Pope Leo is quietly reviving America’s Catholic left |
Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass at St. Peter's Basilica on February 2, 2026, in Vatican City. | Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media via Getty Images
A quiet cold war is happening across America — one that many Americans might not be aware of if they’re not tuned into the changes underway in America’s Christian communities.
On one side is the religious right’s use of scripture and faith to justify and defend President Donald Trump’s agenda — and growing Christian nationalist sentiment. On the other side is the reshaping of the American Catholic Church, under Pope Leo XIV.
Key takeaways
Pope Leo XIV has changed the way the US Catholic Church operates, appointing moderate bishops and urging them to speak up about immigration. Christopher Hale, author of an influential newsletter on Pope Leo, believes it’s part of the pontiff’s effort to moderate the church and act as a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism in the Trump 2.0 era. At the same time, that shift has revitalized the Catholic left in America.Through new appointments, orders to his bishops to speak out about immigration, and public comments critiquing the direction of the US under Trump, the pope is setting up his bishops and priests to be evangelizers, to be vocal about human dignity, and to be a counterweight to the authoritarian and nationalist tendencies of the right.
While the church has long played a role in US politics, Pope Leo’s interventions, according to Christopher Hale, a Catholic writer and political activist who writes the Letters from Leo Substack, represent something new.
In the absence of a well-organized “religious left” in America, he told me, Leo’s moves to reform and shake up the American Catholic Church are reinvigorating a “Catholic left” to engage in the moral struggles of the 2020s, specifically around immigration and creeping authoritarianism.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the first thing to understand about how Pope Leo is changing the American Catholic Church?
Pope Leo is first and foremost a priest and a bishop. He was Pope Francis’s go-to man for appointing bishops for two years, and his education was on the theology and practice of being a bishop, so it’s very crucial to his worldview. He has very strong opinions about what it takes to succeed in these roles, but the most important thing he has emphasized is closeness to the people.
That’s a contrast to the really bad habit in Catholicism to take........