Through new appointments, orders to his bishops to speak out about immigration, and public comments critiquing the direction of the US under Trump, the pope is setting up his bishops and priests to be evangelizers, to be vocal about human dignity, and to be a counterweight to the authoritarian and nationalist tendencies of the right. In the absence of a well-organized “religious left” in America, he told me, Leo’s moves to reform and shake up the American Catholic Church are reinvigorating a “Catholic left” to engage in the moral struggles of the 2020s, specifically around immigration and creeping authoritarianism. The characterization that I’ve made, and I do believe this to be true, is that just as the cardinals elected a Polish pope from behind the Soviet “iron curtain” to defeat communism, I do think that God raised up a pope from the Americas to defeat creeping MAGA authoritarianism.
Author: Christian Paz
Published at: 2026-02-09 23:29:04
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