Pope Leo and President Trump are on a collision course |
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, and U.S. President Donald Trump.REUTERS/AP PHOTO
Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow in Contemporary Catholic Thought at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, and the author of the forthcoming book A Synod Diary: Sixty Days that Shook the Church.
With Pope Leo XIV and U.S. President Donald Trump on a potential collision course, the future promises more than a modicum of upheaval.
There has never before been an American pontiff and there has never been an American president so shamelessly totalitarian in instinct and behaviour.
The Vatican has been here before. In 1925, Georgy Chicherin, the Soviet foreign minister, told the Jesuit Michel d’Herbigny that “we Communists feel pretty sure we can triumph over London capitalism, but Rome will prove a harder nut to crack.” While years later the Russian leader Joseph Stalin mocked the Vatican’s might (“How many divisions does the Pope have?” he was reputed to have asked) Cicherin knew better. “Without Rome religion would die but Rome sends out for service of her religion propagandists of every kind. They are more effective than guns or armies.”
Rome outlasted Soviet Moscow and Nazi Berlin, two implacable foes that sought its extirpation, and it has weathered other hostile powers since, but the Trump presidency has posed fresh challenges for Pope Leo precisely because he is an American.
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