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    Maga Catholics are on a collision course with Leo XIV. They have good reason to fear him | Julian Coman

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    In the outer reaches of the Magasphere, it would be fair to say the advent of the first pope from the US has not been greeted with unbridled enthusiasm. Take Laura Loomer, the thirtysomething influencer and conspiracy theorist, whose verdict on Leo XIV was as instant as it was theologically uninformed: “Anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.” Also doing the rounds on X was a short summary of Leo’s supposed transgressions before ascending to St Peter’s chair: “Trashed Trump, trashed Vance, trashed border enforcement, endorsed DREAMer-style illegal immigration, repeatedly praised and honored George Floyd, and endorsed a Democrat senator’s call for more gun control.”So far, so tedious. The comic-book casting of the new pope as a globalist villain in the US culture wars is traceable back to his predecessor’s impact on liberal opinion a decade ago. Pope Francis’s sometimes lonely championing of progressive causes, such as the rights of migrants, gave him a kind of liberal celebrity and led Time magazine to name him “person of the year” in 2013. Pope Leo, born in Chicago, has been pre-emptively caricatured by much of the Maga right as a continuity pontiff who will, in effect, front up the religious wing of the Democratic party.Leaving the simplistic conflation of religious perspective and political positioning aside, the truth is far more interesting than that. It may also be more challenging for Catholic Maga luminaries such as the vice-president, JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump’s sometime adviser Steve Bannon if they are serious about their faith.Bannon and Vance – a Catholic convert – are representatives of a traditionalist movement in the church, which sought to undermine Francis’s papacy at every turn and has become a kind of theological vanguard for the “America first” era. In January, Vance notoriously invoked St Augustine to justify the Trump administration’s decision to cut international aid and impose a brutal immigration crackdown. One of Francis’s last acts was to refute the vice-president’s reduction of the Augustinian concept of neighbourly love to a version of “charity begins at home” (though delivering a papal rebuke was not enough to spare him from a visit from Vance the day before he died).But it would be too easy (and too reminiscent of their own performatively aggressive approach) to simply dismiss the Maga Catholics as theologically beyond the pale. Many Catholics might, for example, legitimately sympathise with Bannon’s analysis of the neglect of working-class interests in 21st-century western liberal democracies. The deepening inequality and corrosive individualism of our times is seriously at odds with Catholic social teaching, which has historically promoted the dignity of labour, social solidarity and a just wage.The problem is that, in the absence of a leftwing economic populism to challenge the injustices of the globalised era, a rightwing version has filled the gap in the US and beyond. Its form of solidarity is nationalistic and insular, its cultural outlook is xenophobic and its political style is authoritarian and deliberately confrontational. The Maga critique of “globalism” is not limited to the neoliberal economic world order, also condemned by the last three popes; it extends to a repudiation of the foundational Catholic commitment to universality, expressed through compassion for the stranger and a sense of the world as a shared common home.Enter Pope Leo. The most geographically diverse conclave in church history was surely aware that in choosing an American to succeed Francis, it was setting up a potential showdown between the Vatican and Trumpian nationalism. The new pope’s choice of name is a sign that he recognises the scale and the novelty of the challenge that the rightwing populist turn represents.The last Leo, a patrician Italian elected to the papacy in 1878, made it his mission to confront the ruthless laissez-faire economics unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the emerging Marxist response to its cruelties. In Rerum Novarum, his groundbreaking 1891 papal encyclical, Leo XIII laid out swingeing criticisms of the greed that placed profit before people and allowed extreme divides in wealth to undermine the common good. At the same time, in terms that were to prove tragically prescient, he identified in early communist movements a dangerous idolatry of the state and a lack of respect for individual autonomy and rights.Last weekend, before his first mass in St Peter’s Square, Leo XIV explicitly set himself the task of following in his 19th-century predecessor’s footsteps. That would mean, he told a Rome conference, addressing “the dramatic nature of our own age, marked by wars, climate change, growing inequalities, forced and contested migration, stigmatised poverty, disruptive technological innovations, job insecurity and precarious labour rights”.The daunting length of that list, and the interlocking, global nature of its crises, should be viewed as an early critique of the Maga worldview. In Leo XIII’s day, the burgeoning Marxist movement incubated a totalitarian strain that would go viral in the 20th century. The success of Trumpian nationalism is also in part a response to the depredations of capitalism, this time in the context of globalisation. But its authoritarian evangelists have hijacked the working-class cause to inflict new injustices on migrant “invaders” and have lost sight of the need for global cooperation to prevent an environmental catastrophe that threatens the poor most of all. The strategy has proved electorally astute. But as Leo will surely make clear, it has nothing to do with Catholicism.In a column published at the weekend, the American Catholic commentator Sohrab Ahmari referenced a sermon by Leo from last year, in which the future pope acknowledged that the issue of migration “is a huge problem, and it’s a problem worldwide” that needed to be solved. This recognition, Ahmari suggested, could at least open up the possibility of fruitful future dialogue with the Maga Catholics in and around the White House.He failed, however, to quote the sermon’s next passage: “Every one of us, whether we were born in the United States of America or on the North Pole, we are all given the gift of being created in the image and likeness of God, and the day we forget that is the day we forget who we are.” Words for Vance and Rubio, who met Leo after Sunday’s inaugural mass in Rome, to ponder.

    Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor More

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      Episcopal church says it won’t help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status

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      The Episcopal church’s migration service is refusing a directive from the federal government to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status, citing the church’s longstanding “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”.Presiding bishop Sean Rowe announced the step on Monday, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC on a private charter plane and were greeted by a government delegation.Episcopal Migration Ministries instead will halt its decades-long partnership with the government, Rowe said.Donald Trump opened a fast-tracked refugee status to white South Africans, accusing their government of discrimination, even as his administration abruptly shut down the overall US refugee program. The South Africans jumped ahead of thousands of would-be refugees overseas who had been undergoing years of vetting and processing.Episcopal Migration Ministries has long resettled refugees under federal grants. Rowe said that about two weeks ago, the government contacted it and said it expected the ministry to resettle some of the South Africans under terms of its grant.“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step,” Rowe said. “Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the US federal government.”South Africa’s government has vehemently denied allegations of discriminatory treatment of its white minority residents.“It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” Rowe said. “I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country.”He also said many refugees, including Christians, are victims of religious persecution and are now denied entry.He said the church would find other ways to serve immigrants, such as those already in this country and those stranded overseas.The move marks the end of a ministry-government partnership that, for nearly four decades, has served nearly 110,000 refugees from countries, including Ukraine, Myanmar and Congo, Rowe said.It’s not the first high-profile friction between the Episcopal church and the Trump administration. Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington DC drew Trump’s anger in January at an inaugural prayer service in which she urged “mercy” on those fearing his actions, including migrants and LGBTQ+ children.The Anglican church of Southern Africa includes churches in South Africa and neighboring countries. It was a potent force in the campaign against apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s, an effort for which the late archbishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel peace prize in 1984.Another faith-based refugee agency, Church World Service, says it is open to serving the South African arrivals.“We are concerned that the U.S. Government has chosen to fast-track the admission of Afrikaners, while actively fighting court orders to provide life-saving resettlement to other refugee populations who are in desperate need of resettlement,” Rick Santos, CWS president and CEO, said in a statement.He added that the action proves the government knows how to screen and process refugees quickly.“Despite the Administration’s actions, CWS remains committed to serving all eligible refugee populations seeking safety in the United States, including Afrikaners who are eligible for services,” he said. “Our faith compels us to serve each person in our care with dignity and compassion.”The Episcopal ministry and CWS are among 10 national groups, most of them faith-based, that have partnered with the government for refugee resettlement. More

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      Quakers march 300 miles to protest Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      A group of Quakers were marching more than 300 miles from New York City to Washington DC to demonstrate against the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.The march extends a long tradition of Quaker activism. Historically, Quakers have been involved in peaceful protests to end wars and slavery, and support women’s voting rights in line with their commitment to justice and peace. Far more recently, Quakers sued the federal government earlier this year over immigration agents’ ability to make arrests at houses of worship.Organizers of the march say their protest seeks to show solidarity with migrants and other groups that are being targeted by Donald Trump’s second presidency.“It feels really daunting to be up against such critical and large and in some ways existential threats,” said Jess Hobbs Pifer, a 25-year-old Quaker and march organizer, who said she felt “a connection” to the faith’s long history of activism.“I just have to put one foot in front of the other to move towards something better, something more true to what Quakers before us saw for this country and what people saw for the American Experiment, the American dream,” she said.Their goal was to walk south from the Flushing Quaker Meeting House – across New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania – to the US Capitol to deliver a copy of the Flushing Remonstrance, a 17th-century document that called for religious freedom and opposed a ban on Quaker worship.Quakers say it remains relevant in 2025 as a reminder to “uphold the guiding principle that all are welcome”.“We really saw a common thread between the ways that the administration is sort of flying against the norms and ideals of constitutional law and equality before the law,” said Max Goodman, 28, a Quaker, who joined the march.“Even when they aren’t breaking rules explicitly, they’re really engaging in bad faith with the spirit of pluralism, tolerance and respect for human dignity that undergirds our founding documents as Americans and also shows up in this document that’s really important in New York Quaker history.”The Quakers, whose formal name is the Religious Society of Friends, originated in 17th-century England.The Christian group was founded by George Fox, an Englishman who objected to Anglican emphasis on ceremony. In the 1640s, he said he heard a voice that led him to develop a personal relationship with Christ, described as the Inner Light.Fox taught that the Inner Light emancipates a person from adherence to any creed, ecclesiastical authority or ritual forms.Brought to court for opposing the established church, Fox tangled with a judge who derided him as a “quaker” in reference to his agitation over religious matters.Following the faith’s core beliefs in nonviolence and justice, Quakers have demonstrated for the abolition of slavery, in favor of the suffrage movement, against both world wars, and the US role in the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, said Ross Brubeck, 38, one of the Quaker march organizers.They also joined protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and the Black Lives Matter protests after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.“Quakers have had a central role in opposition to repression within the United States since its founding,” said Brubeck, who was marching along a trail in New Jersey with companions waving an upside-down American flag, intended to serve as a signal of distress.One the most well-known Quakers was William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania following the faith’s emphasis on religious tolerance. The group became influential in cities like Philadelphia.But members of the group have also faced scorn for refusing to join wars due to their belief in pacifism and nonviolence. Some were persecuted and even killed for trying to spread their religious beliefs.Earlier this year, five Quaker congregations filed a lawsuit challenging a Trump administration move giving immigration agents more leeway to make arrests at houses of worship.Trump has insisted that immigrants are an existential threat to the US. Immigration into the US, both legal and illegal, surged during Joe Biden’s presidency, and Trump assailed that influx before winning November’s election.Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has launched a campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him.“Immigrants are the ones experiencing the most acute persecution in the United States,” Brubeck said. “The message to Trump is that the power is not his to make.” More

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      An American has become pope. Will he be the moral leader we desperately need? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      America is back, baby. Not only has the Gulf of Mexico been successfully Americanized, the Vatican is now officially US territory. OK, fine, not officially, but, on Thursday, the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost was announced as pope. The 69-year-old, who has taken the papal name Leo XIV, is the first clergyman from the United States to lead the Roman Catholic church.While Prevost was a frontrunner for the papacy, his victory seems to have taken many experts by surprise. There has long been resistance to an American pope for a number of reasons, including the fact that it might make it appear as if the Vatican is aligned with the world’s strongest economic and military power.“If the Catholic church were also run by an American, the global dominance of the US would be simply pervasive and overwhelming,” Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a watchdog group that tracks clergy child abuse cases in the Catholic church worldwide, told ABC News recently.I’ll tell you who doesn’t seem particularly overwhelmed by the first American pope: Donald Trump. The president has spent the last few days posting AI-generated pictures of himself as the pope and generally mocking the Catholic church. Still, Trump was on his best behaviour when the official announcement came through, and posted a fairly restrained message on Truth Social, congratulating the pope and saying it was a “Great Honor for our Country”.Just give it a few days, though, and I’m sure Trump will be on Fox News taking credit for the new pope and announcing that the Vatican is going to get rid of all their dusty old Bibles and replace them with the Trump God Bless the USA Bible. Only $99.99 for the platinum edition and a bargain $74.99 for the pink and gold edition!Vice-President JD Vance, one of the last people to see Pope Francis alive, also posted a diplomatic message of congratulations, saying he was “sure millions of American Catholics and other Christians will pray for [Pope Leo’s] successful work leading the Church”.I am not an American Catholic. Nor am I Protestant, Episcopalian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or anything else. I am an atheist, although not a terribly devout one. But I am certainly praying as hard as I can that Pope Leo will be the moral leader that the world so desperately needs at this moment.For most of my life I have not been particularly interested in who the pope is. And I have had very little faith that the Vatican, which covered up systemic sexual abuse, could ever be a real force for good. But – and I know I am not alone when I say this – the past 19 months has fundamentally changed how I see the world. I used to believe in things like international human rights law. I used to believe that while the arc of the moral universe may be extremely long, it bends toward justice. I used to believe that universities would stand up for free speech. And I used to believe that no matter how craven western world leaders might be, they wouldn’t go so far as to enable the livestreamed genocide unfolding in Gaza. That western leaders wouldn’t stand by and cheer as Israel, whose total blockade on Gaza has entered its third month, starves children to death.During a time when international law has been dealt a deadly blow, when might is right and decades of progress seem to be unravelling, the late Pope Francis made an impression on non-Catholics like me for his moral clarity towards many marginalized groups and his advocacy for peace everywhere from “martyred Ukraine” to Gaza. Of course, his legacy is not perfect: many abuse victims have questioned whether he went far enough in acknowledging children sexually abused by clergy. But Pope Francis undoubtedly fought for the most vulnerable in society.Pope Francis also understood what many newspaper editors and politicians don’t seem to be able to comprehend: that there is no “both-sidesing” atrocities. That there are times where you must take sides because, as Desmond Tutu said, “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”In 2023, for example, Pope Francis went on a historic trip to South Sudan and told churches in the region that they “cannot remain neutral” but must speak up against injustice and abuse of power.Pope Francis also visited the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2023, where he criticized the “poison of greed” driving conflict in the region. “Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hands off Africa. Stop choking Africa: it is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered,” Francis said.When it came to Gaza, Pope Francis spoke clearly and powerfully. He would call the only Roman Catholic church in Gaza almost nightly after this iteration of the conflict broke out. When so much of the world seems to have turned away from Gaza’s suffering, Pope Francis let anguished civilians know he cared. One of his last wishes was that his popemobile be turned into a mobile health clinic for children in the Gaza Strip.And Pope Francis was not shy about criticizing the US – consistently speaking up for immigrants and refugees. “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories,” he told the US Congress in September 2015.We do not yet know how Pope Leo will undertake his duties but he is widely considered a centrist who was aligned with Francis on a number of social issues. Notably, in February Leo tweeted an article that disagreed with Vance’s views on immigration, headlined “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others”. In April, he also retweeted commentary criticizing Trump deporting a US resident to El Salvador.Whether Pope Leo will remain outspoken, whether he will continue Francis’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, remains to be seen. But the world desperately needs strong moral leadership at the moment. May Leo be the light we need in the current darkness. And, for his own sake, may he stay away from Vance.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Unearthed comments from new pope alarm LGBTQ+ Catholics

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      After years of sympathetic and inclusive comments from Pope Francis, LGBTQ+ Catholics expressed concern on Thursday about hostile remarks made more than a decade ago by Father Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV, in which he condemned what he called the “homosexual lifestyle” and “the redefinition of marriage” as “at odds with the Gospel”.In a 2012 address to the world synod of bishops, the man who now leads the church said that “Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel – for example abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia”.In the remarks, of which he also read portions for a video produced by the Catholic News Service, a news agency owned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the cleric blamed mass media for fostering so much “sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyles choices” that “when people hear the Christian message it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel”.“Catholic pastors who preach against the legalization of abortion or the redefinition of marriage are portrayed as being ideologically driven, severe and uncaring,” Prevost added.He went on to complain that “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed in television programs and cinema today”.The video illustrated his criticism of the “homosexual lifestyle” and “same-sex partners and their adopted children” with clips from two US sitcoms featuring same-sex couples, The New Normal and Modern Family.The cleric also called for a “new evangelization to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality”.After some of the comments were reported by the New York Times, American LGBTQ+ Catholic groups expressed alarm but also cautious optimism that the papacy of Francis had moved the whole church forward.“We pray that in the 13 years that have passed, 12 of which were under the papacy of Pope Francis, that his heart and mind have developed more progressively on LGBTQ+ issues, and we will take a wait-and-see attitude to see if that has happened,” said Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based LGBTQ+ Catholic group, in a statement. “We pray that as our church transitions from 12 years of an historic papacy, Pope Leo XIV will continue the welcome and outreach to LGBTQ+ people which Pope Francis inaugurated.”DignityUSA, a group that represents LGBTQ+ Catholics, also expressed “concern” with the pope’s previous comments but wrote in an online post: “We note that this statement was made during the papacy of Benedict XVI, when doctrinal adherence appeared to be expected. In addition, the voices of LGBTQ+ people were rarely heard at that level of church leadership. We pray that Pope Leo XIV will demonstrate a willingness to listen and grow as he begins his new role as the leader of the global church.”Perhaps the best-known of the sympathetic statements made about LGBTQ+ Catholics by Pope Francis was a comment he made to reporters in 2013, when he was asked about his observation that there was a “gay lobby” inside the Vatican hierarchy.“I have yet to find someone who introduces himself at the Vatican with an identity card marked ‘gay’,” the pope joked. “But we must distinguish the fact that a person is gay from the fact of lobbying, because no lobbies are good.”“If a person is gay,” he added, “and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?”DeBernardo, the New Ways Ministry director, referenced those remarks on Thursday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The healing that began with ‘Who am I to judge?’ needs to continue and grow to ‘Who am I, if not a friend to LGBTQ+ people?’” DeBernardo said.“Pope Francis opened the door to a new approach to LGBTQ+ people; Pope Leo must now guide the church through that door,” he added. “Many Catholics, including bishops and other leaders, remain ignorant about the reality of LGBTQ+ lives, including the marginalization, discrimination, and violence that many still face, even in Catholic institutions. We hope that he will further educate himself by meeting with and listening to LGBTQ+ Catholics and their supporters.”Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, told the Washington Blade in a text message from St Peter’s Square shortly after Leo XIV’s election that the new pope “hasn’t said a lot since early 2010s” on the subject, adding “hope he has evolved”.Father James Martin, an American Jesuit and the founder of Outreach, an LGBTQ+ Catholic resource, sounded a note of optimism in a video message from Rome, calling the new pope a “down-to-earth, kind, modest” man and “a great choice”.In 2023, Martin was able to bless a same-sex couple for the first time, after Pope Francis said he would allow such blessings.In 2020, Pope Francis said that he supported civil-union laws for same-sex couples. “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it,” he said.“Pope Francis did more for LGBTQ people than all his predecessors combined,” Martin wrote last month. “He wrote letters of welcome to Outreach conferences for LGBTQ Catholics. He approved the publication of ‘Fiducia Supplicans, a Vatican document that permitted priests to bless same-sex marriages under certain circumstances – and weathered intense blowback from some parts of the church. And, perhaps most surprisingly and least well known, he met regularly with transgender Catholics and spoke to them with warmth and welcome.” More

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      US supreme court seems open to religious public charter schools

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      The US supreme court’s conservative majority seemed open to establishing the country’s first public religious charter school as they weighed a case Wednesday that could have significant ramifications on the separation of church and state.The Oklahoma state charter school board approved the application for St Isidore, a Catholic virtual charter school. The ACLU and other groups filed suit, as did Republican attorney general Gentner Drummond. The state supreme court sided with Drummond, ruling that the US and Oklahoma constitutions “prohibit the state from using public money for the establishment of a religious institution”.The case is part of a broader push to erode the separation of church and state, a concept established through the US constitution via the “free exercise” clause of the first amendment. Oklahoma is at the forefront of this debate.The eventual ruling is seen as a test of the role of religion in the government and in schools. It comes as school choice programs like vouchers that allow students to use public monies to attend private schools grow nationwide and amid a sustained campaign against public schools.Charter schools are taxpayer-funded and free for students, but operate independently and with more autonomy than traditional public schools. Drummond’s attorney warned the case could upend charter school systems throughout the states, said Gregory Garre, who is representing Drummond in the case. Some states may respond by ramping up religious charter schools and others could halt their charter programs to avoid approving religious schools, he said.“This is going to create uncertainty, confusion and disruption for potentially millions of school children and families across the country,” Garre told the high court.The school’s proponents argue the school is not a government entity, so the state is not endorsing or funding a single religion. They also contend that denying the school from becoming a public charter effectively discriminates against religious organizations and people of faith, and that blocking the school would deprive Oklahoma students of an educational option.Jim Campbell, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the state charter board, said there are hundreds of families signed up for the school already, despite it not being open. “They’re part of Oklahoma’s community too. They should not be treated as second class,” he said.The conservatives on the court asked questions along similar lines, contending that the school simply wanted to be treated as non-religious entities. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the school was asking not to be excluded on the basis of religion. He also questioned whether religious-affiliated programs for foster care or food banks could be negatively affected by a ruling against the charter school.“Our cases have made very clear, and I think those are some of the most important cases we’ve had, of saying you can’t treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second class in the United States,” he said on Wednesday. “And when you have a program that’s open to all comers, except religion … that seems like rank discrimination against religion.”Siding with the school would fit with recent court rulings that have eroded the separation between church and state. Rulings in 2022 determined that state governments were in some cases required to fund private religious education and that a Christian football coach at a public school could lead his athletes in prayer.The liberal justices asked how the school intended to include religious beliefs and practices in its curriculum and whether creating a religious charter school crossed the line into the state endorsing a religion.At one point, the liberal Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether other religious communities might teach different curriculum based on their faith, and a lawyer for St Isidore pushed back, saying these hypotheticals shouldn’t justify religious discrimination.“Religious communities are really different in this country, and are often extremely different from secular communities in terms of the education that they think is important for their young people and is critically important to their faith,” Kagan said.The Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, has supported St Isidore, calling the lawsuit “the biggest religious and education freedom case in our nation’s history”. Ryan Walters, the Republican superintendent of public schools in Oklahoma, has frequently spoken in favor of St Isidore and has claimed there should be no separation of church and state. He wrote in a Fox News op-ed this week that denying the school would be “religious bigotry”.“Instead of fighting against parents and telling them that government officials know what is best for their children, we should instead listen to them,” Walters wrote. “There is hope that the supreme court will give us this chance, a chance to take power away from government bureaucrats and give it back to the people.”The Trump administration supported St Isidore in an amicus brief and solicitor general D John Sauer argued in court on Wednesday that denying the school to be a public charter would violate the free exercise of religion.Justice Amy Coney Barrett has recused herself from the case, so it is possible the court could split evenly, which would keep the Oklahoma supreme court’s ruling in place and prevent the school from being a public charter. Barrett has not given a reason why she recused herself, but she is close friends with Nicole Stelle Garnett, who is a faculty fellow at the Notre Dame religious liberty clinic that has represented the school. Barrett also taught at Notre Dame’s law school before joining the court.A decision in the case is likely later this summer. More

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      ‘Maga Catholics’ are gaining ground in the US. Now their sight is set on the Vatican

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      Once the papal conclave starts, the cardinals choosing Pope Francis’s successor will be strictly shut off from the world until a new pope is named. But the coming days before the conclave begins on 7 May will see competing factions of Catholics, including many laypeople, campaigning in the Vatican and the US to influence the church’s future – none with more urgency than those discontented with Francis’s liberal reign.American Catholics will fight to play a central role. Soon after the news of Francis’s death reached faithful the world over, the American counter-revolution mobilized, Vatican watchers say. Red-eyes to Rome were booked. Long-distance phone calls were made. Various cardinals likely received sudden dinner invitations.No one involved calls it “lobbying” – that would be untoward, and it’s “subtler than what you see in DC”, Philip Lawler, a conservative Catholic writer and the author of a book critical of Francis, said. “But representatives of all points of view, from across the spectrum, will be doing their best to ensure that the cardinals understand their concerns.”“I’m going to Rome on Saturday, and I’m late to the game,” Francis X Maier, a Catholic writer and the former adviser to Archbishop Charles Chaput, said last week. “There are all sorts of people already meeting with bishops and cardinals and trying to create the environment that they want.”For conservative, traditionalist or self-described “orthodox” Catholics, fresh from 12 uneasy years under Francis, this interregnum will be the last chance in a long time to try to reset a church that they believe has drifted too far left. To some, that means pushing for a church that clearly affirms polarizing but longtime Catholic teachings on sexuality, marriage and abortion. Others, many of them associated with the priorities of Donald Trump and his supporters, would go further, and press for a church that is explicitly, politically rightwing – or at least less hostile to the Maga movement’s stances on immigration, social welfare and the environment.Steve Bannon, perhaps the most public and inflammatory voice of rightwing Catholic discontent, has said he intends to organize a “show of force of traditionalists” with confrontational “wall-to-wall” media coverage. Most politicking, however, will take the form of quieter wheeling and dealing.Conservative Catholics have their papal draft picks – Raymond Burke, Gerhard Müller, Péter Erdő and Robert Sarah are often mentioned – though observers are skeptical that the next pope will break Francis’s mold, in part because he appointed most of the cardinals who will choose his successor. Yet conservative Catholic Americans are unusually influential and wealthy, and the Vatican needs “American money and American influence”, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of religious studies at Villanova University.And while the conservative faction is a minority, it “shouldn’t be dismissed. For them, this conclave is just one battle in a war that lasts decades.”“Do I have time to talk to the Guardian about the fake pope?” Steve Bannon asked when I reached out for an interview. “Of course I do. Always.”For years, Bannon – Trump’s former adviser and a self-described traditionalist Catholic, though he has been divorced three times – has used his massively popular political podcast, War Room, to wage blistering attacks on the Francis pontificate. He has charged the pope with being a Marxist subversive, a globalist anti-American, even illegitimate.View image in fullscreenMuch of conservatives’ anger centers on Francis’s record of pronouncements that seemed to relax or render ambiguous Catholic social doctrines. In 2013, when a reporter asked Francis if there were gay men in the Vatican, he famously remarked: “Who am I to judge?”“‘Who am I to judge?’” Bannon repeated, incredulous. “Yo, dude, you’re the pope. That’s kind of the gig. You’re supposed to be judgmental. This ‘empathy’ is all phony. He brought the therapeutic 20th century into the church. The church is not supposed to be therapeutic.”Devout Catholics have historically been difficult to place in the American political binary. They were often anti-abortion but in favor of immigration and a social safety net. “I believe all the church teaches,” Leah Libresco Sargeant, the author of two books on her Catholic faith, told me. “I try to live up to it. And obviously that makes me a poor fit for either political party.”Still, working-class Catholics were a traditional base of 20th-century Democratic party support, and activist Catholic clergy marched in protests for Black civil rights and against the Vietnam war. Yet the legalization of abortion drove some prominent Catholics who had previously supported leftwing causes to the conservative movement.While the stereotypical Christian conservative of popular imagination may be a Bible-thumping southern Protestant, Catholics have for years dominated the intellectual leadership of the American right. Five of the US supreme court’s six right-leaning justices are Catholic, despite the fact that Catholics account for only about a fifth of the US population. JD Vance – the vice-president who earlier this year sparked a feud of sorts with the Vatican about immigration and compassion and also met briefly with Francis shortly before his death – converted to Catholicism in 2019.Although borderline sacrilege by normal Catholic standards, Bannon’s fulminations against Francis have found a ready audience among a demographic that the New York Post has coined “Maga Catholics”: Catholic Americans who are militantly conservative, both theologically and politically, and see no tension.Francis did a favor to a resurgent Catholic right, Bannon argues: “His reign of terror has been nothing short of disastrous. And that’s why you’re having a massive reaction, particularly in North America, where he rejuvenated the traditional church here.”View image in fullscreenGregory A Smith, who studies religious demography at Pew Research Center, noted that polling shows that most American Catholics – including most Catholic Republicans – viewed Pope Francis favorably throughout his pontificate. Yet starting around 2018, an ideological gap began to open, with Catholic Republicans reporting less favorable views of Francis than Catholic Democrats.Pointedly referring to Francis mostly by his secular, pre-papal surname, Bergoglio, Bannon outlined numerous grievances.Among his arguments: that the pope was hostile to the old-fashioned Latin mass liturgy beloved by some American Catholics, did not hold alleged abusers in the clergy fully accountable, muddled longstanding doctrines about sexuality and marriage, undermined US sovereignty by celebrating mass immigration, and betrayed persecuted Christians abroad by allowing the Chinese communist government control over the church there.“He’ll burn in hell just for that,” Bannon said of the agreement with China. He admitted that his stance was probably not representative of the average person in the pew.Yet many of these complaints, in more respectful form, are common to the orthodox Catholics who are the church’s most engaged, influential and financially generous constituency.While disagreeing with some of the conservative characterizations of the state of the church, Faggioli said that American detractors of Pope Francis have momentum, to some extent, on their side. American priests starting their vocations today are on average more conservative, not less, than their older peers, he noted.Latin masses are popular where they are offered. And the past couple years have seen a surprise influx of young adults converting or reverting to Catholicism, many of whom seem to want “smells and bells” and moral certitude, rather than the casual Catholicism they associate with their parents’ generation, or the rainbow flag-adorned progressivism of many mainline Protestant churches.“The living and vibrant parts of the US church are not those who were most enthusiastic about the Francis pontificate, but those who have embraced the ‘all-in’ Catholicism of John Paul II and Benedict XVI,” George Weigel, a neoconservative Catholic writer, told me by email as he traveled to Rome. “In the main,” he argued, “Francis’s most vocal supporters were the ageing and shrinking parts of the American church.”He contrasted the Anglican church. “[A] lot of the most engaged Catholics in the United States don’t think of the Church of England as a very impressive model of Christian vitality, and they rightly attribute its decline to its embracing a lot of contemporary culture, rather than working to convert that culture.”His views echo outside the US, as well. Recent data suggests that Catholics may soon outnumber Anglicans in Britain for the first time since the 16th-century Reformation, with the change driven in large part by gen-Z churchgoers, even as British society as a whole continues to become more secular.View image in fullscreenNot all conservative or orthodox Catholics were unhappy with Francis.In the magazine First Things, the conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari, who converted to Catholicism in 2016, argued recently that the substance of Francis’s preaching was often “far more ‘trad’ than critics appreciated”. Yet he was dogged by “the emergence of a veritable anti-Francis cottage industry” that worked to “prime a subset of Catholics against the pope”.In an email, he told me: “I personally loved the late Holy Father, and generally tried to relate to the Vatican as a medieval peasant might: pay, pray and obey.”Catholics For Catholics is one of the political faces of a newly militant Catholic right. In March, the organization hosted a prayer event at Mar-a-Lago for the second year in a row. The organization also worked to mobilize Catholic swing-state voters for the Republican party last fall, with a particular focus on millions of “low-propensity” Catholics who don’t regularly vote.John Yep co-founded Catholics For Catholics two and a half years ago, he told me, to “advocate for Catholics in the public square, and to just reaffirm our beliefs and present them to our politicians so that they are aware of them and respect who we stand for and what we believe”.The organization is well to the right of the average Catholic, by most metrics, and perhaps even to the right of the average conservative Catholic: it published a book by Bishop Joseph Strickland, a Texas clergyman who was removed from office in 2023 after becoming one of Francis’s fiercest critics.Faggioli, the Villanova professor, believes that traditionalists overreacted to Francis. “Conservative Catholics got used to a certain kind of papacy and a sympathy for their causes during the 35 years of John Paul II and Pope Benedict, and some of them thought that history was over,” he said.But Yep’s political instincts about Catholics as a voting bloc may be apt. According to an AP analysis, Trump won 54% of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, a four-point improvement on 2020, when he and Biden received roughly equal shares of the Catholic vote. And although white Catholics support Trump at higher rates than Latino Catholics, Trump also benefited from a swing in the Latino Catholic vote.Bannon believes that a rupture between traditionalist North American Catholics and the larger church is coming – and even welcomes it. Observers are skeptical of that idea, in part because most Catholics, regardless of their ideological stripe, would find the prospect of a 21st-century schism with the mother church in Rome unthinkable. But either way there seems to be a growing gap between a Catholic community in the US that is becoming more conservative and a church leadership in Rome that is open to new ideas.Faggioli believes that “in some sense, this church is already in a situation of soft schism”. But he doesn’t think a full-blown schism is in the cards.“The real goal of [most] neo-traditionalist voices is not to break away and make their own small church,” he said. “Their project is to win back the entire Catholic church, in the long term, to what they think is real Catholicism.” More

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      ‘Standing up for Christian values’: US evangelicals keep the faith with Trump

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      When asked about Donald Trump’s Easter morning post wishing a happy holiday to “the Radical Left Lunatics … fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners” to the United States, Jackson Lahmeyer, an Oklahoma evangelical Christian pastor, said: “Isn’t it terrible that they are wanting to do that?”Lahmeyer, the founder of the Pastors for Trump organization, was not bothered by Trump’s extreme and divisive message on the Christian religious holiday, because, he said: “You cannot unify with evil.”Lahmeyer’s attitude appears typical of many white evangelical leaders who still strongly support Trump despite what – for many – is violent, extremist-laden language that many would see as unsuitable for any religious occasion, let alone one intimately connected to rebirth, forgiveness and peace.But those leaders in the US say Trump – unlike some past Republican presidents – has followed through on campaign promises concerning core issues such as abortion, immigration, the location of the US embassy in Israel and, more generally, his pledge to “bring back Christianity”.More good things could be in store for that demographic because in a second Easter post on his platform Truth Social, Trump said he would make America “more religious, than it has ever been before!!!”“He has moved the needle for the Christian agenda unlike anyone else, especially in modern times,” said Lahmeyer, who attended an Easter dinner at the White House. “As a pastor, obviously, that is music to my ears.”White evangelical voters also turned out in large numbers for George W Bush when he ran for president in 2000 and 2004, but they were disappointed because they felt he did not do enough to oppose same-sex marriage or to ban abortion. Bush also, when compared to Trump, had a more liberal immigration policy, including supporting providing undocumented immigrants the chance to become citizens, according to John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and the author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.“Bush wasn’t willing to give them everything that they wanted to be elected,” Fea said. “Trump will do what evangelicals tell him to do for the most part, in order to maintain power.”In addition to appointing supreme court justices who ruled that there is no constitutional right to abortion, Trump also moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which previous presidents had said they supported but did not implement.“They all said it to get votes. They never did it. The president did it,” said Lahmeyer, who ran for Senate and lost in 2022.During this term, Trump has signed executive orders to establish a faith office and a taskforce to address “anti-Christian bias” in the federal government.To evangelical leaders, that emphasis on Christian values stands in contrast to how they perceive the Biden administration’s actions, including in 2024 declaring 31 March Transgender Day of Visibility, the date when it had been celebrated since its creation in 2009, but last year fell – entirely coincidentally – on Easter Sunday.But in a world where conspiracy theories and misinformation is rife, that sparked anger among rightwing Christians.“Easter was barely mentioned,” said Brad Sherman, an Iowa pastor and Republican now running for governor. “In fact, I think it was more about some kind of LGBTQ awareness day or something, if I remember correctly, so I just feel like President Trump is standing up for Christian values.”In actual fact, Biden continued the tradition of the annual White House Easter egg roll and in a statement said: “As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’s sacrifice … with wars and conflict taking a toll on innocent lives around the world, we renew our commitment to work for peace, security, and dignity for all people.”This year, Trump held an Easter prayer service and dinner with Lahmeyer; prominent pastors such as Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress; and his personal pastor, Paula White-Cain, who now leads the White House faith office, among others.“[Trump] preached the gospel to us pastors, and I thought that was amazing,” Lahmeyer said.While most white evangelicals support Trump, there are Christian leaders, including evangelicals, who have criticized some of the president’s policy decisions, especially to eliminate 83% of US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs. Among the initiatives affected was the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), which has saved millions of lives from HIV/Aids and was popular with evangelicals.“We see it as really overarchingly a pro-life program in that it promotes the life-saving need for HIV treatment,” Emily Chambers Sharpe, the health director at World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, told the Guardian.But the person behind many of the federal government cuts, Elon Musk, head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, called USAID a “criminal organization” and said that it was “time for it to die”.Adam Russell Taylor, the president of Sojourners, a Christian social justice group, said such remarks remind him of “the prophet Isaiah, who forewarned us that woe to you that call evil, good, and good, evil”.The administration is “making these allegations that aren’t backed up by evidence or proof. And they disparage this whole body of work that has created such goodwill around the world and is so aligned with our Christian values,” Russell Taylor said.But many American evangelicals continue to support Trump despite such cuts, because concern for the poor “always takes a back seat in evangelical politics to abortion [and] control of the supreme court, which will allow them to have the religious freedom that they want”, said Fea, the history professor.Tony Suárez, the founder of Revivalmakers Ministries, an evangelical group, said he supports Trump because he is trying to strengthen border security and is restoring “respect for conservative, Judeo-Christian values”.Once the country secures the border and removes “the criminal element”, Suárez, who is also executive vice-president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said he would like to see a pathway to at least legal permanent residency for undocumented immigrants. He thinks that based on some of his comments during his first term, Trump would support that too.But Trump also wants to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and foreign residents, a guarantee under the 14th amendment.Asked for his position on this, Suárez said that is “a little bit above me to understand what it is specifically that they are arguing”.And on cuts to foreign aid programs, Suárez said he views them “as difficult decisions that any organization, denomination, reformation, might have to take, and they will never be popular”.Suárez joked that the only thing he disagrees with Trump on is him saying that “you may even get tired of winning”.“I’m not tired,” Suárez said. “I’m looking for the next win.” More

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      What did Pope Francis think of JD Vance? His view was more than clear | Jan-Werner Mueller

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      We might never quite know what Pope Francis said to the US vice-president during their very brief meeting on Sunday. In the widely shared video clip, it was hardly audible. The morning after, Francis died, and Vance jetted to visit India, finding time to tweet that his heart went out to the millions of Christians who loved Francis (implying, I suppose, that not all Catholics loved him) and patronizing the dead pontiff by calling one of his homilies “really quite beautiful”).Francis had been as outspoken as could be without naming names, when he criticized Vance in his February letter to US bishops; but he was not just registering his rebuke of Trump and Vance’s cruel treatment of refugees and migrants; he was reacting to a broader trend of instrumentalizing religion for nationalist and authoritarian populism.In February, Vance had an online “close-quarters street fight” with Rory Stewart, the former UK Conservative minister, diplomat and now professor in the practice of grand strategy at the very university from which Vance obtained his law degree. At issue was what to most of us wouldn’t seem an obvious source of social media outrage: the correct reading of St Augustine’s notion of ordo amoris, the right ordering of love.In January, Vance had alluded to the concept in an interview with the Trump courtier Sean Hannity; according to the Catholic convert, it was a “Christian concept” that love and compassion start with family, then extend to neighbors, then nation, and, last and least, reach fellow human beings as such.Stewart had registered skepticism, observing that Vance’s stance was “a bizarre take on John 15:12-13 – less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love.” The infamously very online Vance hit back with: “Just google ‘ordo amoris’.” In typically snarky fashion, Vance then questioned Stewart’s IQ and added that “false arrogance” of the Stewart type “drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years” (never mind what would constitute appropriate or correct arrogance).As plenty of learned observers remarked at the time, complex theological questions will not have bumper-sticker-size answers. But eventually a figure not entirely irrelevant for Catholics weighed in with a view that perhaps carries indeed more weight than those of others. Francis, in a letter to US bishops, instructed the flock that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!”He added, driving home the rebuke without naming names, that “the true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ … that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” Apparently, Cardinal Pietro Parolin was dispatched on Saturday to explain all this to Vance again.Vance is not the only far-right populist who has smuggled nationalism into what he touts as the correct notion of Christianity. Viktor Orbán, a great model for Vance and other self-declared US “post-liberals” (meaning: anti-liberals), has been declaring for years that a proper understanding of “Christian Democracy” is not only “illiberal”, but nationalist.That would have been news to the many Catholics who experienced nation-building projects in Germany and Italy during the 19th century as outright oppressive. After all, Catholics were suspected of putting loyalty to Rome ahead of civic duties (a suspicion still very much alive in the US when JFK ran for office). Bismarck started the Kulturkampf (the original meaning of culture war) against Catholics in the 1870s; the Vatican forbade the faithful to participate in the political life of unified Italy.Far-right populists claim that only they represent what they call “the real people”. Of course, they have to explain who “the real people” are (and, who by contrast, does not truly belong). Many have instrumentalized Christianity for that purpose. Giorgia Meloni, in her autobiography, states: “The Christian identity can be secular rather than religious.” What matters is not believing (let alone actual Christian conduct), but only belonging. It’s what the social scientist Rogers Brubaker has called “Christianism”, in contrast with actual Christianity.Some far-right populists have tried to square their Catholicism with their populism by criticizing the hierarchy as a somehow illegitimate, or at least hypocritical, elite. Italy’s Matteo Salvini, who likes to flaunt the Bible and a rosary when riling up the masses of “real” Italians, pioneered this move; Vance copied it when he insinuated that there was something corrupt about church leadership; concretely he had accused US bishops of resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to obtain federal funds (an accusation deemed “very nasty” by Cardinal Timothy Dolan).The point is not that the correct understanding of Catholicism (or Christian Democratic political parties, as they have existed in Europe and Chile) has always been liberal; that’s hardly plausible. The point is that Francis reaffirmed that Catholicism is not compatible with the “America first” (and humanity last) view of the Trumpists.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More