American independence, and a plan to end slavery in Cuba. The constitutional government of the Trienio Liberal gave such proposals a brief hearing.

In 1822 Varela wrote a plan to end slavery in Spain and the Spanish colonies. Under the plan the enslaved would go free over roughly fifteen years, and the slaveholders who complied would be indemnified. The document stayed unpublished until 1886, the year Spain finally abolished slavery in Cuba.

At the Congress of Verona (October–December 1822) the European monarchies authorized France to restore Ferdinand VII to absolute power, and in April 1823 the army known as the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis crossed the Pyrenees. The Cortes retreated south, and at Seville in June Varela voted with the majority to declare the king incapacitated under the 1812 Constitution so that a regency could keep governing. When France put Ferdinand back on the throne, the royalist regency in Madrid declared every deputy who had taken part in the king’s deposition guilty of lèse-majesté — the charge under which the liberal general Rafael del Riego had gone to the gallows.

Varela had already escaped to Gibraltar and sailed for New York. Spain condemned him in absentia and he never set foot in Cuba again. From Manhattan he kept writing for independence in the newspaper he created called El Habanero, the first Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, and supporters smuggled the issues onto the island in batches.

Varela put the skills he built in Havana and Madrid to their fullest use in the New York slums. He served the Irish refugees pouring into lower Manhattan, a people the city’s nativists despised. He assisted at St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, bought a former Episcopal church on Ann Street in 1827 and opened it as Christ Church, and later led the Church of the Transfiguration, whose congregation followed the immigrant poor into the streets that became Chinatown and serves them there still.

He built the institutions a destitute congregation needed. Varela founded orphanages and parish schools, started a day nursery for the children of laboring women, and organized one of the city’s first total abstinence societies. He was made vicar general of a diocese that then stretched across all of New York State and into New Jersey and twice sent him to the Councils of Baltimore as a theologian.

He stripped his own rooms bare. Varela’s housekeeper fought a steady battle to keep him supplied, because he gave away whatever came to hand — his watch, his silver, the dishes from his table, the linens and blankets from his bed. When the poor came asking, he often passed alms to them through a side window so that no one would watch them take it. Through the cholera epidemic of 1832 he all but lived in the hospitals and nurseries, attending the dying as richer men fled the city.

Leo XIII would teach in Rerum Novarum in 1891 that the worker holds a claim, by his labor and dignity, on the whole community, and the popes after him would build a century of social doctrine on the priority of the poor. Varela had already spent himself on that claim, in a parish too poor to repay him, across thirty years.

Varela arrived in New York as anti-Catholic agitation in the United States was hardening into a movement. Nativists shaped the climate his parishioners breathed: the forged convent memoir published in 1836 under the name Maria Monk, the conspiracy tracts of the inventor Samuel Morse, a press that cast Catholic immigrants as agents of Rome. Varela answered in print. He co-edited the New York Weekly Register and Catholic Diary and the Catholic Expositor and Literary Magazine, and in English he met the attacks on their own ground with essay in defense of the faith and religious diversity and against Nativism. He pressed for cooperation between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking Catholics and for civility between Protestant and Catholic households, and he wrote on religious tolerance and the Christian duty to welcome immigrants.

The Cuban bishops opened Varela’s cause for canonization in the 1980s, and on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012, Benedict XVI declared him Venerable, a finding that he had lived Christian virtue to a heroic degree. Cardinal Timothy Dolan announced it in New York; Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia serves as postulator and Bishop Octavio Cisneros of Brooklyn as vice postulator. On a verified miracle the Church could beatify him; on a second, canonize him as the first Cuban-born saint.

Today Varela is reversed by Cubans of every political perspective. The Cuban government keeps his remains in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana and confers the Orden Félix Varela for service to culture. Oswaldo Payá, the Cuban opposition leader who founded the Christian Liberation Movement in 1987 to oppose the one-party rule of the Cuban Communist Party, called his 2002 petition drive for free elections and civil liberties under Cuban law the Varela Project. Cubans across the political divide claim him as the father of their national conscience.

The Church rests his cause for sainthood primarily on his New York years and the charity Varela showed the immigrant poor — the food he distributed, the cholera wards he would not leave, the schools and the nursery he raised for people who could never pay for them. The grounds of his cause are the grounds of Catholic social teaching. On Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012, both the Archdiocese of New York and the Archdiocese of Miami (each having significant Catholic Cuban-American populations) announced that the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints had declared Varela “Venerable.”

Worn down by asthma and the New York winters, Varela left New York for the last time around 1850 and returned to St. Augustine, the town where Father O’Reilly had taught him as a child. He died there on February 25, 1853. The parishioners who attended him already spoke of him as a saint. His students built a memorial chapel over his grave in Tolomato Cemetery, and José Martí came to stand at it. In 1911 his remains were carried back to Cuba and laid in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana, leaving the St. Augustine tomb empty. The body completed the journey home that the living man was never allowed to make.

All Christians say that Christ is King, but the nature of his kingship is among the most contested issues in contemporary Christianity. One side sees a warrior king wearing a crown of gold who leads his soldiers against the enemies of the faith. The other sees a servant king crowned with thorns, who emptied himself and died like a slave for the people who killed him. The same three words — Christ is King — can signify either image, and the divide between them is as wide as the divide between two different religions. These divergent views do not fall along denominational lines. Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians divide within their own communions over what Christ’s kingship means. Few people realize, however, that for Catholics the question was settled nearly a hundred years ago, in an encyclical Quas Primas that almost no one read at the time and fewer read today.

Quas Primas: the papal encyclical that established the meaning of Christi Regis and the Feast of Christ the King.

On December 11, 1925, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Quas Primas that taught the faithful why the Church could call Christ a king and what kind of king he is. Almost no one read it. One commentator called its promulgation the greatest non-event in the history of the Church, passed over by Catholic clergy and laity alike and ignored by the leaders of the nations it sought to turn from the belligerent nationalism that had produced the then-unprecedented slaughter of the First World War.

The encyclical also created a feast called Festum Domini Nostri Iesu Christi Regis, the Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King. The original date of the feast was the last Sunday of October, immediately before the Feast of All Saints. In 1969 Pope Paul VI amended the title of the feast to Domini Nostri Iesu Christi Universorum Regis, Our Lord Jesus Christ King of the Universe, and moved it to the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Many Catholics have kept the feast for a lifetime without once reading, or even knowing of, the encyclical that created it and gave it its purpose.

Quas Primas has not entirely disappeared. In a Catholic community now divided in its politics and its liturgy, one faction – Catholic integralists – reads it and cites it. The Catholic integralists cite it as a mandate for secular governments to submit to the rule of Jesus Christ as exercised through the authority of the Catholic Church. On the populist and angrier edge of the same faction, the words “Christ is King” have become a banner. A movement that calls itself Christian flies the phrase over a politics of grievance and bigotry, a rallying cry for dominion over immigrants, over people of non-European heritage, and over people of other faiths.

But the encyclical they cite teaches against them. Pius XI wrote Quas Primas to set Christ above every nation, from a papacy that no longer held a nation of its own. He wrote against the nationalism of his day in plain words, deploring the “cupidity unrestrained, concealing itself often under the mask of patriotism and the general good” that fanned “the fires of hatred and of fierce rivalry between nations.” The Catholic Right shouts the slogan Christus Rex and ignores the Catholic Christology that justifies it. It has taken a doctrine Pius XI taught to condemn belligerent nationalism in the name of universal brotherhood and turned it into a war-cry against the rest of humanity.

Pope Pius XI gave the Church the Feast of Christ the King to set Christ above every nation.

Pius XI issued Quas Primas on December 11, 1925, closing the Holy Year and marking the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which had defined Christ’s divinity by declaring that the Son is of one substance with the Father. The kingship the encyclical proclaimed flowed from that Nicene confession — Christ reigns because he is God, consubstantial with the Father, having dominion over all created things by his divine nature. Pius XI recalled that the Council of Nicaea “added to the Creed the words, ‘Of whose Kingdom there shall be no end,’ thus affirming the royal dignity of Christ.”

The era supplied the encyclical’s raison d’être. Europe was just seven years past a world war in which Christian nations had slaughtered each other in numbers that still retained their shock. Pius XI’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XV, had called the war the suicide of civilized Europe. The aristocratic world order had also crumbled in the war’s political and economic chaos; the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Ottomans had fallen. On the third of January that same year, Benito Mussolini stood before the Italian parliament and took the full power of dictatorship onto himself, an anticlerical who had built his movement partly on violence against priests and Catholic associations. When Pius XI proclaimed that Christ is King, he was telling Mussolini and every dictator, president, and minister that Christ ruled above them all, that no nation stood in the place of God, and that the love of Christ united all humanity. He made his own the words of Leo XIII, that Christ’s empire “is not limited to Catholic nations ... it embraces also those who have no part in the Christian faith. The Kingdom of Christ is the whole world of man.”

The pope who said it ruled no territory. For centuries the popes had governed the Papal States across central Italy, but they had held no temporal land since 1870, when the Kingdom of Italy seized Rome while French troops were drawn off by the Franco-Prussian War. Pius IX declared himself a prisoner of the Vatican, and no pope from 1870 to 1929 stepped outside its walls. Pius XI was another prisoner pope, with no state and no army. The militarily powerless pontiff who later signed the Lateran Treaty of 1929, relinquishing every claim to the former Papal States, and who condemned the militarized fascist and communist regimes rising around him, was the one who proclaimed Christ King of the Universe.

To carry the encyclical’s meaning to the people, Pius XI instituted the feast itself, judging that “nothing can serve this purpose more effectually than the institution of a special feast in honor of the Kingship of Christ.” Solemn declarations, he wrote, “reach only a small number,” while “feasts move and teach all the faithful.” He set the day on the last Sunday of October, before All Saints, joining Christ the King to the company of the saints and the martyrs, who, like their king, gave their lives for others.

When he closed the Holy Year that December, he raised, in his own words, “six holy confessors and virgins” to the altar, models of service and sacrifice: Thérèse of Lisieux and her little way, the parish priest of Ars, and founders of teaching and nursing orders. The glory he attached to Christ’s reign was the glory of the gentle and the caring rather than the mighty and the grand.

Pope Pius XI made clear that Christ the King rules by love, not force.

Those who find in Quas Primas a warrant for a warrior king point to its claim that Christ’s authority reaches past private souls to states and rulers. Pius XI wrote that “rulers as well as private individuals are bound to offer public worship and service to Christ Our Lord,” and that “His royal dignity demands that the State shall be guided by the Commandments of God and by Christian principles in its legislation, its administration of justice, and its training of children.” He taught that the removal of God from public life, the secularism he called a “plague,” ruins the societies that attempt it.

But those who rely on Quas Primas to justify their image of Christ as a warrior king ignore the encyclical’s equal insistence that the reign of Christ can never resemble the reign of any mortal sovereign. Where earthly kings rule by force, Christ “is said to reign over the minds of men ... because He is very Truth,” and is “King of the hearts of men as well because of His charity, which exceeds all knowledge, and of His mercy and goodness, which draw all men to Him.” Pius XI reached back to Cyril of Alexandria to fix the point: Christ holds “dominion over all creatures, not won by force, not received from another, but essentially His own.”

The kingship of Christ, he wrote, “is in a special sense spiritual and concerned with spiritual things.” He recalled that “when the admiring multitude wished to proclaim Him their king He fled from them and hid Himself, to avoid both the title and the honor,” and that he “declared to the Roman Governor that His kingdom was not of this world.” He told his readers what the kingdom asks of its subjects: “detachment of heart from riches and other earthly things, with the spirit of gentleness and hunger and thirst for justice, while all must bear their cross in self-denial.”

Pius XI seemed to foresee that some would misuse the idea of Christ the King to envision the warrior God that the Catholic Right now wants, and he shut down the misunderstanding in advance: “More than once,” he wrote, “when the Jews, and even the Apostles, wrongly thought that the Messiah would restore the kingdom of Israel and free its people, He repelled the idea and destroyed their empty hopes.” Christ holds authority in civil matters, Pius XI granted, yet “while He lived on earth, He abstained from the exercise of that power,” for “He takes away no mortal crown.”

The encyclical taught that Christ the King reigns as a holy sacrifice nailed to a cross, a truth the Church had sung since the sixth century in the Good Friday hymn Vexilla Regis, which proclaims Regnavit a ligno Deus — God has reigned from the tree. Pope John Paul II, teaching on the psalm verse that the hymn takes up, called that cross “a throne of love and not of dominion.”

The Church drew out the controlling logic of Quas Primas’ condemnation of violent nationalism over the next forty years. Pius XI himself applied it first: in Non abbiamo bisogno in 1931 against Italian Fascism’s worship of the state, and then in Mit brennender Sorge in 1937 against Nazism’s idolatry of race and nation. The Second Vatican Council, in Dignitatis Humanae, followed the same non-coercion principles that Pius XI had built into Christ’s kingship to teach that “no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs.”

Paul VI moved the feast to the last Sunday of the year and titled it for Christ the King of the universe, setting the reign at the end of history rather than inside a program of conquest. Leo XIV taught the same model of Christ’s non-coercive kingship on the feast itself in November 2025, calling Christ a “gentle and humble Sovereign” whose “power is love” and whose “throne the Cross,” and taking up Vexilla Regis, “From the wood he reigns.”

Pius XI proved what he meant by an act against the Catholic Right of his own day. The year after he proclaimed the Feast of Christ the King, the Holy Office condemned Action Française, the right-wing monarchist movement that flew the banner of throne and altar and demanded that Christ reign over France. Its guiding mind, Charles Maurras, was an agnostic who prized the Church as the cement of social order and ranked politics first, politique d’abord. The pope who taught the Church to call Christ King put Maurras on the Index, because a man who wanted the Church’s order without the Church’s God had turned the faith into an instrument of his idea of the nation. Here we see the Vatican putting Quas Primas into action. A kingship exercised by truth and love, proclaimed by a pope with no sword, raised against the deified state, drawn out at the Council as the freedom of conscience — the line is the Church’s Christology of Christ the King, settled and taught by the reigning pope.

Christ refused the kingdom the devil offered him.

The kingship of Christ that Pope Pius XI defined, and that Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church still teach, is the one that Christ himself defined first, against a temptation as old as the desert. In the time of the gospels, many Jews under Roman occupation believed that the promised Messiah would be a son of David who would break the occupying Roman legions and restore the Jewish kingdom by force. The hope for a conqueror was reasonable for a conquered people – people living under the sword of an occupier wanted a king who would wield a mightier sword.

But Jesus took the title Messiah from popular Jewish national aspirations and redefined it. He read the Son of Man of Daniel, who receives everlasting dominion, through the suffering Servant of Isaiah, despised and led like a lamb to the slaughter. The Son of Man came to serve and to give his life as a ransom. The Messiah – the Christ – would reign by dying.

St. Paul set the same logic to song. In the hymn he quotes to the Philippians, Christ emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and became obedient even to death on a cross, and for that descent God exalted him and gave him the name above every name, at which every knee shall bend. Being seated on the divine throne is the outcome of Christ’s self-emptying.

As we know from the gospels, even Jesus’ closest followers had difficulty comprehending the idea of a Messiah who would not lead an army to victory but would die on a cross. At Caesarea Philippi Peter confessed Jesus as the Messiah, and when Jesus answered that the Son of Man must suffer and be killed, Peter rebuked him. Jesus reproved him sharply. He told Peter to get behind him and called him Satan — giving the wish for a warrior, voiced by his chief disciple, the tempter’s own name.

This same pattern repeats throughout the gospels. James and John asked for the thrones at his right and left in glory – and these places were filled at the crucifixion by two condemned men. The crowd after the loaves tried to seize Jesus and make him king, and he withdrew. He entered Jerusalem on the donkey of Zechariah, the humble king who breaks the war-horse and speaks peace to the nations. In the garden when Peter drew a sword, Jesus healed the man it wounded and refused the legions of angels he said he could summon.

The clearest and most dramatic evidence of the quality of Christ’s kingship comes from Christ’s encounter with the Satan himself. Luke records that the devil tempted Jesus by offering him all the kingdoms of the world and Jesus refused. Those who would seize an earthly dominion in his name are demanding the bargain with the devil that Christ turned down.

The Church teaches that in Christ’s refusal of Satan’s offer lies the meaning of his kingship. The Catechism teaches that Jesus accepted the title Messiah with reserve, because some of his contemporaries took it “in too human a sense, as essentially political,” and that “the true meaning of his kingship is revealed only when he is raised high on the cross” (CCC 439–440). Joseph Ratzinger, writing as Benedict XVI, read the three temptations as the offer of messianic power without the cross, and set Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor beside them, the standing temptation to give people bread and power and call it salvation. What Christ refused in the desert, the Church has refused after him.

Pilate turned the true title into a coronation staged as mockery.

Pilate taunted the unarmed prisoner Jesus by asking him whether he is the king of the Jews. Jesus then answered that his kingship did not belong to this world, and gave the proof: if it did, his followers would be fighting to prevent his arrest, and the missing swords were the evidence that the kingdom of Christ was not the kingdom of Caesar. But Pilate understood only one kind of kingdom – the earthly one he served — and so the Roman soldiers staged a mocking coronation. They pressed a crown of thorns onto his head. Across his shoulders they threw a cast-off military cloak, dyed the color of royalty. A reed went into his hand for a scepter. They knelt and hailed him as king of the Jews, then struck him with the reed they had given him. Then Pilate fixed the title to the cross. He wrote it in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek for all to see and understand: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews – a king without power, without glory, and soon, without life.

The crown of thorns holds the whole idea of Christ the King in one image. Each sign of royal power appears, and each becomes an instrument of pain. The throne is a cross. The courtiers are executioners. The acclamation is a taunt. The Christian who reaches for the gold band and the laurel, the throne and the conquest, reaches for the coronation the soldiers staged. He takes the insignia of worldly glory and refuses the wounds and the death of Christ’s true nobility.

This quality of Christ’s kingship is portrayed with surpassing beauty in an icon from the mid-sixth century known as Christos Pantocrator (Χριστὸς Παντοκράτωρ — Ruler of All) at Saint Catherine’s Monastery, located at the foot of Mount Sinai. He holds a book and raises his hand in blessing, and he carries no sword. His look is simultaneously serious and kind, not domineering or triumphant, sage judgment and divine mercy held in a single gaze.

The American Christian Right Inverts the Catholic Theology of Christ the King.

The American Christian Right took the words “Christ is King” for itself and turned them from a profound theology of sacrifice and redemption into a political slogan of conquest and exclusion. The warrior king Christology is the one doctrine that the whole Christian Right shares. A Reformed Reconstructionist, a charismatic apostle of the New Apostolic Reformation, a Catholic integralist, and a nondenominational evangelical for Trump hold almost no theological doctrine in common. They divide over the clergy, the Eucharist, the path to salvation, the sacraments, the nature of sin, free will, the last things, and the Church itself. Yet they unite on seeing Christ as the avenging king who fights for their conception of the American nation and American identity.

Catholics should know that this warrior conception of Christ the King, which unites the American Christian Right, is a complete inversion of the Catholic Church’s understanding of Christ and his kingdom. The warrior-king figure that unites the American Christian Right is the figure the Church defined Christ’s kingship against. That figure wears a crown of gold that Christ refused and grips a sword that Christ laid down. The Christ defined at Nicaea, taught in Quas Primas, and crowned with thorns under Pilate is replaced by the warrior he declined to be. This substitution is an overthrow of the real king.

The Universal King the Catholic Church proclaims is the one the soldiers dressed in mockery in purple and the iconographers of Sinai painted as Christos Pantocrator. He wears a crown of thorns, holds the book of the gospels, and he raises his hand in blessing not wielding a sword. He reigns from the cross, the throne John Paul II called “a throne of love and not of dominion,” and the hand he lifts is the hand that healed the man Peter wounded. His power is the charity Pius XI drew from Cyril of Alexandria, a dominion “not won by force.”

The choice for every Catholic – every Christian – is the choice Christ faced on the mountain and turned down: the kingdoms of the world and their glory or the crown of thorns and the Cross.

To raise “Christ is King” as a cry for dominion over the immigrant and the foreigner is to raise it against the true king who emptied himself and died like a slave for the people who killed him. The Catholic who means the words as Pius XI meant them owes his loyalty to that Prince of Peace and not to a warrior who borrows his name.

The Catholic Church proclaims Regnavit a ligno Deus – God has reigned from the tree. Christ the King, who reigns from the wood, his only crown the thorn, has already refused every kingdom the American Christian Right would conquer in his name.

FOn June 26, 2026, First Things published Bishop Robert Barron’s review of JD Vance’s memoir Communion in which he joined Vance’s case against the Church’s authority to make judgments about the government’s application of moral principles to civil affairs.

In Communion, Vance recounted his meeting with Cardinal Pietro the Vatican Secretary of State, and complains that “the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes” on immigration. Barron answered in his own voice: “It’s a damning observation, but I confess to sympathizing with it, for I have found the same tendency too often when the Church addresses complex political matters.”

Barron then sharpened Vance’s complaint. He noted that Parolin “acknowledged that the U.S. had a right to control its borders” and “encouraged Vance to treat migrants humanely,” then supplied the frustration with three questions of his own — “Deportations in general? Deportations of criminals? The pace of deportations?” He built Vance’s case against Cardinal Parolin, and by obvious extension, the Catholic Church, and called the result damning to the Vatican. Barron went on to praise Vance’s book as “a challenge to … a religiosity that aspires to hover above the political.” In other words, Barron here endorses a drastic narrowing of what the Catholic Church’s has considered the authority of Christ on public policy.

This articulation of a highly constrained role for the Church in making judgments about government policy decisions followed a rule Barron had already stated, two months earlier, about the Trump administration’s war against Iran, and about the limits of the Catholic doctrine of Just-War. On April 20, 2026, with Pope Leo XIV pressing the moral case against the American strike on Iran, he settled the question for his followers in two sentences on Elon Musik’s social media platform X. The Church calls for peace and holds a war to the just-war criteria, he wrote, but “it is not the role of the Church to evaluate whether a particular war is just or unjust.” That appraisal, he added, “belongs to the civil authorities, who, one presumes, have requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground.”

Here is the doctrine Barron advocates: The Church’s role is to teach the moral law based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ; the secular authorities’ role is to apply the teaching in all particular situations; and however the secular authorities apply the moral law is beyond the Church’s legitimacy to judge. As Barron put it in one line: “It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life. In regard to the concrete application of those principles, people of good will can and do disagree.”

Call it the Barron Doctrine.

It might sound, at first hearing, like longstanding Catholic teaching on prudential judgment, but it is a drastic narrowing of that teaching that effrectively keeps Christ out of civil affairs.

Others exposed Barron’s just-war move two months ago.

The just-war post drew a fast reply. In an article entitled Bishop Barron vs. Pope Leo? War and Church Teaching, Deacon Steven Greydanus read Bishop Barron to claim that the Pope should teach principles and raise questions while the president alone answers them, and likened it to a Catholic “non-overlapping magisteria.” Msgr. Arthur Holquin, in article entitled On Bishop Barron and the Catechism’s “Prudential Judgment”, answered that Barron’s reading lifts one clause of the Catechism from its setting, and set against it William Cavanaugh, Gaudium et Spes, and Bishop James Massa of the bishops’ doctrine committee. In The Catholic Herald, Patrick Neve put the deeper trouble in its title, Bishop Barron’s accidental liberalism. Neve correctly observed that “Barron’s formula seems to render the Church incapable of judging acts as good or evil. The Church is responsible for forming consciences, including those of our political leaders, but if she asks only questions and gives no positive instruction, she cannot adequately do so.”

These writers saw that Barron’s defense of Trump’s war in Iran against criticism from Pope Leo XIV and others in the Catholic Church hierarchy relied on a principle that would render just-war doctrine effectively meaningless. But Bishop Barron’s doctrine goes beyond the question of war.

The Catechism grants the Church the power to judge and limits only her means.

The Catholic Church’s doctrine of prudential judgment does not validate Barron’s attempt to insulate the Trump administration, or any government, from the moral judgment of the Church based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Catechism clearly makes the moral judgment of public affairs and politics part of the Church’s mission: she is “to pass moral judgments even in matters related to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it” (CCC 2246). The limit the Catechism then sets is a limit on means, not on judgment — “the means, the only means, she may use are those which are in accord with the Gospel.” She is “not to be confused in any way with the political community” (CCC 2245), which keeps her out of governing, but not out of judging.

Barron improperly narrows the Church’s Prudential Judgment Doctrine at three crucial points.

First, Barron widens what the civil authorities decide and shrinks what the Church decides. The Catechism assigns the civil authorities one task, “the evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy” (CCC 2309) — whether a war is a last resort, whether the force is proportionate, whether it stands a reasonable chance of success. Those officials hold the facts on the ground, so that evaluation is theirs. The moral judgment that follows, whether the war so measured is just or unjust, stays with the Church. Barron moves that second judgment into the first office. He declares it is no longer “the role of the Church to evaluate whether a particular war is just or unjust,” handing the moral judgment to the same officials who weigh the facts. In applying the Prudential Judgment Doctrine in 2003 to the impending U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Pope John Paul II kept the two role apart. Against what Bishop Barron’s doctrine would require, Pope John Paul II did not leave the morality of invading Iraq to Washington. Instead, he concluded that the impending military action lacked moral justification and failed the moral criteria of the Church’s Just War doctrine. Bishop Barron would find this papal intervention in U.S. military and geo-political affairs totally unacceptable.

Second, Barron reads a clause about responsibility as a clause about competence. When the Catechism in 2309 assigns the evaluation to those “who have responsibility for the common good,” it places the burden of the decision on the ruler who must answer for it. As Msgr. Arthur Holquin points out, theologian William Cavanaugh read the same clause and found that it “lays an obligation on civil authorities” and “nowhere limits the Church’s own competence.” Barron turns the sentence about who carries the burden into a sentence about who may render the moral judgment, and concludes the Church lacks a competence the Catechism gives her.

Third, Barron stretches subsidiarity from jurisdiction into morality. Subsidiarity bars the higher body from absorbing the functions of the lower — Rome does not run border enforcement or move troops, and no pope claims to. It does not retire the moral law at the parish line. The Church administers no prisons and calls a particular execution an offense against dignity; she commands no armies, and Gaudium et Spes calls the obliteration of a city “a crime against God and man.” Barron stretches “the Church does not govern” into “the Church does not judge.” The first states subsidiarity correctly. The second denies the Church a competence subsidiarity never reached.

The shrinkage is plain. The Prudential Judgment Doctrine grants the Church competence to judge political acts and limits only the means she may use. The Barron Doctrine grants her the principles and surrenders the judgment. The Church keeps the verdict in Rome and leaves the administration to the state. Barron ships both downstream to Caesar, on the presumption that Caesar has the facts. What the Catechism calls a mission to pass moral judgments in matters related to politics, Barron calls off.

Barron binds the state on abortion in the words his war post forbids.

On abortion Barron violates his own doctrine. He rebuked a sitting Catholic president by name and morally condemned his particular policy, writing that Joe Biden “stands athwart both right reason and the explicit teaching of his Church.” Barron rejected the claim that a believer may hold a conviction in private and decline to legislate it: “Laws don’t suggest; they impose. And behind every truly just law, there is some moral principle: preserving life, establishing greater justice, protecting the poor, fostering the common good.” He called it “utterly incoherent to claim that one can hold to the position privately but not defend it publicly.”

When a politician says that public policy should regard abortion as a private matter, Barron harshly rebukes him. But when politician calls the Church’s migration teaching a “trite platitude,” Barron answers with sympathy. His response reverses according to the party of the politician.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic claims the competence to make moral judgments that Bishop Barron’s Doctrine denies.

The bishops of the United States judge the concrete acts Barron walls off, and they say so in their charter document on Catholic political life. The USCCB’s Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship holds that prudential judgment is needed “in applying moral principles to specific policy choices in areas such as armed conflict, housing, health care, immigration.” The bishops go past the principle to the cases: they “apply Catholic social teaching to specific proposals and situations” and make “judgments and recommendations … on such specific issues.” They list “the use of the death penalty, resorting to unjust war … or an unjust immigration policy” among the moral issues that “require us to act.”

The same document guards the prudential element the right way, and the contrast with Barron is exact. The bishops grant that their specific-issue judgments “do not carry the same moral authority as statements of universal moral teachings,” and that Catholics “may choose different ways to respond.” That latitude runs to the weight of the judgment and the means of pursuing it. Barron inflates it into a denial that the judgment belongs to the Church at all. His “people of good will can and do disagree” keeps the conference’s qualifier and drops the conference’s claim, that the bishops still render the judgment and that “not all choices are equally valid.” His rule would silence the body that, in its 2025 report, conceded “a nation has a right to regulate its borders” and then judged the enforcement raised against the Church’s own ministries to migrants.

Bishop Barron’s own Red Mass homily forbids the Barron Doctrine.

Barron’s own fullest account of the relationship between Church and state refutes the Barron Doctrine four years before he stated it. Preaching the Red Mass in New Orleans in October 2021, in homily he entitled The Moral and Spiritual Purpose of the Law, Barron rejected “integralism, whereby the state is simply swallowed up by religion” — the position he does not hold and is not charged with. He then called the opposite danger the graver one: a secularism that would “confine [religion] to the realm of privacy, so that it would function as a kind of hobby.” Resisting that confinement, he said, “is of paramount importance.”

His doctrine performs the confinement his homily condemned. A Church that may state principles and must yield the application is a Church shut inside the private realm of conscience, consulted for values and barred from the public act. Barron diagnosed the disease at the Red Mass and prescribed it on X.

The same homily authorizes the very thing the doctrine forbids. Barron taught that rulers “can and should be criticized,” and praised Martin Luther King Jr. for judging that “Jim Crow laws are unjust precisely in the measure that they do not embody the principles of the natural moral law.” King applied the moral law to a particular body of statutes and condemned them. Barron applauds King for it, then tells Leo XIV he may not do the same to a deportation regime.

The Pope already spoke to the concrete, in words no one can call platitudes.

The Barron Doctrine depends on a Church that only poses questions, and that Church does not exist. Asked about deportations in November 2025, Leo XIV conceded the point Barron treats as withheld — “every country has the right to determine who enters, how, and when” — and then refused the evasion that follows from it, urging that the United States “look for ways of treating people humanely,” through “courts” and “a system of justice,” and calling the treatment of long-settled immigrants “extremely disrespctful.” Two weeks before the publication of Barron’s review of Vance’s Communion, Pope Leo XIVB he carried the same teaching to the port of Arguineguín in the Canary Islands, standing before a cross built from a wrecked migrant boat to say the Church “cannot remain silent about those who are abandoned to its waters,” and that “human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border.” His encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, published May 25, 2026, set the treatment of migrants as a measure of a society’s justice.

The bishops of his own country said the same, and Barron broke from them. The United States conference, at Leo’s urging, declared, “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people,” and Leo asked Catholics “to listen carefully to what they said.” Robert Barron sits in that conference. He set his sympathy beside the politician who called its guidance empty rather than beside the brother bishops and the pope who backed them.

The Feast of Christ the King was instituted to condemn the Barron Doctrine.

Pope Pius XI built a feast against this exact error. He promulgated the encyclical Quas Primas on December 11, 1925, against the secular states then forcing God out of public life, and recalled the cause of the age’s ruin: men had “thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives,” so that the law of Christ held “no place either in private affairs or in politics.” Against that expulsion he laid the line that refutes the Barron doctrine whole: “It would be a grave error … to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs.”

The Bartron Doctrine grants Christ the principle and hands Caesar the application, which effectively removes Christ from authority over any concrete act of government. That removal is laicist in effect. Barron does not preach laicism — he joined a religious-liberty commission and warned against the privatized faith — yet his rule reaches the laicist destination by another road, confining Christ’s law to principle and surrendering the civil act to the autonomous judgment of the state. Pius XI called that separation a grave error and built a feast to refute it. Barron backs into the error and does not see that the Feast of Christ the King exists to condemn it.

Pius XI traced the ruin of the century to the states that refused to submit to Christ, the rebellion he placed at the root of the age’s violence. Barron and the Catholics who admire him do not appear to see what the doctrine costs them. The Catholic Right has argued for more than a hundred years, from Leo XIII to the postliberals, that there is no autonomous secular order and that the liberal partition of spheres is the error to undo. JD Vance stood at Munich and summoned “Western Christian civilization” against a secular global liberalism, and First Things printed it as a creed. In the same magazine, Barron handed the secular ruler the competence the integralists have spent a century trying to reclaim. The applause for the chef’s kiss covered the sound of the keys changing hands.

The load-bearing premise is the one Barron states most casually. The verdict belongs to the civil authorities, he wrote, “who, one presumes, have requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground.” The clause grants the men directing the mass deportations, the war on Iran, and the missile strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in international waters a remarkable presumption of competence and good faith, on the very day that the Pope tells the world they lack both.

The Barron Doctrine is contrary to the Catholic Doctrine of the Social Kingship of Christ. Christ the King reigns over the president, the cabinet room, the missiles and the border or Christ is the king of nothing.

This is Part 10 of Optimizing Integral Human Development, a ten-part series on the social mission of the Catholic Church. This installment turns from the teaching to the obligation it imposes, and asks what integral human development requires of Catholics who choose the officials who govern them.

Part 10: What Integral Human Development Requires of Us Now

Part 9 identified the Catholics and Catholic institutions whose politics contradict the Church’s social teaching. Identifying the opponents leaves the question this series has deferred: what the teaching asks of the Catholic who accepts it. The preceding chapters established that integral human development is the settled social doctrine of the Catholic Church -- traced from Aristotle to Leo XIV, affirmed by six consecutive popes, embedded in the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and applied by Magnifica Humanitas to artificial intelligence and the dignity of work. A doctrine that binds the conscience imposes obligations, and the most consequential of them is the obligation to vote.

Leo XIV Hands the Catholic a Measure to Apply

In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV presents Catholic social teaching as a framework for judgment: every economic arrangement, political program, and technology is to be assessed by whether it serves the development of the whole person and of every person. The framework yields no slate of candidates and no party registration. It supplies a measure and requires the Catholic to apply it to the particular thing in front of him.

In a democracy, the particular thing in front of the Catholic is most often a ballot. The officials he elects write the tax code, set the immigration rules, fund or defund the safety net, authorize or restrain war, regulate or ignore the firms that deploy artificial intelligence, and decide who is executed and who is spared. The vote is the layperson’s most direct instrument over the temporal order, and the measure bears on it first.

The Catholic Applies the Measure First to the Candidates on the Ballot

The Second Vatican Council assigned the renewal of the temporal order to the laity, and the Catechism makes participation in public life an obligation that follows from the dignity of the person rather than a preference left to taste. Voting is the ordinary form that obligation takes. The Council and the Catechism settle that the Catholic must participate. What they leave to him is whether his participation advances the good of every person or only the good of some.

Officials who follow Catholic social teaching need not be Catholics. The test is the direction of their programs: whether, taken as a whole, they move society toward the development of every person -- the worker and the migrant, the unborn child and the condemned prisoner, the elderly patient and the displaced refugee. The candidate’s religion stays out of it; his policies decide.

The Measure Runs Through Every Issue the Series Examined

Applied to candidates, the standard grants no single issue a veto over the others.

The just wage and the rights of labor that Leo XIII defended in Rerum Novarum bear on the minimum wage, the right to organize, and the conditions of work. The universal destination of goods, and Francis’s warning in Evangelii Gaudium against “an economy that kills,” measure whether a candidate’s fiscal program protects the poor or sacrifices them.

The migrant, whom Francis placed at the center of the Church’s social mission and defended in his February 2025 letter to the United States bishops, bears on immigration, asylum, and deportation. The racism and nationalism that rank persons by blood or birthplace, which Part 6 set against the standard, reach every policy that sorts human beings by origin. Care for creation, which Laudato Si’ made integral to the Church’s teaching, shapes environmental and climate policy.

The death penalty, which Francis declared inadmissible in his 2018 revision of the Catechism, bears on a candidate’s appetite for executions. The Church’s call to avoid war, taught from Gaudium et Spes through Fratelli Tutti, decides whether a candidate reaches first for force or for peace.

The unborn child, excluded by no clause of the standard, bears on abortion. The elderly, the sick, and the disabled -- those whom Leo XIV called, before Spain’s Parliament, the measure of a just society, and whom Francis described as exposed to a hidden euthanasia -- bear on assisted suicide and the funding of care.

Religious freedom, which Dignitatis Humanae rooted in the dignity of the person, tests a candidate’s respect for conscience against the integralist temptation to coerce it. The dignity of work under artificial intelligence, the subject of Magnifica Humanitas, asks whether a candidate subjects data, algorithms, and the firms that own them to the common good or leaves them to concentrate power unchecked. Every issue on that list binds the Catholic’s judgment, and none of them is the whole of the standard.

No American Coalition Reflects the Full Scope of the Standard

No current American political coalition reflects the full scope and depth of what the Church means by optimizing integral human development. Each carries part of what the standard demands and sets the rest against it. A Catholic who finds his politics already complete inside either coalition has stopped letting the measure work.

The standard was built to cut across the parties of every age. Maritain set it against liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism at once, and John Paul II condemned unbridled capitalism and atheistic communism in a single breath. The standard cuts across the American coalitions exactly as it cut across the ideologies Maritain and John Paul II faced.

The Church Rejects Single-Issue Voting

Some Catholics escape that discomfort with a shortcut: they choose one issue, usually abortion, and vote on it alone. The magisterium closes that exit. The Church teaches that abortion and euthanasia carry grave and, in the judgment of the United States bishops, preeminent weight; it does not teach that a Catholic discharges his duty by attending to them and ignoring everything else.

Francis stated the principle in Gaudete et Exsultate, in the section on the ideologies that strike at the heart of the Gospel. The defense of the unborn, he wrote, must be unequivocal, firm, and impassioned, and in the same paragraph he called the lives of the poor, the destitute, the trafficked, and the vulnerable elderly “equally sacred” (no. 101). In the paragraph that follows, he wrote that treating the migrant’s situation as a lesser or secondary concern beside the grave bioethical questions suits a politician hunting votes, and that no Christian may share that attitude (no. 102).

The Church’s own provision on voting reaches the same result. In a 2004 memorandum to the American bishops entitled Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, distinguished two cases. A Catholic who votes for a candidate precisely because the candidate favors permissive abortion laws shares in that evil. A Catholic who rejects that position but votes for the candidate for other reasons engages only in remote cooperation, permissible, Ratzinger wrote, in the presence of “proportionate reasons.” The same memorandum granted that abortion and euthanasia outweigh other moral questions, a ranking of issues that does not authorize neglect of the issues it ranks lower.

Francis applied the principle to an American election. Asked in September 2024 how a Catholic should choose between a candidate who supported abortion and one who would expel migrants, he judged that “both are against life,” insisted that a Catholic must vote, and said the choice of the lesser evil belonged to each conscience. He declined to reduce the ballot to a single question.

The United States bishops, who assign abortion its preeminent place, draw the same line. “As Catholics we are not single-issue voters,” they teach in Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, warning against two opposite errors: treating every issue as morally equal, and using the real differences in gravity to dismiss every issue except one. Their consistent ethic of life neither flattens those differences nor collapses the whole of the teaching into a single cause.

Single-issue voting commits the second error. It takes the priority of one grave matter and converts it into permission to ignore the deportations, the executions, the gutted wage, the poisoned creation, and the abandoned poor that the same teaching condemns. The priority is real; the permission does not follow from it.

Single-Issue Voting Repeats the Error of Sorting the Teaching by Party

The figures identified in the previous chapter -- Vance invoking ordo amoris against the stranger, Robert Sirico’s Acton Institute baptizing the unregulated market, Adrian Vermeule proposing common-good constitutionalism, Bishop Barron spending his platform on culture-war targets while the gravest policies go unmentioned -- differ in doctrine and aim. Their shared move is the retention of the half of the Church’s social teaching that serves a prior political loyalty and the quiet discard of the other half.

Single-issue voting is that same move, performed when the Catholic votes. It keeps the issue that aligns with a political home and discards the rest of the standard as though the Church had not taught it. Keeping half is the error, whichever half is kept.

Leo XIV Turns the Same Measure on the Church

Magnifica Humanitas does not reserve the standard for governments and corporations. Leo XIV directs it at the Church herself, asking whether her own institutions treat the persons in their care as ends or as means. The diocese that underpays its teachers, the Catholic hospital that prices out the poor, and the parish that welcomes the donor while overlooking the day laborer in its pews all fall under the judgment the encyclical aims outward.

The Obligation Reaches Beyond the Ballot Into Ordinary Life

The vote is the most direct lay act on the temporal order, but it is not the only one. The Catholic sets a wage, approves a layoff, or installs software that ranks and surveils the people who work for him, and the measure bears on each choice as it bears on the ballot. Integral human development binds every believer in the world in his daily choices, not only the staff of an office in Rome.

Catholic social teaching calls the layperson into the political process. In a two-party system, that participation runs through a party -- joining it, voting in its primaries, and pressing it toward the common good. The standard commands this engagement and forbids only captivity to a party that has stopped serving the whole person. A Catholic works through his party while holding his conscience above it, loyal enough to act through the party and free enough to oppose it wherever it departs from the good of every person. The popes from Paul VI to Leo XIV kept the Church out of partisan capture while engaging the political questions of their time, and the layman owes his party the same independence.

Leo XIV put the question directly to Spain’s Parliament in June 2026: whether a society that abandons the unborn, the elderly, the sick, and those who depend entirely on the care of others can be called just. He asked it of legislators, but it binds the Catholics who elect them with the same force. The Catholic who casts his vote on abortion alone has answered Leo XIV’s question for one of the four and left the candidate to answer it for the other three.

What the teaching requires now is the patience to judge particulars. The Catholic does not discharge the obligation once by choosing a side or fixing on a single issue. He takes it up again at each election, each budget, each new technology, and each policy that sorts human beings into the deserving and the disposable.

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This essay is part of a ten part series on Optimizing Integral Human Development -- Understanding the Social Mission of the Catholic Church.

The individual parts of the series are:

Part One: The Two Leos, 135 Years Apart

Part Two: Integral Human Development Is 2,400 Years Old

Part Three: Six Popes Have Taught the Same Doctrine

Part Four: The Church Reorganized Itself Around the Idea of Integral Human Development

Part Five: The Dimensions of Integral Human Development

Part Six: What Integral Human Development Rejects

Part Seven: Integral Human Development in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Part Eight: The Attack on Empathy

Part Nine: Catholic Against Catholicism

Part Ten: What Integral Human Development Requires of Us Now

The priest who baptized Martin de Porres in Lima on December 9, 1579, recorded the child’s father as unknown. His mother was Ana Velázquez, a freed Black woman from Panama who lived on wages she earned taking in laundry. Martin’s name was placed in the Catholic parish register that served as official civil records, categorizing people into a strict socio-racial hierarchy of Spanish and Indigenous “republics.” Within this system, individuals were legally classified by mixed-race caste labels (such as Mestizo or Mulato), legitimacy of birth, and freedom status to dictate their wealth, legal rights, and tax obligations. The registry placed the child where colonial Peru placed people of his color, at the bottom of a hierarchy that sorted human beings by blood and parentage. The child’s father was, in fact, a Spanish nobleman, Don Juan de Porres, who acknowledged the boy eight years later.

The Viceroyalty of Peru organized itself around descent. Spaniards born in Europe stood at the top, then those born in the colony, then the grades assigned to mixed parentage, and beneath them the indigenous and the enslaved. Ships brought enslaved Africans into the port of Callao by the thousands, and Lima held one of the largest populations of African descent in the Americas. Martin grew up among the city’s free Black poor, ranked near the bottom of the caste in his own person.

Ana Velázquez placed her son with a barber-surgeon when he was about twelve. The trade taught Martin to cut hair, draw blood, dress wounds, set bones, and compound the medicines of the day. He kept the work for the rest of his life and gave much of each night to prayer.

A closed door stood in front of him. Peruvian law barred descendants of Africans and Indians from professing vows in religious orders. Martin asked the Dominicans at the Priory of the Holy Rosary to take him in the one capacity open to him, as a donado, a servant who did the menial labor of the house in exchange for the habit and a place to sleep. He was fifteen. The friars handed him a broom.

He took the lowest tasks and kept them by choice. Martin swept, scrubbed the kitchen, washed the laundry, and emptied the infirmary buckets. The community soon trusted him with its charity, and he carried food and money to the poor of Lima as the priory’s almoner. He treated anyone who came to the gate with the medicine he had learned as a boy.

About eight years later, the prior Juan de Lorenzana set the law aside and allowed Martin to profess as a Dominican lay brother. The friars later recounted the scene that explains the decision. Forbidden during an epidemic to bring the sick indoors for fear of contagion, Martin was found tending to a bleeding stranger in his own cell. When Lorenzana started to reprimand him, Martin asked instead to be taught, “for I did not know that the precept of obedience took precedence over the precept of charity.” The prior let the reprimand go.

Martin spent every privilege the friars gave him on the people the colony discarded. He founded the Colegio de Santa Cruz, a residence for orphans and abandoned children in Lima, and raised dowries so poor girls could marry. He nursed the enslaved Africans who came ashore sick at Callao, the human beings the city entered in its ledgers as cargo. Each day he fed a crowd of poor men and women at the priory door, the chroniclers counting roughly a hundred and sixty.

His tenderness reached the animals as well. Martin kept a shelter for stray dogs and cats at his sister’s house, and the friars told of a dog, a cat, and a mouse he had coaxed into eating from a single dish. Painters have put a broom in his hand and those animals at his feet ever since.

Two companions shared his work and later shared the altar with him, Rose of Lima and the Dominican brother Juan Macías. Martin refused every rank above lay brother and never sought ordination. He died on November 3, 1639, at fifty-nine. Bishops and Lima’s notables helped carry his coffin, the man once handed a broom now borne on the shoulders of the colony’s elite.

His cult began at street level, and it began at once. The poor of Lima had known Martin as the man who brought them food and medicine, and after 1639 the African-descended and enslaved population of the city kept his memory as their own. They came to his tomb at Santo Domingo for cures, and the biographers who spread his fame worked from a devotion that was already there.

A surviving portrait shows how early that devotion ran. An anonymous painter made his likeness in the 17th century, by one account during Martin’s life or soon after his death, and the canvas is kept in the Lima monastery linked to Rose of Lima. The image is the evidence on its own: someone wanted the face of a poor mixed-race servant recorded and kept.

Portraiture in that century belonged to the powerful, who paid to be seen as they wished. A donado at the bottom of the caste had no claim on a painter and no money to commission one. His likeness exists because the people who loved him treated him as worth painting before any tribunal in Rome had ruled on him, which leaves the portrait one of the few seventeenth-century faces of Lima’s Black poor to survive at all.

The standard scholarly biography of Martin de Porres, Celia Cussen’s Black Saint of the Americas: The Life and Afterlife of Martin de Porres (2014), reconstructs his cult partly from its images and shows that race sat at the center of the devotion. Limeños revered Martin as a mulatto healer, and many held that his African blood strengthened the power of his cures. The people at the bottom of the caste recognized one of their own working wonders, and they carried his name for three centuries.

That reverence of the poor did not stay in the past. I have stood in a very poor wooden church in southern Mexico and seen it myself, the same devotion the limeños first carried, kept by people who have almost nothing else to give him.

Rome moved far more slowly than the streets. Clement XIII recognized Martin’s heroic virtues in 1763, Gregory XVI beatified him in 1837, and then the cause sat for more than a century while the devotion ran on without it.

The push that finished the work came in the 20th century, and it came largely from the United States. African American Catholics, shut out of much of their own segregated Church, took up Martin as the saint whose existence answered the contempt they lived under. Dominican promoters circulated his image and collected reports of cures and favors credited to his intercession. Pope Pius XII designated Blessed Martin de Porres as the patron of social justice organizations within his home country of Peru, a regional patronage granted while his cause for sainthood was still under review. Pope John XXIII canonized Martin on May 6, 1962. The canonization arrived the same year federal marshals walked James Meredith past a mob to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

John XXIII opened the canonization homily by turning the assembly toward the coming Council, then held up the lay brother from Lima as the holiness the Council should yield. He praised Martin for caring for the Black and mixed-race poor whom Lima had treated as slaves and as the dregs of society.

Critics of his cult point to a moment the friars themselves preserved. Told the priory had fallen into debt, Martin begged his superiors to sell him, calling himself a poor mulatto and the property of the order. Hagiographers offered the moment as the summit of his humility. Skeptics read the same words as a man who had taken the colony’s verdict on his body into his own mouth.

The same critics press the point onto the canonization itself. John XXIII praised Martin as a man of charity, humility, and obedience, and the Church elevated the Black holy man who swept the floor, obeyed his superiors, and never moved against the order that ranked him. On this reading, a saint of endurance asks nothing of the powerful. The iconography holds him in the servant’s place, broom in hand, and the trades attached to his patronage, barbers and hairdressers, keep him at the work the caste assigned.

The same institution that canonized Martin carried a debt of its own. The law that once barred him from profession was the law of a Catholic colony, enforced inside a Catholic order, and a Catholic prior had to set it aside before a saint could take vows.

The United States bishops confronted the longer problem in their 1979 letter Brothers and Sisters to Us, which condemned racism and the tokenism of putting a few Black faces in view while the structure held. Black Catholics still make up around 3 percent of the American faithful and a thinner share of its clergy. A Black patron on the altar did not close the distance between those pews and that sanctuary.

The demand for Martin rose from below. The limeños who crowded his tomb and kept his likeness, together with the African American Catholics who pressed his cause for decades, built the case that John XXIII ratified in 1962. They claimed a man they regarded as their own and held on until the universal Church agreed.

Martin had resisted the caste at the only level it left open to him – by outworking and outloving every man who outranked him, and the people once ranked beside him read his triumph as their own.

Martin de Porres holds a settled place among the witnesses to Catholic social teaching because he lived its central claims before the encyclicals wrote them down. He treated the dignity of the enslaved African at the dock as equal to the dignity of the Spaniard in the pew, which is the Catholic teaching that every person carries the image of God. He spent the priory’s resources first on the orphan and the sick, which is the preferential option for the poor. He picked up the broom and held onto it, which honors the worth of ordinary labor that Leo XIII would defend in Rerum Novarum two and a half centuries later.

The reverence I watched for his portrait in that poor Mexican church is where his story started. The poor of Lima knew Martin before the theologians weighed his virtues and before any pope signed a decree, and they have kept him close ever since. The Church that once ranked him last now asks the world to learn from him. The worshippers in that small wooden church in southern Mexico are seeing their own saint just as the limeños did four centuries ago.

Jordan Peterson -- the Canadian psychologist whose YouTube biblical lectures have attracted tens of millions of views, whose 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos sold over five million copies worldwide, and whose 2024 Jungian commentary on the Hebrew Bible, We Who Wrestle With God, became an instant number-one bestseller -- has found devoted champions among media-savvy Catholic culture warriors: Bishop Robert Barron, philosopher Christopher Kaczor, apologist Trent Horn, and Father Mike Schmitz, among others. Peterson speaks to men -- particularly young men -- about suffering, responsibility, order, meaning, and the deep structure of Western civilization and its biblical foundations. He quotes Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, lectures on Genesis and Exodus with evangelical energy, and uses the word “God” constantly. He is not Catholic.

Peterson defines God as “how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time.” He has described the biblical stories as having “a phenomenological truth” rather than historical truth and characterized the people who wrote them as thinking “more like dramatists” than scientists. He argues that “it’s within the individual that redemption is manifested” -- a formulation that locates salvation in the self rather than in the grace of the crucified and risen Christ.

When asked in a public forum whether he believes in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, he said it would take him forty hours to explain. He has also said he lacks the competence to know whether Jesus rose bodily from the dead or even what that would mean -- a formulation Christianity Today’s reviewer noted in assessing We Who Wrestle With God. Neither answer is an answer. One claims inadequate time. The other claims inadequate credentials. Competence, in Peterson’s framework, belongs to the expert evaluating evidence. The Resurrection belongs to a different order of knowing -- the order of witness, of testimony, of the faith Paul describes in First Corinthians 15 not as a conclusion reached by the credentialed but as a confession made by those to whom Christ appeared. The Nicene Creed avows belief, not expertise.

Peterson has been criticized extensively by theologians who find his biblical hermeneutics Jungian rather than exegetical, by philosophers who find his framework incoherent, by cognitive scientists who find his empirical claims unsupported, by feminist Catholics who find his characterizations of women denigrating, and by political analysts who find his defense of hierarchy Nietzschean rather than democratic. These critiques of Peterson are well-founded. However, they have not addressed the question that seems to me more significant than how seriously anyone should take Peterson as a biblical scholar, a moral philosopher, or a social critic — that is, what does the fact that so many intellectuals on the Catholic Right have taken Peterson seriously and promoted both his person and his ideas tell us about these Catholic Right intellectuals? What Bishop Barron’s foreword, Word on Fire’s institutional promotion, and the address to the USCCB tell us about the faction of American Catholic intellectuals who chose Peterson as a model for Catholic evangelization? Peterson’s inadequacies are Peterson’s own. The Catholic Right’s institutional decision to promote Peterson despite these inadequacies belongs to — and helps to explain — this faction of the American Catholic Church.

The Anointing Is Documented.

Peterson is not the only non-Catholic who has been received as a prophets by the Catholic Right. Over the past decade, figures including Peterson, Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk have received sustained, warm, and institutionally significant attention from Catholic bishops, Catholic media organizations, Catholic apologetics operations, and Catholic publications. None of them identify as Catholic. Peterson does not identify as a member of any religious faith or denomination. Murray was raised as an Anglican but now self identifies as an agnoistic or a “Christian athetist.” Shapiro is an orthodox Jew, Rogan was raised Catholic but now calls himself an agnostic. Carlson is an Episcopalian. Kirk was a lifelong Evangelical Protestant. Yet all of them have received more sustained and more enthusiastic attention from this faction of American Catholic institutional life —much more so than the living popes whose encyclicals address precisely the moral, social and political questions these figures claim to answer. Pope Francis’s Fratelli Tutti, published in 2020, received in right-wing American Catholic media a reception ranging from cool skepticism to open hostility, but Peterson’s biblical lecture series -- produced by a man who reads the Bible in English translation, holds no appointment in any theology or religious studies program, and whose doctoral work was in psychology -- received a bishop’s foreword, a Word on Fire Institute book, two on-camera dialogues each lasting nearly two hours, and a formal presentation to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as a model for reaching young men.

Then-auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles Robert Barron -- at the time chairman of the USCCB Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis -- addressed the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops at its Spring Meeting in Baltimore in June 2019. He described Peterson as a model for Catholic evangelization, citing what he called “the Jordan Peterson phenomenon” as evidence that a serious message could reach a wide audience of young men. At the press conference afterward, the USCCB’s own Twitter account reported that “Bishop Barron says his comments were not about the content of Jordan Peterson, but the way he holds attention.”

Yet Word on Fire, Barron’s media ministry, conducted two on-camera dialogues with Peterson -- one in March 2019, one in April 2021 -- each lasting nearly two hours. Word on Fire published Christopher Kaczor’s book Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life, with a gushing forward written by Bishop Barron himself. Kaczor declared Peterson “the most influential biblical interpreter in the world today,” and insisted that Peterson is “a seeker, but one who is poised to build a synthesis that may not be currently available within the mainstream Church” -- in effect claiming that the Catholic intellectual tradition is insufficient to meet the present moment, but Peterson succeeds where every Catholic thinker, including the popes have failed.

By 2019, Peterson had become a regular reference at Catholic men’s Bible study gatherings -- quoted with admiration by men who had apparently not noticed, or not disavowed, his consistently denigrating characterizations of women. The promotional ecosystem Barron built had reached the parish formation level. Peterson’s Catholic promoters have treated his wife Tammy’s conversion to Roman Catholicism at Easter 2024 as proof that her husband is approaching the faith -- a claim Peterson’s own statements about God and the Resurrection do not support.

In his 2024 book We Who Wrestle With God, Peterson defined God variously as “The spirit within us that is eternally confident in our victory,” “What is to be properly and necessarily put in the highest place,” and “the ideal to which we commit and sacrifice.” Still, Raymond Arroyo interviewed Peterson on EWTN’s The World Over. Peterson completed a 17-part series on Exodus for The Daily Wire. He toured ancient churches in Rome and Jerusalem with Catholic and Orthodox figures.

Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire Institute has called the man who cannot answer whether he believes in the Resurrection the most influential biblical interpreter in the world today. More influential, apparently, than N.T. Wright, the former Bishop of Durham, whose The Resurrection of the Son of God runs to 800 pages of documented historical argument for the very claim Peterson cannot answer; more influential than Luke Timothy Johnson at Emory, or John Meier’s five-volume A Marginal Jew at Catholic University of America, or Daniel Harrington, S.J., whose Sacra Pagina commentaries constitute the standard scholarly reference in American Catholic seminary education, or the late Raymond Brown, S.S., whose two-volume commentary on the Gospel of John remains the benchmark Catholic treatment half a century after its publication; more influential than Robert Alter, whose complete translation of the Hebrew Bible with literary commentary is the most distinguished modern literary engagement with the texts Peterson lectures on, or Jon Levenson at Harvard Divinity School, or Nahum Sarna, whose commentary on Genesis and Exodus in the JPS Torah Commentary series engages in actual Hebrew the texts Peterson approaches with Jung.

Douglas Murray is a British author, journalist, and associate editor of The Spectator. He is openly atheist, describing himself as a “cultural Christian” -- someone who values Christianity as a civilizational inheritance while being unable to confess the faith that built it. His 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe argues that mass immigration from Muslim-majority countries constitutes an existential civilizational threat to European Christian culture, and that compassion for migrants must be subordinated to civilizational self-defense. His 2022 book The War on the West argues that the Western civilizational record is fundamentally good and is being subjected to an ideologically motivated attack dressed as moral reckoning.

Tom Hoopes, editor-in-chief of the National Catholic Register, published a warm interview with Murray. The Catholic World Report reviewed The War on the West approvingly, absorbing without theological qualification Murray’s central argument that Western civilization’s record on slavery is distinguished by having been the first to abolish it -- without noting the centuries of Catholic complicity in the institution Murray was rehabilitating. Catholic conservative commentators treat Murray as a fellow traveler in the defense of Western Christian civilization. Murray has never claimed that characterization and cannot endorse its theological premise.

Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, host of The Ben Shapiro Show -- the most downloaded conservative podcast in the United States -- and an Orthodox Jew. He explicitly denies the divinity of Jesus Christ. He deploys the formulation “Judeo-Christian values” to describe a shared civilizational inheritance, a formulation that papers over the specific theological claim Christianity requires -- that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnate Son of God, risen from the dead -- which is precisely what Shapiro’s Orthodox Judaism denies. His signature slogan, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” functions as a systematic epistemological delegitimization of compassionate response to suffering. Benedict XVI called caritas -- love ordered by truth -- the heart of the Gospel. Shapiro has built a media empire on its delegitimization.

Bishop Barron -- by then bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester -- appeared on Shapiro’s podcast. Legatus, the organization of Catholic business executives, invited Shapiro to address its members on Judeo-Christian values. The National Catholic Register has covered Shapiro warmly. Matt Fradd’s Pints with Aquinas -- a Catholic podcast named for Thomas Aquinas -- embedded itself in The Daily Wire’s media network, platforming Shapiro’s colleagues Matt Walsh and Andrew Klavan alongside explicitly Catholic content. A Catholic podcast named for the Angelic Doctor found a home in the media empire of a man who denies the Incarnation.

Joe Rogan hosts The Joe Rogan Experience, the most listened-to podcast in the world. He is a lapsed Catholic and self-described agnostic who has said he is “sticking with Jesus” as a philosophical preference -- an admiration for what he understands as Jesus’s moral teaching, not a confession of faith in the risen Christ. He endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Catholic Answers, the flagship Catholic apologetics organization, produced content asking how Catholics might show Rogan that Christianity is true -- treating his expressed curiosity as a near-conversion to be completed. The National Catholic Register has tracked his spiritual journey warmly. Matt Fradd has platformed him. Whether Rogan eventually enters the Church is between him and God. Whether Catholic Answers, the Register, and Fradd should organize their institutional resources around his spiritual curiosity as though it constitutes a near-conversion -- that is a question about the apparatus, not about Rogan.

The Anointing Serves a Purpose

The Catholic Right’s embrace of these non-Catholic writers and pundits goes far beyond the Catholic intellectual tradition’s engagement with secular and non-Catholic thought -- learning what can be learned, rejecting what must be rejected, never confusing engagement with endorsement.

Every figure on this list offers the same primary product: a story about a golden age of natural order -- white, male, Western, Christian, hierarchical -- whose destruction by feminism, multiculturalism, immigration, and progressive politics constitutes a civilizational and theological emergency. Peterson sells this story through Jungian mythology -- the eternal masculine, the competence hierarchy, the hero who restores order from chaos. Murray sells it through civilizational history -- the Europe that was coherent before immigration dissolved it. Shapiro sells it through the Judeo-Christian founding -- the West that was confident before the secular left corrupted it. Carlson sells it through populist nostalgia -- the America that worked before the elites destroyed it.

The story is false. The imagined past never existed as these figures describe it. Peterson’s natural hierarchy erases the women, the poor, and the colonized whose subordination made the hierarchy function. Murray’s coherent Europe erases the pogroms, the wars of religion, and the colonial violence through which European Christian civilization maintained its order. Shapiro’s Judeo-Christian founding erases the slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the systematic exclusion of Catholics, Jews, and people of color from the civilization whose values he celebrates. The nostalgia is ideological -- a falsification of history deployed as theological argument, bearing false witness about the dead in order to serve the living who benefit from the power arrangements the falsification justifies.

The attraction to these figures runs through five distinct but interlocking modes. The first is the hunger for masculine formation. The post-conciliar American Church failed in many parishes to form men. The catechetical culture became therapeutic, relational, and conflict-averse. It did not speak adequately of sacrifice, courage, heroism, or the demanding love that requires strength to give. Men left. Young men especially left. Peterson, Rogan, Carlson, and Shapiro speak directly to men in a register of demand and combative confidence that many Catholic men had never heard from a pulpit.

But the masculinity these figures offer is not the masculinity of the cross. It is the masculinity of the undefeated warrior -- strength as dominance, courage as aggression, sacrifice as self-discipline rather than self-gift. Peterson’s “harmless man” who chooses not to be dangerous is Nietzsche dressed in therapeutic language, not the baptized Christian who lays down his life. The right-wing Catholic men who perform this masculinity complete the costume: the beard, the pipe, the wooden library, the Chesterton quotation on the wall. They have kept the props and discarded the substance. Chesterton himself -- fat, disheveled, chronically late, who wept at beauty and attacked the British Empire -- would not recognize himself in the performance conducted in his name.

The Catholic tradition has a fully developed account of masculine strength that does not require Peterson to supply it. Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward to take the place of a condemned man in the Auschwitz starvation bunker. Franz Jägerstätter refused the Nazi oath and was executed. Thomas More went to the scaffold rather than betray his conscience. Oscar Romero stood at the altar knowing the assassin was in the cathedral. These are men of extraordinary courage whose strength was expressed precisely in willingness to be defeated by the world’s terms. The crucified Christ -- who is in Catholic theology the definitive revelation of what masculine strength looks like -- is absent from Peterson’s tradition entirely.

The second mode is the clash-of-civilizations frame. Murray’s entire project, and significant portions of Peterson’s and Shapiro’s, rest on Samuel Huntington’s argument that the world is organized as a contest between civilizations in which Christian Western civilization faces existential threat from Islam, immigration, and demographic change. This frame treats the migrant as a threat rather than a person bearing the image of God. It treats the Global South church -- now the demographic majority of world Catholicism -- as a problem rather than the Body of Christ. It treats Western Christian civilization as a fortress to be defended rather than a sacrament to be offered to the world.

John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963) insists that every human person possesses inalienable dignity and rights regardless of national origin. Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) insists that the exploitation of the Global South by the wealthy North is structural sin. Francis’s Fratelli Tutti (2020) insists that every border is permeable to the claims of human dignity. Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (2026) insists on the integral development of every person and every people. Murray’s argument that compassion for migrants must be subordinated to civilizational self-defense contradicts all four. The Catholic institutions that promoted Murray’s books did so without noting the contradiction.

The third mode is the systematic hostility to empathy. Peterson has written that “empathy has become a vice” that is “destroying civilization.” Shapiro’s signature slogan -- “facts don’t care about your feelings” -- functions as an epistemological weapon against compassionate response to suffering. Murray’s immigration analysis requires readers to train themselves out of compassionate response to refugee suffering as a condition of civilizational self-preservation.

This hostility is not the Catholic tradition’s distinction between ordered and disordered compassion. Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est (2005) insists that caritas -- love ordered by truth -- is the animating principle of Christian social engagement. He does not call empathy a vice. He calls love the heart of the Gospel. Peterson has built a system on its delegitimization. The Catholic institutions that promoted Peterson without noting this contradiction were not making a prudential judgment about the limits of compassionate policy. They were endorsing a systematic attack on what their own Magisterium calls the heart of the Gospel.

The fourth mode is the middlebrow intellectual register. None of these figures is as intellectually serious as the Catholic tradition they are supposedly supplementing. Peterson is a clinical psychologist who popularizes Jung and Nietzsche for audiences that have not read Jung or Nietzsche. His biblical lectures give the sensation of intellectual depth without requiring the formation that depth demands. Murray is a talented journalist whose civilizational arguments lack the philosophical and theological rigor they require. Shapiro is a skilled debater, not a theologian.

The Catholic intellectual tradition offers resources genuinely superior to anything these figures have produced. Josef Pieper on leisure and the philosophical life. Romano Guardini on the Lord. Jacques Maritain on integral humanism. Hans Urs von Balthasar on the glory of the Lord. Christopher Dawson on Christianity and Western culture -- a relationship far more complex, more critical, and more theologically serious than anything Murray has produced. These are not consolation prizes. They are the tradition at its best, more intellectually demanding and more humanly adequate than Peterson or Murray or Shapiro. They require formation to appreciate. The shortcut to Peterson is the abandonment of that formation.

The fifth mode is the defense of power -- specifically, the power arrangements of Western male dominance constructed by European colonialism and American slavery and now defended against every force that names them as sin. Peterson has described white privilege as “absolutely reprehensible” as a concept. Murray argues that the West is distinguished by having abolished slavery without acknowledging the centuries during which Catholic institutions participated in it. Shapiro’s “Judeo-Christian values” framework papers over not only the denial of the Incarnation but the specific historical record of what those values authorized when wielded by the powerful against the weak.

John Paul II called these arrangements “structures of sin” in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) -- not metaphors for personal moral failure but actual configurations of political and economic power that systematically produce injustice regardless of the intentions of those who operate within them. The denial that such structures exist is not a prudential disagreement about policy. It contradicts the ordinary Magisterium of the Church. The Catholic institutions that promoted these figures without noting the contradiction were not taking a conservative position within Catholic Social Teaching. They were promoting a position Catholic Social Teaching explicitly condemns.

Running beneath all five modes is the threat maintenance system that keeps the pattern in place -- the manufactured fears that transform every challenge to the power arrangement into a theological emergency. Sharia law coming to Cincinnati. The Amazon Madonna as pagan infiltration of the Vatican. Demographic replacement of white Christians. Critical race theory as heresy. Gender ideology as Gnostic assault on natural order. Synodality as creeping Protestantism. Pope Francis as Marxist. Pope Leo XIV as Francis’s continuation. Each of these fears follows the same structure: something that gives voice to those the power arrangement requires to be silent -- Indigenous Amazonian Catholics, Global South theology, women in liturgical roles, migrants’ dignity -- is reframed as an assault on Catholic orthodoxy. The Amazon Madonna is not a pagan idol. Synodality is not Protestantism. The preferential option for the poor is not Marxism. What these fears share is not a common theological error but a common function: they make the defense of the worship of power feel like the defense of the faith.

The Theology Beneath the Pattern Has a Name: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

In 2005, sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues published Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, documenting what they called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as the de facto religion of American adolescents. The God of MTD exists, created the world, and watches over human life. He wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when needed to resolve a problem. Good people go to heaven when they die. Smith called it a “watered-down, hand-me-down” Christianity -- a faith that had evacuated the specific claims of the Gospel and replaced them with a benign cultural religiosity requiring nothing and promising comfort.

Peterson sells a version of the same theological emptiness with the therapeutic register systematically inverted. Where Smith’s MTD was designed for teenagers who wanted religion to be comfortable and undemanding, Peterson’s version is designed for young men who have been told -- correctly -- that comfortable religion is contemptible. The passive therapeutic God who wants you to feel good has become the active civilizational God who wants the West to prevail. The support group has become the competence hierarchy. The language of niceness has become the language of order and chaos, dominance and submission, the hero who ascends the hierarchy or dies in the attempt. Peterson’s version sounds rigorous. It sounds demanding. It uses the vocabulary of sacrifice, of suffering, of bearing your cross.

But the sacrifice Peterson demands is Jungian self-mastery, not Paschal dying-and-rising with Christ. The suffering is the weight of becoming your best self, not participation in the suffering of Christ present in the poor. The cross is the burden of responsibility, not the instrument of salvation. The hero’s journey ends in self-actualization, not in the tomb and what comes after it. Peterson has taken MTD’s theological emptiness -- no incarnation, no resurrection, no living God who acts in history, no specific historical claims about a specific person who rose from the dead -- and dressed it in the aesthetic of seriousness, combat, and masculine demand. The theological content is identical to the therapeutic version. The emotional register is its precise inversion. MTD for angry young men.

The God of Peterson’s system did not become flesh in Bethlehem. He did not suffer under Pontius Pilate. He did not rise from the dead -- or if he did, it would take forty hours to explain, or require a competence Peterson does not claim to possess. He does not appear to witnesses and commission them to the ends of the earth. He does not ask anything specific of his followers beyond the self-improvement Peterson’s twelve rules require. He has no Sermon on the Mount in which the poor in spirit, the meek, and the merciful are pronounced blessed. He has no Matthew 25 in which the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner, and the sick are identified with Christ himself. He has no preferential option for the poor, no welcome of the stranger, no love of enemies, no promise that the last shall be first. He is a God who confirms the competent in their competence and the powerful in their power. He is not the God who was crucified by the powerful and rose from the dead to judge them.

Peterson himself would say -- and has said -- that his framework is not a replacement for Christianity but a preparation for it: a clearing of psychological ground, a making-ready of the soil in which faith can grow. His Catholic promoters have repeated this claim extensively. Bishop Barron has framed Peterson as a gateway to the faith, a secular voice pointing toward truths that Catholicism can then complete. The response to this defense is precise. A preparation that cannot confess the Resurrection is not a preparation for Christianity. A gateway that does not lead through is a destination. The young Catholic man who replaces OCIA with Peterson’s biblical Series has not been prepared for the faith. He has been formed in a substitute faith whose god cannot answer whether Christ rose from the dead. Tammy Peterson’s conversion does not change this. Her husband’s promotion of a Jungian God who acts as if he exists does not change this. The gateway mythology functions to protect the promotion from the charge of substitution while the substitution continues.

The Catholic faith is not MTD in any register. It is the precise opposite of MTD -- a religion that makes absolute and historically specific demands, confesses events that either happened or did not happen, and stakes everything on the claim that a specific person died and rose from the dead in a specific place at a specific time in history. The Nicene Creed is not a collection of archetypes. It is a series of historical confessions: born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures. These are claims about what happened, not about what the stories mean psychologically. They cannot be reduced to phenomenological truth. They cannot be approached with Jungian hermeneutics. They require confession or rejection. Peterson has chosen a third path -- the path of the man who says it would take forty hours to explain, who acts as if God exists, who lacks the competence to know whether Jesus rose bodily from the dead. That path has a name. It is not Christianity.

The Catholic consequences of this substitution are visible in the pattern this essay has documented. Catholic young men formed by Peterson rather than by the tradition have received a religion that looks and feels like serious faith -- demanding, combative, aesthetically rich, intellectually stimulating -- while containing none of Christianity’s specific substance. They have received Nietzsche with a rosary. They have received the lobster hierarchy instead of the Lamb of God. They have received a god who rewards the competent and confirms the powerful instead of the God who became poor, was executed by the powerful, and rose from the dead to announce that the kingdom belongs to those the powerful have trampled. They have received the beard and the pipe and the wooden library and the Chesterton quotation instead of the cross, the empty tomb, and the commission to go to the ends of the earth.

What has been lost is not merely a theological emphasis or a pastoral approach. What has been lost is the Gospel itself -- the specific, historically grounded, ecclesiastically transmitted, sacramentally mediated Gospel of Jesus Christ that the Catholic Church exists to proclaim and that no amount of Jungian mythology, civilizational nostalgia, or aggressive self-help philosophy can replace. The Gospel preached by Francis in Evangelii Gaudium -- the joy of the Gospel, addressed to the poor, the excluded, the forgotten, those whom the world’s competence hierarchies have defeated -- is not a liberal political agenda. It is the Gospel. The Gospel preached by Leo XIV in Magnifica Humanitas -- the integral development of every person and every people, measured against the standard of the crucified and risen Christ -- is not progressive ideology. It is the Gospel. The social-encyclical tradition from Leo XIII through Leo XIV is not a political program grafted onto the faith. It is the faith’s own account of what the Resurrection demands of those who confess it.

Several of these figures identify genuine problems. Several address genuine hungers. The post-conciliar American Church did fail in many parishes to form men. The Catholic intellectual tradition did become in many institutions less demanding and less confident than it should have been. These failures are real. The Catholic tradition has resources more than adequate to address every genuine hunger on this list -- more honestly, more demandingly, and more humanly than anything Peterson, Murray, or Shapiro has produced. Maximilian Kolbe is more demanding than Peterson. Romano Guardini is more intellectually serious than Murray. The social encyclicals are more adequate to the present moment than anything Shapiro has produced. The tradition is sufficient. The shortcut to Peterson is the abandonment of the tradition, not a supplement to it.

Right-wing American Catholic institutions have promoted these men as preferred authorities -- as prophets and thought-leaders whose presence displaces the Catholic intellectual tradition they were never equipped to replace, and whose promotion defies a century of papal teaching this faction has chosen to ignore. Six successive popes have addressed in the ordinary Magisterium of the Church the precise questions Peterson and Murray and Shapiro claim to answer. The faction documented here has chosen Peterson’s foreword over the encyclicals, Murray’s civilizational defense over Fratelli Tutti, Shapiro’s facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings over Benedict XVI’s caritas as the heart of the Gospel.

What they are promoting is not Catholicism. It is not even Christianity. It is a version of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism for angry young men.

On the evening of August 28, 1967, a little after six-thirty, James Groppi led about a hundred members of the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council off North Fifteenth Street and up onto the Sixteenth Street Viaduct. They carried hand-lettered signs that read “We Need Fair Housing.” Groppi, a white priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, walked at the front. On the south side, police counted as many as eight thousand people along the route. Someone had parked an old hearse across one street under a placard reading “Father Groppi’s Last Ride.” Bricks, bottles, cherry bombs, and worse came over the police line.

Groppi had a name for the half-mile of bridge spanning the Menomonee Valley. He called it Milwaukee’s Mason-Dixon line. It separated the Black near north side from the white, heavily Polish and Catholic south side, and crossing it pulled national attention onto a northern city that preferred to imagine segregation belonged to Alabama.

His parents turned the scorn aimed at Italians into sympathy for Black Milwaukee.

Groppi was born in Bay View on November 16, 1930, the eleventh of twelve children of Giocondo and Giorgina Magri Groppi, immigrants from Italy. Giocondo ran a grocery called Groppi’s, and the family lived in the rooms attached to the store. James and his brothers and sisters worked the counter.

Italians in that corner of Milwaukee absorbed their own share of contempt. Groppi credited his mother and father with turning the experience outward. They raised their children to recognize the same contempt aimed at Black Milwaukeeans and to stand with the people on the receiving end of it.

He attended Immaculate Conception parish school and captained the basketball team at Bay View High. After a Black player on an opposing team drew abuse during a game, Groppi wrote a school essay on brotherhood and racial justice.

He drove a city bus to pay for the seminary that formed him.

A year out of high school, Groppi entered St. Lawrence Seminary in Mount Calvary, run by the Capuchin Franciscans, and studied there from 1950 to 1952. He moved on to St. Francis de Sales Seminary, the major seminary of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, and finished his theology in 1959. He paid his way by driving a Milwaukee city bus, work that set him among the city’s laborers years before he marched with any of them.

Beginning in the summer of 1956, Groppi counseled children at a day camp run by Blessed Martin de Porres parish in the inner core. The poverty he met there, and the contempt he watched fellow Catholics aim at Black families, shaped him more than his classroom theology.

Archbishop William E. Cousins ordained him in June 1959. His first assignment sent him to St. Veronica’s, a white working-class parish on the south side, where he preached on racial justice ten Sundays running and watched the pews stay unmoved. He asked for a Black parish and received St. Boniface, at Eleventh and Clarke, in 1963.

The Civil Rights Movement in the South taught him the methods he brought home to Milwaukee.

Groppi joined the 1963 March on Washington. In March 1965 he drove south with three other priests to join the Selma voting-rights demonstrations. He taught in a Freedom School and spent that summer on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s voter-registration drive under Martin Luther King Jr. He came home trained in nonviolent civil disobedience and convinced that Milwaukee needed the same pressure as Alabama.

He joined the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee, led by the attorney and state legislator Lloyd Barbee, and picketed and blocked buses against school segregation. Police made the first of his more than a dozen arrests on June 4, 1965, when he protested the segregation of Black children kept apart inside a white school. “Agitate, agitate, agitate is my motto,” he told a reporter.

Late in 1965 the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council asked him to serve as its adviser. He built a security arm from the young men of the council, the Commandos, who wore black berets and walked the edges of every march to hold the demonstrators steady under attack.

He aimed the Youth Council at Milwaukee’s gatekeepers.

The Youth Council’s first target was the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a club whose charter barred Black members and whose rolls held many of the city’s judges and officials. Groppi asked how a judge who belonged to a whites-only lodge could weigh a Black defendant fairly.

Picketing the Eagles’ clubhouse in early 1966 drew little notice, so the council moved to the homes of the members who held public office. In August 1966 picketers appeared outside the Wauwatosa home of Circuit Judge Robert C. Cannon. White crowds gathered and showered the demonstrators with bottles and firecrackers. After nine nights of mounting violence the National Guard was sent to protect the picketers. Several officials resigned from the Eagles. The lodge kept its policy.

Two hundred nights pressed the Common Council to outlaw racism in housing.

Most of Milwaukee’s ninety thousand Black residents lived in the inner core, blocked from buying or renting south of the Menomonee Valley. On July 30 and 31, 1967, the core erupted. Four people died, and Mayor Henry Maier imposed a curfew.

Alderman Vel Phillips had carried an open-housing ordinance to the Common Council and watched it lose, once by twenty to one.

Maier opposed a city-only ordinance, arguing that it would drive white residents into suburbs beyond its reach and that open housing had to cover the whole county to work. Phillips and Groppi read his county-wide framing as a reason to delay. He had already banned the Youth Council’s night marches.

Groppi and the Youth Council crossed the viaduct anyway on August 28, 1967. The next night a crowd estimated at twelve thousand met them on the south side, pelting the marchers with bottles and cherry bombs and hanging Groppi in effigy.

Police arrested 137 people on August 31 for defying the ban on night demonstrations, Groppi among them. They arrested him twice over the campaign.

At a rally he told the marchers what they were in for. They would walk, he vowed, “till our feet are tired … on our ankles, and on our knees.” The marches ran two hundred consecutive nights into the spring of 1968.

When south side Alderman Robert Anderson demanded to know why the clergy would not push their people toward open housing, Groppi answered him in the Council chamber. He and Anderson agreed for once, he replied, “but that does not excuse your inactivity.”

The comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory measured the Catholic stakes at a packed rally inside St. Boniface. Groppi, he told the cheering crowd, “has given the Pope respect in our black ghettos for the first time in history.”

King had turned his own campaign toward housing and northern poverty, and he sent Groppi his support. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, moved Congress to pass the federal Fair Housing Act.

Milwaukee adopted its own ordinance that same month, stronger than the federal floor, and more than fifty Wisconsin communities later modeled statutes on it. The marching had produced the law.

The inspiration of John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris.

Groppi put into practice the social teaching the popes had issued since 1891. In 1968 the Davenport Catholic Interracial Council gave him its Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award. The award took its title from John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical, which counted decent housing among the rights every person holds by being human and bound public authority to the common good.

The Second Vatican Council had closed in 1965, two years before Milwaukee passed its ordinance. Gaudium et Spes, the Council’s pastoral constitution, called discrimination based on race “incompatible with God’s design.” Groppi marched the south side in the years right after the Council wrote that line.

Cousins took the petitions that demanded Groppi be silenced, shipped back to Africa, stripped of his collar. He declined to rein the priest in. Cousins said in public that Groppi had “a lot of guts,” defended the right of priests to march for racial justice, and reminded Milwaukee that the wrongs Groppi protested would outlast Groppi.

He carried the marching into Wisconsin State Assembly and up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On September 29, 1969, Groppi led the Welfare Mothers’ March on Madison, and more than a thousand women filled the floor of the Wisconsin State Assembly to protest cuts to the welfare budget. They held the chamber from midday toward midnight, eleven hours, while the Assembly sat paralyzed.

The Assembly cited him for contempt and ordered him to the Dane County jail for six months. He fought the citation through the federal courts.

In 1972 the Supreme Court agreed with him. Writing for the Court in Groppi v. Leslie, Chief Justice Warren Burger held that the Assembly had denied Groppi due process by jailing him with no notice and no chance to answer. A welfare protest had produced a precedent on legislative contempt that courts still cite.

He marched against the Vietnam War and for American Indian treaty rights into the early 1970s. He also enrolled in law school for a time.

He left the priesthood when the archdiocese refused him the Black parish he asked for, but he could never leave the Catholic faith.

Groppi asked again and again for assignment to a Black parish, where he could keep the ministry he had built at St. Boniface. The archdiocese opened several such parishes during these years and turned him down for each.

In 1970 his superiors transferred him out of St. Boniface to St. Michael’s, ending the inner-core ministry he had asked to keep. They had grown uneasy with the marches, and the transfer closed the question of the Black parish he kept asking for.

He remained a priest six more years. In 1976 he resigned and married Margaret Rozga, a former Youth Council member who had marched beside him. Rozga now teaches creative writing and multi-cultural literature at the University of Wisconsin Waukesha, and was named Wisconsin Poet Laureate.

In 1978 he studied for the Episcopal priesthood at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria and served St. Andrew’s, an inner-city parish in Detroit. He gave up the conversion within the year, too deeply Catholic to become anything else.

He went back to driving a Milwaukee bus, the work that had carried him through seminary twenty-five years before. His fellow drivers elected him president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998 in 1983, returning him to the labor question Leo XIII had opened with Rerum Novarum in 1891.

He and Rozga raised three children. A brain tumor partially paralyzed him after surgery in 1984, and he died on November 4, 1985, at fifty-four.

The open-housing ordinance still governs who may rent and buy where in Milwaukee. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, formed in those years, still checks landlords for compliance under directors who came long after Groppi.

In 1988 the Milwaukee Common Council renamed the Sixteenth Street Viaduct the James E. Groppi Unity Bridge. The span he had condemned as a Mason-Dixon line now carries his name across the valley he refused to accept as a border.

Groppi treated the marching as priestly work. The day camp at Blessed Martin de Porres, the unanswered sermons at St. Veronica’s, the viaduct, the Assembly floor in Madison -- he carried the same gospel into each. Pacem in Terris and Gaudium et Spes put words to convictions he already held about the people he marched with.

His quarrel was with the men who ran the archdiocese, and it cost him the collar. The faith those men administered held him to the end. He turned back from the Episcopal seminary in 1978 because he could not stop being Catholic, and a Mass at St. Leo’s buried him in 1985. Groppi spent his life pressing the Church to live up to its own teaching and he died inside it.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is not a Catholic and does not claim to be one, but he is clearly obsessed with Catholicism.

On June 20 the Guardian’s Jason Wilson reported a leak that exposed the guest directory of Dialog, the invitation-only forum Thiel founded in 2006 and that critics set beside the Bilderberg Group. The list surfaced in the source code of Dialog’s own website, preserved in an Internet Archive snapshot and first flagged by a hacktivist on Bluesky. It gathered Elon Musk, senators of both parties, Trump cabinet officers, Gulf royals, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, OpenAI’s president, and New York Times columnists.

The leak landed in the same season as Thiel’s other public turn, the one in which he lectures elite audiences on the Antichrist and warns that Armageddon is near. The two roles belong to one project. Thiel borrows the vocabulary of Catholic apocalypse to dignify a politics of power, and he has supplied that politics with a Catholic Vice President of his own making.

He calls himself a Christian of broadly Protestant background. He studied at Stanford under René Girard, the French literary theorist and Catholic convert whose theory of mimetic desire became Thiel’s master key to markets, rivalry, and now the end of the world. Over the past year Thiel has carried a traveling lecture series on the Antichrist from city to city -- four closed-door sessions in San Francisco in the fall of 2025, organized by the ACTS 17 Collective at the Commonwealth Club, then private talks in Paris reported by Le Monde and Politico, and in March 2026 a four-day series in Rome.

The Rome sessions ran invite-only, no recordings, no press. The Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association, tied to the Italian far right, organized them with the independent Cluny Institute and praised Thiel for the “courage and intellectual liberty” to discuss forces it described as bent on destroying what remains of the West.

Italian newspapers first reported the venue as the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas -- the Angelicum, where the American-born Leo XIV once studied -- and the pontifical universities hurried to deny any role. In a parliamentary session, Italian lawmakers called Thiel’s ideas scandalous and demanded transparency about the government’s contracts with Palantir, the surveillance firm Thiel chairs. Voices close to Leo XIV called the content heretical.

A Protestant billionaire delivered a private theology of the last days a short walk from St. Peter’s Square, and the Catholic institutions of Rome backed away from the room.

Ross Douthat asked Thiel on a New York Times podcast what the Antichrist meant to him. Thiel answered, “How much time do we have?” His formula comes from Paul. The slogan of the Antichrist, Thiel says, is “peace and safety,” the phrase from First Thessalonians that arrives just before sudden destruction.

He draws the rest from a improbably assembled bookshelf: St. John Henry Newman’s apocalyptic sermons; Russian mystic Vladimir Soloviev’s A Short Story of the Anti-Christ — a 1900 tale of an Antichrist who presents himself as a humanitarian and a benefactor; German Nazi political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s katechon — the restrainer who holds back the end of the world and provides the only bridge between an eschatological paralysis of all human effort and great historical power like that of the early Christian Empire of the Germanic kings.

In Thiel’s telling, the Antichrist of this century wears the costume of a reassuring administrator who promises to end existential risk -- the regulator, the arms-control negotiator, the global-governance official, the precautionary state that slows the machines. Greta Thunberg serves as his recurring example. Thiel hands his audiences a choice between a one-world state under the Antichrist and an Armageddon if that project collapses.

His account of the Antichrist and his commercial interest run in the same direction. If safety is the slogan of the enemy, then the people who would slow artificial intelligence, audit Palantir, or restrain the surveillance frontier are doing the enemy’s work. The chairman of a surveillance company has produced an account of the end times in which restraint is the temptation and acceleration is the faithful act.

Thiel met JD Vance in 2011, when he spoke at Yale Law School and the future Vice President was a striving student from Ohio. Thiel handed him Girard. Vance has credited that encounter for his conversion, which he recounted in a 2020 essay, “How I Joined the Resistance.”

Girard was Catholic. Thiel is not. Vance became one. The line ran from the dead French Catholic to his Protestant student to the convert that student would fund into the United States Senate in 2022. Thiel is also credited with handing Vance the work of Carl Schmitt, the jurist who served the Nazi state and defined politics as the division of humanity into friend and enemy.

Girard exposed the scapegoat so that communities might stop sacrificing their victims, the crucified Christ being the innocent the civilization wronged. Critics who read Girard closely, among them the Jesuit commentators in Ireland who have tracked Vance’s turn, argue that he absorbed the mechanism and now works it -- defending the administration’s indictments, its deportations, and its lists of enemies. Thiel calls himself a Girardian while building a politics organized around the enemy: the woke, the climate activist, the globalist, the regulator. By that reading, both men took the anatomy of the scapegoat as an instruction manual.

He handles the other sources the same way. The katechon restrains the Antichrist and delays the end; Thiel reassigns it, treating the global order of safety and control as the danger and calling disruption the faithful answer. Paul’s “peace and safety” warns of false comfort on the edge of judgment; Thiel turns the phrase into the slogan of tyranny, which lets him brand AI safety, climate caution, and arms control as the devil’s work. He conscripts the texts rather than submitting to them.

The living Pope has answered the program directly. In his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, Leo XIV condemned “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation,” and he has denounced the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States. In April 2026, Vance -- the Catholic Thiel made -- told the Pope to be careful when he speaks about theology. The Church that received Vance now rebukes the agenda Thiel funds.

The fusion of maximal technology, friend-enemy politics, and Christian end-times language repeats a Weimar formula. The historian Jeffrey Herf called the pairing reactionary modernism, the embrace of the machine joined to a rejection of Enlightenment reason and liberal democracy, with Carl Schmitt among its theorists. Thiel revives it and routes Schmitt to the second-highest office in the country.

The faction is specific. Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and the Founders Fund orbit carry the technology side; Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and the postliberal Catholics around Vance carry the religious one. The leaked Dialog list runs wider than that circle and older than Thiel’s turn to Trump. It holds Democrats who hurried to disown it -- Wes Moore, Cory Booker, and Jared Polis among them -- and writers with no stake in any of it. The argument is about Thiel’s faction, not Silicon Valley and not the American right.

He takes the categories -- Antichrist, katechon, the two cities of Augustine -- and the two-thousand-year vocabulary of cosmic struggle, and he leaves behind the magisterium that interprets them, the preferential option for the poor, and the Pope who is alive and disagreeing with him.

The forum the leak exposed is the material body of that vision. Dialog meets off the record under a confidentiality its members prize; Auren Hoffman chairs it, Raffi Grinberg directs it, and the group is building a permanent campus in the Washington suburbs. Wired’s account of the August retreat near Dublin listed sessions called “Navigating WWIII,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” and “Build-a-Cult.” Records released by the House oversight committee show Hoffman invited Jeffrey Epstein to the 2014 gathering, alongside Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton. Janine Wedel, who studies power elites at George Mason University, calls these closed forums “a problem for democracy,” the rooms where agendas get set past any vote the rest of us could cast.

The source Thiel cites describes a figure he seems unable to recognize. In Vladimir Soloviev’s tale, the Antichrist arrives as a benefactor and a peacemaker, a superman who ends scarcity, unites the world under a single government, wins the gratitude of nations, and convenes the churches to ask them to bow to him in exchange for everything they have wanted. That likeness fits the technologist who promises to cure death and administer the human future more closely than it fits an official asking for a safety review. Thiel drew a careful portrait of the Antichrist and addressed it to the wrong man.

Catholic social teaching levels a sharper charge than excess piety. The first commandment forbids the worship of substitutes, and a man who borrows God’s vocabulary to consecrate his own power has raised a god he can manage.

The borrowing does political work. Thiel funds the 2026 Republican campaigns, chairs a surveillance company that sells to governments, and has placed his protégé a step from the presidency. His apocalyptic story dignifies that power and brands the people Leo XIV defends, the migrant and the poor, as frightened masses who would trade their freedom for the Antichrist’s safety.

When he brought the performance to Rome, the Catholic institutions there heard him out and refused him the bow that Soloviev’s Antichrist demands of churches. The Church — and, we hope, most Catholics, can tell the difference between Thiel’s mashed-together distorted pseudo-religion for the real thing.

On June 18, 2026, Andy Burnham won a special election in Makerfield, a constituency in the industrial Northwest of England, and returned to the House of Commons. The British press treated the result as the opening move in a contest for the country’s leadership. To see why, an American reader needs the mechanics.

Britain does not elect its prime minister directly. Voters choose a local member of Parliament, and the leader of whichever party commands a majority in the Commons becomes prime minister. A governing party can also replace its leader between general elections, and the new leader takes office without any national vote, as the Conservatives did several times between 2016 and 2022.

The current Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, has governed since July 2024 and has grown deeply unpopular. Burnham means to challenge him.

One rule stood in the way. A candidate for the Labour leadership must hold a seat in Parliament, and Burnham gave his up in 2017 to become the elected mayor of Greater Manchester, a regional executive presiding over nearly three million people. His standoff with Boris Johnson’s government over pandemic relief for the North earned him the nickname King of the North. Winning back a Commons seat was the precondition for everything else, and on June 18 he won it. Should he take the leadership, Britain will have its first prime minister meaningfully formed by Catholicism since the Reformation, and the first to govern, by his own account, out of Catholic Social Teaching.

Andy Burnham calls Catholic Social Teaching the foundation of his politics.

Burnham makes the claim plainly. He calls himself Catholic by upbringing and not particularly religious, then adds that Catholic Social Teaching underpins his politics, that he had to read the catechism at school, and that the teaching is “powerful and strong and right.” That sentence rewards attention, because it pulls apart two things American and British commentary alike keep folding together: assent to the creed, and formation in the social magisterium.

The biographical facts are ordinary for his generation and his corner of England. Burnham was born near Liverpool in 1970, raised in a Catholic household, schooled at St Lewis Catholic Primary and St Aelred’s Roman Catholic High, served as an altar boy, and joined the Labour Party at fifteen. His father worked as a telephone engineer and his mother as a receptionist, and their marriage crossed the Protestant-Catholic line that still divided the city, a tension the family eased, by its own account, through a shared devotion to Everton. He has identified the three institutions that shaped him as the Labour Party, Everton Football Club, and the Catholic Church.

What he describes is a formation in moral outlook, kept distinct from any profession of the creed. He drifted from the institutional Church after John Paul II died in 2005 and Benedict XVI brought what Burnham called a “more judgemental mode” to Rome, and he has spoken since of an “obsession with sexuality” that pushed him away. He still sends his children to Catholic schools for the grounding. What survived the drift, on his telling, is the social teaching.

In October 2025, two decades after he drifted from the Church, Burnham gave the annual Theos lecture in Manchester, calling for a politics built on trust, community, and faith, and borrowing from Pope Francis the phrase a culture of encounter. He had met Francis at the Vatican in 2023 and called it the greatest privilege of his life. The man who left the creed behind keeps reaching for the language of the Church to say what politics is for.

England spent centuries treating Catholics as traitors and enemies of the state.

For an American audience, the weight of a Catholic-formed prime minister is hard to feel without the history, because the United States settled its own version of the question long ago. John Kennedy’s Catholicism was a live controversy in 1960, and he reached the White House anyway; Joe Biden’s faith drew far less fire sixty years later. England’s quarrel with Rome ran deeper and lasted longer.

The quarrel began with Henry VIII’s divorce. When Rome refused to annul his marriage, the king broke with the papacy in 1534 and made himself supreme head of a new Church of England. For the next two centuries the English state treated loyalty to Rome as treason in waiting. Catholics who refused to attend Anglican services were fined as recusants, priests were hanged, and the Mass was driven into hiding.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Catholic conspirators tried to blow up Parliament and the king, hardened the suspicion into national folklore that England still rehearses every November, when effigies of the conspirator Guy Fawkes are burned.

A web of penal laws followed. The Test Acts barred Catholics from Parliament, the universities, the army, and public office by requiring oaths no faithful Catholic could swear. The Act of Settlement of 1701 barred them from the throne, a bar that remains in force today.

The walls came down slowly. The Gordon Riots of 1780, among the deadliest in London’s history, erupted under the banner “No Popery” against a modest easing of those laws. Catholic Emancipation, the Act that finally let Catholics sit in Parliament, did not pass until 1829, and only after Daniel O’Connell won the County Clare election of 1828 and, barred as a Catholic from taking his seat, forced the Tory government to concede. As late as 1974, a Catholic could not serve as Lord Chancellor, one of the great offices of state.

While the law slowly relented, immigration changed the ground beneath it. The Irish who fled the Great Famine of the 1840s poured into Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow, building dense Catholic working-class communities in the very industrial cities that would become Labour strongholds in the next century. English Catholicism took on an Irish, working-class character, instinctively left-leaning, suspicious of wealth and power, and at home in the Labour Party. Burnham’s Northwest is the heartland of that history.

Burnham’s own family rode that current. By his account, his forebears left Drogheda, in County Louth, for the Liverpool docks in the late 1800s, a more recent crossing than that of Joe Biden’s Louth ancestors, with other lines reaching back toward Donegal.

Even so, the highest office stayed closed. No practicing Catholic has ever governed Britain as prime minister. Tony Blair waited until months after he left Downing Street in 2007 to be received into the Catholic Church, having conformed to the Church of England throughout his years in power. Boris Johnson, baptized Catholic and confirmed Anglican as a schoolboy, married in a Catholic rite at Westminster Cathedral in 2021, which led some to call him the first Catholic prime minister, though he governed as nothing of the kind.

The thaw is real and recent. In October 2025, King Charles III prayed beside Pope Leo XIV in the Sistine Chapel, the first time a reigning British monarch and a pope had prayed together in public since Henry VIII walked out five centuries earlier. Against that long backdrop, a prime minister who credits Catholic Social Teaching for his politics marks something the penal laws were written to prevent.

Derek Worlock’s Liverpool gave that Catholic Social Teaching a working form.

The national story has a local version, and Burnham was formed inside it. The Catholicism of his Merseyside childhood had a specific shape, set by Derek Worlock, Archbishop of Liverpool from 1976 to 1996. Worlock was the son of a suffragist, a liberal and anti-Thatcher churchman who led the archdiocese through the Toxteth riots of 1981, mass unemployment, and the collapse of the city’s industrial base.

Liverpool was the closest thing England had to Belfast or Glasgow, a city of Orange marches and Catholic processions that spilled into riots, kept solidly Conservative for much of the twentieth century by anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling.

In that city the Catholic vote was the loyalty of a suspected minority, and it went to Labour. Burnham came into his own Catholic-Labour politics as the heir of that embattled minority.

Worlock did that work beside David Sheppard, the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, whose Bias to the Poor appeared in 1983 and who helped produce the Church of England report Faith in the City two years later. The two preached from each other’s pulpits, lobbied government ministers in tandem, and published Better Together: Christian Partnership in a Hurt City in 1988. They fought to keep a sugar refinery open and stood with neighborhood associations against both London and the city’s hard left.

This was Catholic Social Teaching put to work in one place: the common good pursued across that Protestant-Catholic divide, solidarity with a place the national government had abandoned, the preferential option for the poor enacted on the ground. When John Paul II visited Liverpool in 1982 he stayed at Worlock’s home, and Burnham, then twelve, remembers it. Burnham has identified the political expression of Worlock’s teaching as the Labour Party, which he joined three years later.

In Manchester Burnham enacted the preferential option for the poor.

A formation can be measured against a record, and Burnham has built one over eight years as mayor. His signature program, A Bed Every Night, opened in November 2018 as what he called a humanitarian response to people sleeping rough on the streets. It offers an emergency bed and personal support to anyone without shelter, pulling together local councils, the public health service, charities, faith groups, and private landlords. It has helped thousands and cut street homelessness across the region by more than half.

The language he uses for it comes from the social magisterium. He insists that housing is a human right and that a community should pick people up the moment they fall. The principle is the dignity of the person; the method is solidarity organized through the institutions closest to the need. A reader schooled in Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s 1891 charter of Catholic Social Teaching, and the encyclicals that followed it recognizes the grammar at once.

Burnham’s Hillsborough campaign defends the truths that institutions of power usually conceal.

The sharpest case is Hillsborough, a name every British reader knows, but most Americans do not. On April 15, 1989, at an overcrowded soccer stadium in Sheffield, ninety-seven Liverpool supporters were crushed to death. The police blamed the dead and their fellow fans, the press amplified the lie, and the families spent twenty-seven years fighting official denial before an inquest finally ruled, in 2016, that the victims had been unlawfully killed.

For more than thirty years Burnham stood with those families. At the twentieth-anniversary memorial in Liverpool in 2009 he was interrupted by chants demanding justice; he absorbed the rebuke and took up the cause. In 2017 he introduced a bill, the Hillsborough Law, to impose a legal duty of candour on public officials and to give bereaved families legal funding equal to the public bodies they face in court.

Bishop James Jones, reporting on the disaster for the government, identified the wrong at its center as “the patronising disposition of unaccountable power.” Burnham’s bill answers that wrong by setting the grieving and the powerless on level terms with the strong. The Labour government brought forward its own version, the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, in 2025.

Truth-telling, accountability, the defense of the weak against institutions that lie to protect themselves -- all of this expresses the dignity of the person before it becomes policy. Burnham reached these commitments through a Catholic moral imagination, and he has held them longer than any electoral calculus would require.

Some observers reduce his Catholicism to football and tribalism.

Writing in the British magazine UnHerd this June, the historian Samuel Rubinstein offered the skeptical reading. Burnham, he argued, is a “plastic Papist” whose Catholicism is cultural, a badge of northern, anti-establishment, Irish-descended identity that does real political work without binding him to anything the Church teaches. His true religion, Rubinstein suggested, is Everton, the soccer club he supports. British Catholics have themselves drifted from Labour as the party embraced social liberalism, and a Burnham premiership would carry, on this account, consequences that stay inside Catholic circles and interest no one else.

The point about identity is fair, and the football is real. Burnham ranks Everton above the Church among the institutions that shaped him, and in 2023 he handed the soccer-loving Pope Francis a signed shirt. A good deal of his appeal does ride on a regional Catholic history that he neither invented nor fully controls.

Catholic Social Teaching is a body of doctrine, which complicates the cultural reading.

The skeptical reading rests on a buried premise: that Catholicism comes down to creed and sexual ethics, so that a man who rejects those is left holding nothing but culture. Catholic Social Teaching unsettles the premise by existing. It is a developed body of magisterial doctrine, running from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 through the social encyclicals of every pope since to Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas this May. Its principles, human dignity and the common good, solidarity and subsidiarity and the option for the poor, are taught with the Church’s authority and carry the weight of doctrine.

To be formed by that body of teaching is to be formed by something with content and weight. The football-against-faith frame measures Burnham against the wrong examination. He passes the social-doctrine examination more convincingly than many Catholic politicians who clear the creedal bar and then govern in ways Leo XIII would have called a robbery of the poor.

His break with the Church runs through the indivisible dignity of the person.

Honesty about the formation means marking where it ends. The principle of human dignity that grounds Burnham’s housing and Hillsborough work also grounds the Church’s defense of life at its beginning and its close. John Paul II drew the connection in Evangelium Vitae in 1995, and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin gave it a name, the consistent ethic of life: the dignity of the person is a single thing, and it does not separate into a social portion a politician may keep and a life portion he may put down.

Burnham has put the life portion down. He left the institutional Church over its teaching on sexuality, and on assisted dying he has moved from abstention as a member of Parliament toward open sympathy. Catholic teaching reads the legalization of assisted suicide as the abandonment of the dying to a calculus of disposability, the same calculus the social magisterium resists when it defends the homeless man and the bereaved mother. A formation that carries solidarity into government while releasing the protection of vulnerable life holds one half of the dignity principle and lays the other half on the ground.

Dissent marks Burnham’s formation as Catholic.

A skeptic could grant the whole record and still doubt the cause. Burnham’s housing work, his Hillsborough campaign, and his language of solidarity each carry a secular explanation ready to hand: Labour tribal loyalty, the civic culture of a northern industrial city, the humanitarian instinct that crosses every creed. Resemblance to Catholic Social Teaching does not prove descent from it.

Burnham attributes his politics to the social teaching himself, saying so in interview after interview. He did not reach those convictions across open ground either; he was catechized in them in Worlock’s Liverpool, by priests and an archbishop who practiced the social teaching in public.

The decisive evidence is the shape of his dissent. A politician drawn only by Labour loyalty and humane instinct would track the party’s consensus across the board, and Burnham does not. He holds to the social teaching, solidarity and the option for the poor, and lets go of the Church’s defense of life at the edges, most visibly on assisted dying. That split is the signature of a Catholic formation carried into politics and then halved, and a purely secular social democracy would have no reason to divide there.

The Politics of Catholicism in the U.K. versus the United States.

The contrast with the United States sharpens what Burnham represents. American politics keeps God in plain view: presidents close their speeches with a blessing, and a candidate’s faith is an asset to be shown. British politics treats belief as a private affair best kept off the podium, a reticence Alastair Campbell fixed in the line that Downing Street does not “do God.” A politician who credits Catholic Social Teaching for his convictions cuts against that habit.

The two Catholic populations sit in different places. American Catholics began as a despised immigrant minority, carried John Kennedy past a wall of suspicion in 1960, and have since spread across the class structure and split their votes, white Catholics leaning Republican and Hispanic Catholics leaning Democratic. British Catholicism stayed closer to its origins, an Irish-descended working-class faith concentrated in the industrial cities and bound, for most of a century, to Labour. Burnham is its older type, the Catholic of the docks and the council estate, a figure nearly gone from American politics.

The bishops play different parts. The American hierarchy is a public actor in the culture wars, with abortion elevated as what its voting guidance calls the preeminent priority, and in 2021 it debated whether to deny communion to Joe Biden over his record. The conference holds a range of views, with its president, Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, opposed to the death penalty and its vice president, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, a defender of migrants. Its public weight still settles on the life questions.

The bishops of England and Wales keep a quieter, pastoral profile, set on poverty, immigration, and opposition to assisted dying. Archbishop Richard Moth of Westminster leads them now, with Liverpool’s Archbishop John Sherrington chairing their social-justice work. They favor pastoral letters and private counsel over public confrontation.

A Catholic prime minister who parted with the Church on abortion or assisted dying would still be considered Catholic by the hierachy. No conference of British bishops would form to debate his fitness for communion.

Both anti-Catholic prejuidice and tension with the Church’s teaching on the sanctinity of unborn life remain.

That long history of legal exclusion has left one clause still standing, and it would bind a prime minister Burnham in office. Section 18 of the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, the same Emancipation Act that let Catholics sit in Parliament, makes it unlawful for a Catholic to advise the Crown, directly or indirectly, on appointments to any office in the Church of England or the Church of Scotland. By long convention the prime minister advises the monarch on bishops and archbishops. A Catholic prime minister would be forbidden by statute from that part of his own office, on pain, in the words of the Act, of being disabled for ever from holding office under the Crown. The same bar falls on Jews under an Act of 1858, and on no one else.

The practical bite is light. The prime minister’s role in these appointments has never been fixed in law, so a Catholic in the post can pass the duty to another minister, and since 2007 the Crown forwards a single name for approval, with no choice left to make.

What remains is symbolic. The clause that would constrain a prime minister Burnham sits inside the very Act that opened Parliament to his Church, carried in 1829 by the Irish-born Duke of Wellington under pressure from Catholic Ireland. Emancipation and exclusion were written into the same law. The residue is still being cleared: in 2025 the government moved to repeal a neighboring clause so a Catholic could represent the Crown at the Church of Scotland’s general assembly.

Should Burnham reach Downing Street, Britain would gain a prime minister fluent in the language of the common good, able to make the dignity of the poor a governing priority in a way no recent occupant has tried. It would also gain, on the questions of life and death, a Catholic leader standing where Joe Biden stood, in tension with crucial aspects of the teaching authority of his own Church.

Judas does not argue, contradict, or deny. He does not stand at the paschal supper and lay out a case against the teacher from Nazareth. He waits, he slips away, and when he comes back he arrives with a greeting and a kiss. The gesture by which a disciple honors his teacher becomes the gesture by which the teacher is handed to the men with torches. Luke gives Christ one question for the moment, and it is still the most exact description ever written of a certain kind of treachery: Judas, do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?

A betrayal that announces itself is easy to see. A betrayal that comes wrapped in the pretense of love does its work before anyone notices it has begun. The part of the Catholic Right that presents itself as loyal to the pope -- its bishops, journals, and officeholders, not the openly schismatic fringe -- has perfected that second kind against the social doctrine of the two most recent popes, and it has perfected it precisely because the first kind is closed to it. To say openly that Leo is wrong about migrants, or about the men killed on the water, or about the poor, is to break with the pope, and these are people who cannot afford to be seen breaking with the pope. So they keep the kiss. They affirm the doctrine and empty it in the same motion, and the affirmation is the thing that does the emptying.

This gesture is old. The Church herself identified it, anatomized it, and condemned it, across four traditions she taught and carried for centuries. What follows is that gesture in our own moment -- but first, what it is, and where it came from, because the Catholic Right did not invent it and the Church already has it on record as a kind of lie.

The kiss keeps fidelity’s form and empties its substance.

Open disagreement is honest. A man who says the pope has erred on immigration has staked a claim in daylight, and he can be answered. He has paid the doctrine the compliment of taking it seriously enough to resist.

The kiss does something else. It keeps the whole outward form of fidelity and removes the substance from inside it. This matters most for those who owe the most. Paragraph 892 of the Catechism binds the faithful to adhere “with religious assent” to the ordinary teaching of the pope on faith and morals, and binds bishops above all, who hold the office of teaching in communion with him. The kiss is the performance of that assent with the assent taken out -- the bishop who reveres the Holy Father and routes the Holy Father’s words into a place where they govern nothing, the journal that praises the encyclical and disappears its argument, the layman who loves the pope and votes as though the pope had never spoken. The doctrine is affirmed, and in the same breath it is moved somewhere it can no longer touch a vote, a policy, or a conscience.

This is what I mean by pretense, and the word has to be exact, because it is not a charge about anyone’s heart, which no one can read. Pretense is a feature of the performance, and a performance is public. The gap between what the gesture presents itself as -- fidelity, reverence, teaching -- and what the gesture actually does is visible on the page, in the man’s own sentences. To call out the pretense is to describe the act; it makes no claim on the soul behind it.

A man can give this kiss in complete sincerity. He can believe every word of his reverence for the pope and still perform the emptying, because the emptying lives in the structure of what he says and does, wholly apart from whatever he feels while saying it. That is the most unsettling form of the gesture, and it is the form this essay mostly describes. The charge is never that these men are lying about their love for the Holy Father. The charge is that the love, however real, has been arranged to cost the pope’s teaching everything and the one who professes it nothing.

There is one test that holds throughout, and it asks nothing about interior states. Honest disagreement costs something. It concedes weight to the other side, it looks for the hard cases, it can point to the policy it would oppose if the policy went too far. The kiss costs nothing. The man who gives it keeps his assent and keeps his politics, and the two never collide, because the assent was shaped from the start to prevent the collision. A gesture that can be performed a dozen ways and comes out weightless every time was built to come out weightless.

The Church condemned this gesture long ago.

The men who give the kiss did not invent it. The Church anatomized it long before them, in four of her own vocabularies, and condemned it in most of them. That is the irony to carry into everything that follows: the manual now turned against the pope was written in the Church’s own schools.

The theology. The Devil is rarely an open adversary. He is the father of lies, and his trade is counterfeit. Paul gives the warning its lasting form -- the Devil disguises himself as an angel of light, so that what is evil arrives wearing the face of the good. The diabolic, in this account, is the imitation of fidelity. It never denies the good aloud; it produces a convincing likeness of the good and hollows it. Judas is that structure in a single gesture. He does not denounce. He comes as a disciple, gives the sign of love, and the sign of love delivers the body to the torches.

The rhetoric. The classical tradition the Church carried in the trivium catalogued the gesture as a set of figures, taught so that Catholics could practice honest persuasion and recognize its corruption. Concessio is the grant that defangs -- you concede your opponent’s point precisely so it can do no further harm. Captatio benevolentiae is the securing of goodwill at the opening of a speech, and turned cynical it becomes the profession of love for the poor, or of devotion to the magisterium, offered in order to be spent. Paralipsis is the art of saying a thing while claiming not to say it. Each figure is neutral in itself. Each becomes a weapon the moment a speaker uses the form of candor to do the work of deceit.

The casuistry. The moral theologians gave the gesture its most careful anatomy, and then the Church condemned it. The doctrine is restrictio mentis, mental reservation: affirming something in words while silently withholding the qualification that would make the words false, so that what the speaker says and what the speaker means come apart. The canonist Martín de Azpilcueta, called Navarrus, drew the line that mattered in the sixteenth century -- between a broad reservation, where the hearer might infer the missing qualification from the circumstances, and a strict reservation, where the qualification lives only in the speaker’s mind and the hearer has no way to reach it. The broad kind some allowed in narrow straits, to guard a secret under unjust interrogation or turn a murderer from the door. The strict kind was the scandal, because it is a lie wearing the grammar of truth. Blaise Pascal held the casuists up to the light in the Provincial Letters of 1656 and 1657 until educated Europe was laughing at them, and a generation later the magisterium acted. On the second of March, 1679, in the decree Sanctissimus Dominus, Pope Innocent XI condemned sixty-five laxist propositions of the casuists as “scandalous and pernicious in practice” and forbade them under pain of excommunication. Among the propositions he struck down were the ones that licensed a man to swear a falsehood while reserving the truth in his heart. The thing this essay describes already carries a papal condemnation, three and a half centuries old.

The stage. The English had their own word for the strict reservation -- equivocation -- and a famous case to hang it on. When the Jesuit Henry Garnet was tried in 1606 for his foreknowledge of the Gunpowder Plot, his defense leaned on a manuscript treatise on equivocation found among the conspirators’ papers, and the word entered the language as a name for sworn deceit. Shakespeare, writing Macbeth that same year, gave it to the drunken Porter, who imagines admitting to hell an equivocator who could swear in both the scales against either scale and still could not equivocate his way to heaven. The stage already knew a man could keep the form of truth and lie in the substance, and that the trick does not finally save him. Shakespeare drew the type again, and indelibly, in Iago, who never tells Othello a flat lie that could trap him. Iago professes loyalty, and the profession is the weapon; he hands the audience the key in six words -- I am not what I am -- then wears the mask of the honest counselor while he poisons everything he touches.

Four traditions, one gesture, one judgment running through all four. The man who uses the sign of fidelity to betray is a known type, with an old name in every vocabulary the Church owns and a conviction on record in most of them. What follows is that type at work now, in the words of men who would be wounded to be told what they are doing.

Word on Fire empties an encyclical in plain sight.

Start with the clearest case, because it can be watched frame by frame, and because the man at its center commands the largest Catholic media operation in the English-speaking world.

In May 2026 Pope Leo issued Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence, written for the hundred and thirty-fifth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. It is a hard document. It is a sustained indictment of concentrated private power -- of the systems that treat human beings as inputs to be optimized, and of the men and the corporations who grow rich by it. Leo took the tradition that began when Leo XIII faced the factory owners of the industrial age and turned it on the men who own the machines of ours. The encyclical indicts the powerful and judges them.

A few days, Word on Fire -- Bishop Robert Barron’s media apparatus -- published its account of the encyclical, written by its editor-in-chief, Tod Worner. The account opened by telling readers that the encyclical’s “foremost priority” is to remind us we are “beloved children of God.”

Hold those two things side by side, because that is where the kiss happens. Leo wrote an indictment of the men who treat persons as inputs. Word on Fire told the faithful that the encyclical’s first concern is a reminder that God loves them. The reminder is true, and it is also a substitution. Between the document Leo wrote and the gloss Word on Fire published, one specific thing disappeared -- the indictment, the charge against the powerful, the judgment on the systems -- and what replaced it was a consolation that asks nothing of anyone and threatens no one. No teaching is denied. The encyclical is praised, recommended, received with every mark of reverence, and emptied, its edge folded back into a sentiment that the most ruthless data baron in the world could read over breakfast without discomfort.

Here is the gesture in its purest form, performed not in passing but in print, over a byline and a date, by the institution that forms more American Catholics than any chancery. And the apparatus is the point. When a single bishop relocates a teaching, that is one man’s habit of mind. When Word on Fire does it -- through videos watched in the millions, study programs, a publishing house, a podcast network -- it becomes a curriculum, a way of receiving the pope that a generation absorbs from a teacher it trusts. The same hand that disappears the encyclical disappears the migrant. It is one method, and Word on Fire is its house.

The same gesture recurs across the issues, and it cools as it goes.

Once you can see the gesture, you find it everywhere the pope and the American regime collide, and you find that it has a temperature. It runs hottest where Leo has spoken most plainly and the administration has acted most harshly, because that is where the pressure to honor the pope while voiding him is greatest. It cools as the teaching grows easier to ignore, until at the far end it thins past argument altogether and runs into plain silence. Follow it down.

The kiss runs hottest on the migrant.

Here the doctrine is unmistakable, which is why the firewall around it is the most elaborately built.

Dilexi Te, the apostolic exhortation Francis began and Leo completed and signed on the feast of Saint Francis in October 2025, runs migration through the whole history of salvation -- Abraham, Moses, the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt, Christ coming to his own and finding no welcome -- and then states the consequence in a line no firewall can hold back: in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community. The spoken Leo is plainer still. Receiving letters from border families in October 2025, he called what is happening an injustice, in the present tense, and told Bishop Seitz of El Paso that the Church cannot be silent. At Castel Gandolfo he granted everything a restrictionist could ask -- no nation is obliged to open borders, every nation may decide who enters -- and then called the treatment of people who have lived good lives for twenty years “extremely disrespectful.” He has said a man who opposes abortion while accepting the “inhuman treatment of immigrants“ may not be pro-life at all. This is the teaching the Catholic Right must revere and cannot obey, and here is how it manages both at once.

Bishop Barron gives the cleanest version, stated almost as a principle. The pope’s task, he explained, is to “move prudential judgment in the right direction“; the president’s task is to make the prudential judgments themselves. The Church supplies a framework; the application belongs to the officeholder; and so the pope is loved in full and fenced out of every actual raid and deportation at once. Watch where the firewall goes up and where it does not. No one on the Catholic Right says the Church gives the framework on abortion while the legislature makes the prudential judgment. The partition is built only around the doctrines that need neutralizing. And it tilts in only one direction: after an ICE agent killed a woman in Minneapolis early in 2026, Barron asked the administration to confine itself to serious criminals and asked the protesters to stop interfering with the agents -- a gentle suggestion to the government, a firm rebuke to its critics. The love for the pope is real. The pope’s words reach nothing.

First Things supplies the literary version, concessio practiced by writers who know the figure. Kelsey Reinhardt, president of CatholicVote, answered the bishops’ November 2025 pastoral message by granting it everything -- anyone who has met immigrants in a parish, she wrote, knows the truth of what the bishops said -- and then turning on a single sentence: pastoral accompaniment is necessary, but it “does not encompass the entirety of the Church’s moral teaching.” From there the nation’s responsibility to regulate its borders rises until it fills the frame, and the welcome that opened the essay is balanced into stillness. The grant was real, and the grant was the burial.

The same journal, answering Cardinal McElroy -- who had called indiscriminate mass deportation “incompatible with Catholic doctrine” while affirming the nation’s right to control its borders -- supplied restrictio mentis in its civic form. The writer conceded the principle at full strength: a campaign that used the National Guard to round up eleven million people, built detention camps, and broke up families “could hardly fail to be cruel and inhumane.” Then came the reservation, held quietly in the heart while the words affirmed the cruelty: more sober voices in the administration, men like the border czar Tom Homan, would see to it that none of that came to pass. The verdict was handed to a prediction. The prediction has since been falsified -- the protection of sensitive locations rescinded so agents could enter churches, a federal judge finding detainees held in squalor and pressed to sign their own deportations, a citizen shot dead in a Minneapolis street -- and the verdict has not been revisited. A conscience that conceded “this would be cruel” and then watched it happen without moving was never conditional. The condition was a door painted on a wall.

Vice President JD Vance attempted the most ambitious version, because he did not work around the doctrine -- he tried to claim it. Defending the deportation program, he reached into the tradition for ordo amoris, the order of charity, and gave it a nationalist shape: a man loves his family first, then his neighbor, then his community, then his fellow citizens, and only then the rest of the world. The aim was to baptize America-first restriction as a Christian duty the Church had taught all along. It drew the most direct answer on this whole list. In a letter to the U.S. bishops in February 2025, Pope Francis went straight at it without identifying the man: Christian love, he wrote, is not “a concentric expansion of interests“ widening slowly from the self outward, but the love of the Good Samaritan, a fraternity open to all without exception. The magisterium examined the warrant Vance had offered and ruled it a distortion of the very tradition he invoked. He reached for the tradition, and the tradition was taken out of his hands.

The Napa Institute supplies the version that works by ranking alone. Abortion is the preeminent issue; one party is wrong on it; therefore every other doctrine, immigration among them, can always be outweighed. Tim Busch, the institute’s co-founder, has called the second Trump administration the most Christian he has ever seen, the whole package endorsed and the cost to the Church’s social teaching absorbed as the price of the bargain. The honest complication, which sharpens the point rather than blunting it, is that even Napa has given its stage to Catholics who argued from the catechism against the administration’s immigration policy. The line between honest prudential disagreement and the kiss runs through these institutions, not around them, which is the reason the gesture has to be judged as an act and left there.

And the last refuge fails too. The Catholic Right’s final move is always the particular pope -- Francis, they told each other, was the Argentine with his Global South sympathies, and the next conclave would settle him. The next conclave gave them an American from Chicago who had spent his life as a missionary in Peru, and in his first months he took up the migrant doctrine Francis had begun, finished it, and signed it into Dilexi Te. The teaching they were waiting out received a fresh signature and an American voice. It cannot be quarantined as one pope’s temperament when two popes carried it in one hand, in one document. A man cannot be the champion of continuity against the cafeteria left and then treat the most continuous strand of recent social doctrine as a disposable opinion. To try is to give the Judas kiss to the principle of continuity itself.

The kiss cools on the men killed at sea.

Since September 2025 the United States has been destroying small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific that the administration alleges, with almost no evidence, to be carrying drugs. By the middle of 2026 these strikes had killed more than two hundred people -- men incinerated on the water without charge, without trial, without proof, on the strength of an accusation no court ever tested. In at least one case the military returned to kill the survivors clinging to the wreckage of a boat already destroyed. United Nations human rights experts and Human Rights Watch have called the campaign what it plainly is, extrajudicial killing, and within the Church Archbishop Timothy Broglio, head of the military archdiocese and then president of the U.S. bishops, called it “illegal and immoral“ to kill men who pose no immediate threat.

Here the doctrine at stake is the oldest the Church holds -- the fifth commandment, the dignity of the person made in God’s image -- and here the Catholic Right mostly does not even trouble to build a firewall. It affirms human dignity and due process in the abstract, in the safety of principle, while the silent reservation does the work: these men, surely, the traffickers, fall outside the principle. The administration’s Catholic defenders call the strikes lawful and necessary. The administration’s Catholic admirers say nothing at all. Two hundred men are killed without trial, and the voices most insistent on the dignity of the unborn fall silent on the dignity of the man killed without trial.

The kiss goes colder still on the condemned.

In 2018 Pope Francis revised the Catechism to teach that the death penalty is “inadmissible,” an attack on the inviolable dignity of the person, and committed the Church to its abolition. The revision is magisterial teaching, set into the Catechism itself. The Catholic Right met it with the firewall in doctrinal form. The philosopher Edward Feser, whose book-length defense of capital punishment had appeared the year before, argued that the legitimacy of the death penalty is something the Church has taught for two millennia and cannot now reverse, so that Francis’s revision must be read as a prudential judgment binding no one, or else as simple error. The move is the firewall exactly: grant the pope his authority, relocate his teaching to the one category where authority does not bind, and walk away having lost nothing. The Catechism is revered and disregarded in the same breath. What the Catholic Right will not do is the thing the doctrine asks, which is to stop killing.

At the far end the method runs out. On the care of creation the Catholic Right offers neither the firewall nor the reframing nor even a dismissal -- it offers silence. Laudato Si’ is a decade old and Laudate Deum nearly three, and most of the movement never brings them to its lips, while the administration it supports leaves the Paris accord again and opens new ground to drilling. Silence is where this charge stops, because where there is no profession there is no kiss. The teaching is left lying in the dust, never picked up to be hollowed at all. That failure is closer to forgetting than to betrayal, and the difference is worth keeping -- a man cannot give the Judas kiss to a teaching he never lifts to his mouth. He can only walk past it, and on the wounded creation the Catholic Right has largely walked past.

The absence of cost gives the kiss away.

Return to the test, because it is the one that does not require reading a heart. Ask of any position one thing: whether it ever costs the man who holds it anything -- whether there is a raid, a strike, an execution, actually carried out, that triggers the cruelty he conceded in principle. Where the answer is yes, you have found a brother you disagree with, and the disagreement is the ordinary work of prudence, which the Church not only permits but expects. Where the answer is structurally always no -- where every concession is real and every concession is inert, where the door is always painted on the wall -- you have found the kiss.

The legitimate ground is real, and it has to be granted plainly, or the charge becomes its own kind of bad faith. The Catechism holds the welcome of the stranger and the nation’s right to regulate its borders in genuine tension. A state may use force against real and imminent threats. Prudence governs how a teaching meets a circumstance, and Catholics of good will divide on the how. Leo stands on that ground himself. Not every restriction is a kiss. The man who says the border must be ordered and then opposes the raid on the parish and the family taken at dawn is living inside the tension the Church describes. The kiss is the other thing -- the affirmation engineered so that no raid, no strike, no execution ever cashes the principle out.

Consider Paul Hunker. For two decades he was the chief counsel for ICE in Dallas, the lawyer who built the government’s deportation cases, and he is a member of Opus Dei who came to practice his faith through its founder’s teaching on holiness in ordinary work. No one will mistake him for a progressive. He faulted the Biden administration too, calling its hundred-day pause on deportations imprudent, and he tells frightened parishioners that the odds of being seized on the way to Mass are smaller than their fear. He grants what the Church grants: a nation may enforce its laws.

Now run him through the test. Hunker opposes this administration’s enforcement, and he identifies what he opposes -- expedited removal that strips due process, a directive that could leave people held indefinitely without a bond hearing, a promised deportation campaign he calls, plainly, pushing the envelope. Then he does the costly thing. He left the government and now stands in court on the other side, defending the people he once moved to remove. His concession to the state is real, and it cashes out in policies he will fight and a price he pays for fighting them. The test acquits him. He is a conservative Catholic living inside the tension the Church describes, and the acquittal proves the test can clear a man. It weighs what a position does and stays indifferent to which side the position comes from.

The Catholic Right has not left the Church or denied her doctrine. It has learned to give the kiss, and to give it across the entire front where the Gospel and the regime collide -- to the migrant, to the condemned, to the men on the water, and through all of them to the Lord who said that what is done to the least is done to him. The task for the rest of us is the one Christ modeled in the garden: to call the gesture what it is, out loud, in the moment it is given, without presuming to read the heart. Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss? The question lays an act before a man and asks him to see it for what it is. It accuses no soul. And the act, once described, cannot go on pretending to be devotion.