“I was saved by God so that America flies to be great,” is one of the phrases of the president’s inauguration, Donald Trump, who woke up more applause under the roof of the Capitol. The tycoon had never stood out for his religiosity, but the attack on his life at the Butler rally in Pennsylvania, made him feel a divine chosen. “It was God who prevented something unthinkable, I am not afraid. We will remain resilient to our faith and challenging before evil,” he said hours after the attempted murder. In that it coincides with the new and first American Pope, Leo XIV. “The evil will not prevail,” he announced yesterday from the balcony of the Plaza de San Pedro. “We are all the same and God loves everyone,” he added. Both leaders claim to fight evil, but separates an abyss. Because?
Donald Trump’s relationship with the Catholic Church has been characterized by dialectical clashes against the late Pope Francis, while establishing a climate of ambivalence and confrontation, although it seems contradictory, with the greatest representatives of the Church in the United States. In principle, both are attracted to the firm support of the president to traditional moral values, especially anti -abortion positions, but have faced themselves hard on social and humanitarian issues. Something that is a reflection of the internal division of Catholicism in the country between conservative and progressive sectors.
Donald Trump is not Catholic but a presbyterian Protestant, but he is very aware that part of his base is. 52% of Catholics voted in the elections. To earn his support, he appointed Catholic judges like Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court, and during the campaign he emphasized speeches where he defended religious freedom and opposed abortion, a central cause of conservative Catholics. He also defended Christianity in public spaces, met with various Catholic leaders and supported related organizations. He still does. However, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Holy Father criticized the president without qualms.
The Trumpian anti -immigrant rhetoric collided with its message. “A person who thinks only of building walls is not a Christian,” Pope Francis came to tell him, in 2016. As usual when he feels attacked, Donald Trump responded with a bite and said that “it is shameful that a religious leader question my faith.” Immigration policies are the battlefield where the great figures of American Catholicism collide, including the new Pope Leo XIV. The Catholic Bishop Conference is very clear about it.
They condemn the separation of migrant families on the border. They reject the construction of the border wall and support the dreamers, the dreamers, who look for a better life. Migrants who have always been the backbone of the United States growth. In addition, after the pitched battle between progressive and radicals that happened in Charlottesville, in 2017, and protests over the death of George Floyd, in 2020, the US church accused the president of minimizing racism, promoting division, hostility and extreme nationalism. Moreover, they said he was politically manipulating religious symbols.
In the words of Cardinal Daniel Dinardo, former president of the Catholic Bishops of the country, “families are the fundamental element of our society and must remain united. Separating babies from their mothers is not the solution and is immoral.” For Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller of San Antonio (Texas), “Refugee Children belong to their parents, not the government or another institution. Separating them is a serious, immoral and evil sin.” One of the most vowels was Miami Archbishop, Thomas Wenski. “We must tell our parishioners to call them and make them responsible. We are not going to make America great making it cruel,” he said around the famous Maga slogan.
A friend or rival pope?
Following the rules that Donald Trump learned from his mentor, Roy with, it is very possible that the obsession with constant recognition leads the president to try to sweep home and be awarded part of the triumph of having an American Pope. This fits with the nationalist rhetoric that has cultivated for years. When yesterday he declared that it is “a great honor for our country”, the tycoon thinks in geopolitical terms and not on religious achievement. That is, the narrative of America First to project the idea of American world leadership even in the great millenary institution. However, will the president’s superego be able to endure it?
Donald Trump has made a career considering himself the center of the world. The appearance of an American figure with a greater global projection and a spiritual charisma well above that of the White House, will not marry the narcissistic profile that deployed in his peak work, ‘The art of treatment (1987)’. That is, Pope Leo XIV can be a symbolic threat to the political messianism that made him sweep the polls. Therefore, it is almost a certainty that the explosive nature of the New York will collide with the representative of San Pedro. His Christian narratives are like day and night. And his struggles too. Donald Trump with his commercial and migratory war, and the Church against the demons of the abuse of minors and the exclusion of women.
Nor should we underestimate the figure of the vice president, JD Vance, Catholic convert and very conservative. Although he was criticized by Robert Prevost before he was Pope (in February, he shared an article by National Catholic Reporter with the headline “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus does not ask us to hierarchy our love for others”), the Catholic fidelity of the vice president, who was one of the last to see Pope Francis, makes him a natural bridge between the two poles of power. A symbolic and strategic intermediary that, for this, must moderate its message.
The arrival of Leo XIV will intensify the struggle for the soul of Catholicism in the United States. A Pope so far from the Maga world is an earthquake for conservative believers and the president’s radical bases, such as Steve Bannon himself, who does not consider him an American heart because Robert Francis Prevost Martínez spent much of his life and service to God in Peru and Rome, not in Kansas, Mississippi or Texas. Activists such as Laura Lomer, the extreme right -wing influencer close to the president, have already accused him of being Marxist, not representing true values and being an agent of Vatican globalism.
If, as expected, Leon XIV continues with the discourse of his predecessor on human rights, climatic justice and the criticism open to the deportation of migrants, Donald Trump will not hesitate to shout in front of the doors of San Pedro. Then, the president who is considered saved by God to carry out his work, will see them as a stone to be raffled, an obstacle and an enemy that he will deal with with the same strategy that he uses against his greatest opponents: the delegitimation, the insult and a struggle without barracks for the domain of the Christian symbologies that are part of the moral soul of the United States.
