The Anti-American Pope

The man elected to oppose Trump refuses to visit the US for its 250th birthday, roots for Peru against the US, attended a Communist peace march, & just appointed three anti-Trump bishops for the US.

The first American-born occupant of the Vatican in history has declined an invitation to come home for the 250th birthday of the United States. Instead of standing in America on July 4, he is expected to go to Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island that has become a symbol of illegal African immigration into Europe. JD Vance had invited Leo to attend America’s 250th anniversary events, and a Vatican official said Leo may never visit the United States while Trump remains president.

Then came the soccer question. Asked whether he would support the United States or Peru in a World Cup matchup, Leo answered, “probably Peru,” adding that this was because of “affective bonds.” The first American pope, asked to choose between America and Peru, chose Peru.

Now comes the episcopal act. Leo has appointed Evelio Menjivar-Ayala to Wheeling-Charleston, Robert Boxie III and Gary Studniewski as auxiliaries in Washington, and John Gomez to Laredo. The pattern is not hard to read. Menjivar publicly rebuked Trump’s immigration policies. Boxie has defended DEI language and criticized Trump’s attack on it. Studniewski criticized January 6 and warned about political manipulation and violence. Gomez, quieter publicly, is connected to the Tyler, Texas machinery after Bishop Strickland’s removal.

“The Anti-American Pope” is a provocative title. But what else should we call an American-born Vatican ruler whose public gestures keep lining up against the actual America that exists outside the migration-industrial complex and the Catholic left’s fever dream of a borderless therapeutic republic?

Leo is American by birth. That much is obvious. But politically, morally, and ecclesiastically, he appears to belong to the international postconciliar class that views the United States chiefly as a problem to be corrected, humbled, lectured, and re-staffed.

Before the White Cassock: The Tweets and the Communist March

The anti-American pattern did not begin after the conclave.

It was already visible before Robert Prevost became Leo XIV.

The first clue was his social media trail. ABC News reported that the account appearing to belong to Cardinal Robert Prevost had posted, replied, and reposted content since 2011, and that before his election it shared material critical of Trump and Vance on immigration. His last post before the conclave reportedly amplified Rocco Palmo’s criticism of Trump and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele over deportation policy, quoting Bishop Evelio Menjivar’s line: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”

There is the whole pontificate in embryo.

Before Leo appointed Menjivar to West Virginia, he had already used Menjivar as a moral cudgel against Trump’s immigration policy. The retweet came first. The appointment came later. What looked like a social-media opinion has now become ecclesiastical policy.

Reuters likewise reported that, before becoming Leo XIV, Prevost’s account contained “disapproving posts” about Trump and Vance, including a February repost of an article headlined “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” and an April repost attacking the Trump-Bukele deportation arrangement.

Reuters noted it could not immediately verify who operated the account, but the account was under Prevost’s name and used the handle @drprevost.

So the first American pope arrived in white already carrying the digital fingerprints of the Catholic left. He had not even stepped onto the loggia before the record was there: immigration sentimentalism, anti-Trump moralism, suspicion toward Vance’s attempt to articulate ordered loves, and the familiar post-Francis tendency to treat national loyalty as a spiritual defect.

Then there is the older and more revealing episode.

In 1983, young Father Robert Prevost was photographed in Rome participating in a massive protest against NATO cruise missile deployment in Comiso, Sicily, and elsewhere in Europe. The photograph shows him among young Augustinians carrying a sign reading “Giovani agostiniani per la pace,” or “Young Augustinians for Peace.” The demonstration took place on October 22, 1983, against the installation of NATO Cruise missiles and drew a broad coalition that included the Italian Communist Party, the Italian Communist Youth Federation, and peace committees active around NATO bases.

The deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe was part of the Reagan-era NATO response to Soviet SS-20 missiles. UPI reported in November 1983 that the Italian government approved the deployment of 112 cruise missiles in Sicily, with Prime Minister Bettino Craxi’s government committed to the NATO plan to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe to counterbalance Soviet SS-20s. The same report noted that the parliamentary debate had been held at the insistence of the Communist Party, which was trying to delay the deployment at Comiso.

In other words, Prevost was not photographed at a neutral prayer vigil for world peace in a parish hall. He was at a mass political demonstration aligned against Reagan’s NATO strategy at one of the defining Cold War flashpoints. The protest was part of the broader European “peace” movement that often functioned, whether naively or deliberately, as a pressure campaign against Western deterrence while the Soviet bloc sat comfortably behind its own missiles and tanks.

This is the old post-Vatican II clerical disease: moral theatrics against the West, sentimental pacifism against anti-Communist strength, endless suspicion of American power, and remarkable delicacy toward the revolutionary left. The same instinct that marched against Reagan’s missile deterrent in 1983 now recoils from Trump’s immigration enforcement in 2026.

The names have changed. The posture has not.

Reagan was the villain then. Trump is the villain now. NATO missiles were the scandal then. Deportation flights are the scandal now. The Italian Communist Party marched under the banner of “peace” then. The Catholic migrant-industrial complex marches under the banner of “human dignity” now.

And Robert Prevost keeps appearing on the same side of the barricade.

Leo’s anti-Americanism is not a childish hatred of hot dogs, baseball, or Chicago. It is the deeper anti-Americanism of the international Catholic left: suspicion of American sovereignty, contempt for conservative Americans, hostility to strong borders, reflexive trust in global institutions, and a lifelong habit of seeing the United States most clearly when it can be cast as the oppressor.

The July 4 Snub

The most theatrical piece of the puzzle is the reported refusal to visit the United States for its 250th birthday.

There would have been an obvious symbolism in the first American-born Vatican occupant visiting the United States during its quarter-millennium celebration. Even a man who dislikes Trump could have framed such a visit above party politics. He could have come to pray for the nation, visit shrines, meet Catholics, speak about conversion, call America back to Christ, and remind the country that no republic survives without moral order.

Instead, the reports say he declined the invitation and will go to Lampedusa.

That choice is almost too perfect. America celebrates its 250th birthday. The American-born Leo goes to the migrant island.

The message is pure Vatican theater. America, in this symbolic arrangement, is not Leo’s homeland to be honored, but an empire to be rebuked. The real celebration is migrant crossings and the real July 4 catechism is not gratitude for a nation, but a lecture about borders, humanitarian obligation, and the sins of the West.

The Independent reported that Leo refused Trump’s invitation after a tense diplomatic episode involving Cardinal Christophe Pierre and the Pentagon, and that he would instead spend July 4 at Lampedusa. People likewise reported that a Vatican official said Leo “may well never visit the United States under this administration.”

That “under this administration” is the key phrase.

The same Vatican that can find time for every ecumenical photo-op, interreligious exercise, climate-adjacent appeal, migrant symbol, and synodal convocation, suddenly cannot find a way for the first American pope to visit America for its 250th anniversary while Trump is president.

Amazing how calendars work when ideology helps hold the pen.

The Board of Peace Snub

Then came another little act of Vatican diplomacy with a large message inside it.

Trump invited Leo XIV, or at least the Holy See, to participate in his “Board of Peace,” an international body tied originally to Gaza’s temporary governance and reconstruction after Trump’s ceasefire plan, and later envisioned by Trump as a broader mechanism for addressing global conflicts. In January, Cardinal Pietro Parolin confirmed that the Vatican had received the invitation, that Leo had seen it, and that Rome was “deciding what to do.”

A month later, the answer came.

No.

Parolin said the Holy See “will not participate” in the Board of Peace because of its “particular nature,” adding that it is “evidently not that of other States.” He also said there were aspects that left the Vatican “somewhat perplexed,” and that crisis management should be handled by the United Nations.

There it is again.

Trump invites the first American-born pope into a public peace initiative. The Vatican studies it, smiles diplomatically, and declines. The preferred moral authority, naturally, is the United Nations.

Not the United States. Not Trump. Not a direct American-backed peace structure. The United Nations.

The same Vatican that can sit at endless tables with climate bureaucrats, interreligious panels, migrant agencies, secular human-rights institutions, and every flavor of postwar global governance suddenly develops delicate scruples about “particular nature” when the invitation comes from Trump’s Washington.

The Board of Peace snub also exposes the hollowness of the “Leo is above politics” defense. If he were truly above politics in the way Catholic Inc. pretends, Rome could have handled the invitation as an opportunity for moral influence. It could have participated in a limited observer capacity. It could have offered humanitarian counsel. It could have insisted on just-war principles, the protection of civilians, the rights of Christians in the region, and genuine peace rather than propaganda.

Instead, the Vatican declined.

The refusal was dressed in diplomatic language, but the message was clear enough. Trump’s peace initiative is suspect. The United Nations remains respectable. The American president is to be kept at arm’s length. The global bureaucracy is to be deferred to as the proper manager of world crises.

This is the same instinct behind the rest of Leo’s American posture. The United States, especially under Trump, must be humbled, corrected, bypassed, and morally contained. Rome may speak in the accents of peace, dialogue, and humanitarian concern, but the practical alignment is unmistakable.

The first American pope keeps finding ways to stand somewhere other than with America.

“Probably Peru”

Leo was asked whether he would support the United States or Peru in the upcoming soccer World Cup. He answered, “probably Peru, just because of affective bonds.”

Imagine, for one second, a patriotic American pope saying he would root for America against another country because he loved his homeland. The same Catholic media class that finds Leo’s answer charming would immediately start coughing up essays about nationalism, exclusionary identities, baptized tribalism, and the dangers of confusing faith with political belonging.

Leo chooses Peru over America and everyone is supposed to smile.

The answer confirms the emotional geography of the man. Leo is not simply the American pope. He is the post-American pope, the citizen-of-the-world pope, the “I am obviously American, but” pope. He has made clear that Peru is part of who he is, and that his Latin American experience shaped his appreciation for Francis and his “prophetic vision” for the Church.

That is the real point.

Leo’s American birth does not make him a corrective to Francis. It may make him a more effective vehicle for Francis’s project inside the United States. He speaks the language. He knows the culture. He knows which pressure points matter. He can scold America from inside the family.

The Catholic left understands this perfectly. The conservative Catholic commentariat, as usual, will need seven paragraphs and a smelling salt to avoid admitting the obvious.

The Retweet Became a Bishop

Now look at Menjivar.

Menjivar was born in El Salvador, tried to enter the United States illegally several times, and finally entered in 1990 after being smuggled across the border in the trunk of a car. He later became a priest, then a bishop, and now Leo has appointed him to lead Wheeling-Charleston, the diocese covering West Virginia.

A bishop with that background should be the first man to say: I broke the law. I was wrong to do so. Others should not follow my example. Nations have a right to secure their borders. Catholics should obey just laws. The Church may advocate humane treatment, but she may not sentimentalize lawbreaking.

Instead, Menjivar has become a critic of Trump’s immigration enforcement. He has used the language of “fundamental human rights and dignity” against the administration’s policies and has suggested that those who remain silent are “complicit with evil.”

Complicit with evil?

What about the evil of encouraging an entire generation to believe that national borders are suggestions, immigration law is morally suspect unless it produces progressive outcomes, and that the state has no serious duty to protect its own citizens?

The scandal is not only that Menjivar once entered illegally. The scandal is that his story is now being wielded as a weapon against the very idea of enforcing the law he broke.

That is what Leo is elevating. Not merely a man with a complicated past. A symbol. A message. A living rebuke to Trump’s America, sent directly into West Virginia by the first American-born pope.

And if Catholic Inc. wants to pretend this is just a touching immigrant success story, it should at least have the honesty to admit what kind of success story it is: a man who violated American immigration law, rose within the postconciliar Church, and is now being used by Rome to lecture Americans who still believe their country has the right to exist as a country.

Coal Country Gets the Border Sermon

West Virginia is not Los Angeles. It is not San Francisco. It is not Washington, D.C. It is Appalachia, coal country, a place where Catholics are a small minority and where ordinary people have lived for decades under the contempt of credentialed America.

So what does Leo send them?

A bishop whose biography will be endlessly framed as a rebuke to the immigration politics of the state’s own voters.

Democratic Party operative, Chris Hale, saw this immediately. He wrote that Leo sent “a Salvadoran migrant to Appalachia” and that the American hierarchy is being repopulated “by the kind of people the administration would prefer not to exist.” That is the left celebrating the strategy out loud.

The Vatican does not need to say, “We are turning the American episcopate into an anti-Trump moral counterweight.”

It can simply appoint the men and let Christopher Hale explain the move.

What makes the whole thing more insulting is that Appalachia does not need a Vatican sermon about the moral superiority of the migrant class. It needs Catholic bishops who will preach penance, condemn pornography, defend marriage, fight drugs, rebuild parishes, protect children, restore reverence, and teach the faith without the dead language of the NGO world.

But in the postconciliar imagination, the American working class exists mostly as a problem. It is too white, too rural, too patriotic, too attached to borders, too suspicious of elite moral theater, too untrained in the vocabulary of “inclusion.” So the Vatican sends a symbol to catechize it.

Washington Gets DEI in a Roman Collar

Then there is Robert Boxie III.

Boxie is a Vanderbilt-trained chemical engineer, a Harvard Law graduate, and Catholic chaplain at Howard University. But the relevant point is his ideological usefulness. He has defended racist leftist DEI language and said diversity is “of God.” He called attacks on DEI “un-American,” “un-Christian,” and “anti-Catholic.”

That sentence alone should tell you what kind of Catholic politics Leo is elevating.

Diversity as a fact of creation is not controversial. The Church embraces every race and nation under the kingship of Christ. But DEI in contemporary America is not just a friendly word for charity. It is an ideological apparatus, a bureaucratic theology, and a substitute anthropology complete with inherited guilt, institutional penance, managed speech, official victims, and professional inquisitors.

And now one of its Catholic defenders has been made a bishop in Washington.

Washington is the national stage. It is where the Church speaks near embassies, media outlets, lobbyists, federal power, universities, NGOs, and the permanent bureaucracy. Boxie is being elevated in Cardinal McElroy’s Washington. The same McElroy who gave public support for Fiducia Supplicans and claimed that American resistance to homosexual blessings showed “enduring animus” toward homosexuals.

That is the orbit.

That is the world.

Immigration, DEI, synodality, gay blessings, anti-Trump moral rhetoric, and the permanent reclassification of traditional Catholics as dangerous extremists. The whole program is arriving in personnel form.

The Gomez Appointment and the Strickland Shadow

John Gomez is the quieter appointment, but it belongs in the same frame.

Gomez was appointed vicar general in Tyler by Bishop Joseph Strickland in 2015, remained after Strickland was removed, served as delegate of the apostolic administrator from 2023 to 2025, and then resumed as vicar general under Bishop Gregory Kelly. CatholicVote reported that Gomez helped organize meetings between Vatican visitators and diocesan clergy, religious, and laity during the apostolic visitation.

Institutions reveal themselves through promotion.

Strickland was removed. Gomez remained useful. Gomez is now made bishop of Laredo, a border diocese.

That is how bureaucracy talks. Men who publicly resist the revolution are investigated, isolated, and removed. Men who can function smoothly after the removal are trusted. The lesson will be absorbed by every ambitious cleric in America with eyes in his head.

The Leo pattern is becoming harder to miss. America’s border dioceses, national capital, and Trump country are being staffed with men who fit the post-Francis consolidation phase.

National Catholic Reporter Understands the Plan

NCR knows Leo’s recent answer on formal same-sex blessings was not a defeat for the revolution. The editors say Leo’s caution today leaves the door open for tomorrow. They point to his answer that Church unity should not revolve around sexual matters, and that issues like justice, equality, freedom of men and women, and religious liberty take priority.

Then comes the key line from Leo, quoted in the NCR piece: it is necessary to “change attitudes before we ever change doctrine.”

That is the revolution in one sentence.

The left understands it. New Ways Ministry understands it. NCR understands it. James Martin understands it. The German bishops understand it.

Trad Inc. somehow does not.

Or perhaps it does, and cannot say so without detonating its entire business model.

“Change attitudes before doctrine” is a strategy. You do not have to contradict doctrine immediately. You first change the emotional atmosphere around it. You make old formulations sound cruel. You replace sin with “experience.” You replace moral theology with “listening.” You replace conversion with “welcome.” You replace condemnation with accompaniment. You stage meetings with experts. You consult the wounded. You speak of science, psychology, and the lived reality of “sexual and gender minorities.” You praise the people who were once disciplined. You bless the ministry of James Martin. You let bishops attend New Ways gatherings.

Then, after a generation of this, doctrine suddenly appears “underdeveloped.”

Amazingly, the new development always seems to match the politics of the Catholic left from ten years earlier.

The Door Is Open Because They Want It Open

NCR’s editorial is almost comically honest. It invokes Galileo. It says the Church should reflect on its current interpretation of Scripture regarding LGBTQ questions. It complains that the phrases “objectively disordered” and “intrinsically disordered” remain stubbornly in the Catechism. It highlights New Ways Ministry gatherings where bishops listened to LGBTQ Catholics, scientists, scholars, theologians, and pastoral workers. It quotes bishops praising those gatherings as synodal.

Leo has not shut this down. He has given it oxygen.

If he wanted to close the door, he could close it. He could say plainly that no blessing may ever be given to a couple as a couple when that relationship is constituted by public grave sin. He could state that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil, that the language of “same-sex couples” cannot be baptized, and that Fiducia Supplicans caused scandal.

Instead, he talks about timing, unity, broader blessings, and changing attitudes before doctrine changes.

The left sees this clearly. Trad Inc. denies the obvious.

The Ratzinger Key

There is an old Ratzinger clip on YouTube, and it helps explain the theological machinery underneath the political gestures.

In the video, the young Joseph Ratzinger discusses Church unity and dogma after Vatican II. He speaks of questions that became fully discussable only because of the Council. He invokes the “hierarchy of truths,” the idea that dogmas must be read in relation to the unity of the whole, with Scripture, and in new historical situations. He even speaks of finding unity “in the center” without all formulations and concrete consequences needing to be imposed on everyone.

That is the postconciliar instinct in its early academic form.

The orthodox sense of a “hierarchy of truths” is one thing. Some truths are more foundational because they are more directly related to the central mysteries of the faith. But in the postconciliar world, the phrase often becomes a solvent. The question quietly shifts from “Is this true and must it be professed?” to “Is this central enough to divide over?”

Once that shift happens, everything softens. Heresy becomes partial communion. False worship becomes spiritual richness. Schism becomes wounded fraternity.Moral contradiction becomes pastoral tension. Dogma becomes dialogue material.

And eventually Leo can speak of changing attitudes before doctrine, while conservative Catholics debate whether the real problem is that Trump is being uncharitable on X.

The Anti-Americanism Is Not About Geography

Leo is American enough to scold America with native fluency, but not American enough to stand with the country on its 250th birthday while Trump is president. He is American enough for the Vatican press machine to market him as the first American pope, but not American enough to resist the fashionable post-national contempt for his own country. He is American enough to understand exactly what his appointments mean in West Virginia, Washington, and Laredo, but not American enough to stop treating the United States as a moral problem to be corrected by the global Church bureaucracy.

This is the anti-Americanism of the postconciliar elite. It rarely sounds like hatred. It sounds like concern, conscience, and dialogue. It sounds like prophetic witness, “the fullness of the Gospel” and every left-wing Catholic editorial written since 1968.

But underneath it sits a deep suspicion of the old America: borders, patriotism, inherited religion, suspicion of centralized moral engineering, resistance to sexual revolution, attachment to family, local life, and national sovereignty.

That America is not to be blessed. It is to be reeducated.

And Leo appears to know his role.

The First American Pope Against America

When Trump invites him to America’s 250th birthday, he does not come. When Trump invites the Holy See onto a peace board, Rome declines and points toward the U.N. When reporters ask him whether he would root for America or Peru, he says probably Peru. When American dioceses need bishops, he sends men whose biographies and public positions operate as rebukes to Trump’s America.

At some point the dots stop being dots and become a map.

Leo XIV may be the first American-born man to sit in the Vatican’s white cassock.

That does not make him a friend of America.

In fact, his American birth may make him more useful to the revolution. Francis could scold the United States as a Latin American outsider. Leo can do it as a native son who left, absorbed the global postconciliar mind, and returned as a symbol for every Catholic progressive eager to humble the Trump-era right.

Personnel is policy. In the Church, personnel is also theology. A bishop teaches not only through sermons, but through what Rome chose him to represent. His appointment says what Rome values, what Rome wants amplified, what Rome wants normalized, and what Rome wants disciplined.

It is a program.

The Anti-American Pope is not anti-American because he dislikes Chicago, baseball, or his childhood. He is anti-American because the America he opposes is the America that still stands, however imperfectly, between the old Christian political instincts and the borderless therapeutic empire of the postconciliar Church.

That is why the left is celebrating while the right is still pretending not to understand the score.

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