Trump plans to buy the pope
Hmmm. Well, I think the vast amount of attention the news media pay to popes and all their doings is absurd and bad, but having said that…if the new guy is going to annoy Trump, I can’t help a little bit of (entirely secular) schadenfreude.
The first American-born pope is not a fan of the Trump administration.
Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV, has multiple posts on his X account that criticize or outright rebuke the words and policies of President Trump.
In February, he shared an article from the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” in response to Vance’s bastardization of the concept of ordo amaris, a narrow interpretation of love that Pope Francis himself admonished.
In April, he reposted Catholic writer Rocco Palmo, who wrote, “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to [aid] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident, once an undoc-ed Salvadorean himself, now-[Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington, D.C.] asks, “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”
Pope Leo was also critical of Trump’s family separation policy. In 2018, he retweeted a scathing post from Cardinal Cupich: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”
Of course there’s a lot that’s Christian about it, taking Christianity as a whole and after all these centuries, but a rebuke of Trump is a rebuke of Trump and it is some consolation for all this pope-watching nonsense.
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I think we all knew that just about any Pope would be antipathetic to MAGA and all it stands for. After all, the Pope holds sway over a far bigger crowd, a more beautiful crowd, the greatest crowd anyone has ever seen.
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Of course, when asked to define “traditional Christian family values”, they usually fall back on the same old misogyny, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and an aversion to social justice. Of all those, it is only the latter that Jesus spoke of, and he was very much in favour of social justice. Assuming, for the sake of argument, there was a bloke called Jesus and he said those things attributed to him.
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Because, Dog forbid, there should be a Pope who refuses to kiss Trump’s ring.
1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/maga-woke-american-pope-leo-xiv-b2747600.html
2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/trump-maga-want-conservative-pope-to-replace-francis/105210268
How much of Marx has Loomer actually read? Or does she just use him as a bogeyman?
@Colin Day:
Not much… I think Kevin Williamson has it right, Trump is a socialist. Has he read Das Kapital? No, but he doesn’t have to. Batya’s embrace of him makes a lot of sense considering what dullards commies tend to be.
Anything’s possible with Trump. Maybe he has already sought a papal dispensation or whatever for Stormy Daniels, and the whole majestic crew of his other girlfriends, and got knocked back. Maybe Trump wanted the Pope to use his holy powers to fish him out of Hades should he get banged up there; as could easily happen, and got knocked back again. I think that the new American pope Leo is a whole lot younger than Trump, and so is a well-placed pontiff for the job of always being there to rescue the said Trump from eternal damnation.
Though of course, it’s always possible that the Devil wouldn’t have him. And so: what then?
I remember Fred Clark (I’m sure among others) pointing out that some time after the 1980s (when Reagan supported abortion rights) the far right realised they could get the Catholic vote merely by coming out as against abortion and capturing these single-issue voters. On almost every other metric Catholics typically lean more toward the left of the political spectrum.
I also remember pointing out to various evangelicals that the one thing Jesus is absolutely 100% clear on in his reported speech in the gospels is that divorce is wrong. Yet it doesn’t seem to be a problem for them. They’ll come up with all sorts of convoluted explanations about how the Bible forbids homosexuality and who knows what else, but completely blow off Jesus’s absolutely clear message about divorce.
Jesus said: (Matt. 5,28): “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
Either he was speaking from his own experience there, in which case he was hoist on his own petard, or else he was not, in which case he was a damn fool, and naive to boot. I would be likewise if I claimed expertise in, say, Chinese calligraphy.
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