An American Pope in a Hollowed-Out Church

Whoever The First American Pope Turns Out to Be, He Will Be Overshadowed by the Legacy of His Predecessor

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Some years back — I’d guess it was 2018 — while I was still running my Catholic publication at the height of its popularity, I received a phone call from a European Catholic gentleman of some renown, with whom I had become friendly through my work.

I was standing outside a coffee shop, discussing the latest scandal of the Bergoglian pontificate, when I shared the story of Arius (father of the Arian heresy) and his horrible, untimely death.

If you’re unfamiliar, it goes something like this:

Bishop Alexander of Alexandria (later St. Alexander) had been dealing with Arius, who was a priest of his diocese. He had been trying for some time to correct Arius on the matter of Christ’s divinity, but could make no headway. When he could not persuade Arius to come around, he warned the faithful. When none of his other efforts bore fruit, he invoked a synod and excommunicated Arius.

But Arius fled Alexandria, continued spreading his false doctrine, and gained no small amount of popularity among some very influential people in other provinces of Rome. His ideas became fashionable, and he won over Eusebius, the Bishop of Nicomedia. Emperor Constantine was troubled by this discord in his newly-Christian empire, and, unable to reconcile Eusebius and Alexander, called the ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325. Arius was declared a heretic, and was initially exiled, but was later allowed to return. His ideas divided the Church, and eventually the tide turned against Bishop Alexander and his protege, Athanasius, who was himself accused of heresy and exiled at the Synod of Tyre in 335. The following year, Arius was restored to full communion at the Synod of Jerusalem.

And then the fateful moment came: the Emperor Constantine, having been fooled by Arius into believing that he had renounced his heresies and now accepted the determinations of Nicaea, took the arch-heretic’s side. Falsely convinced, the emperor ordered Bishop Alexander of Constantinople to give Arius Holy Communion at Mass.

Alexander, having already been greatly disturbed by Arius’s reception in the city, resorted to fasting and prayer. According to Socrates Scholasticus’s Ecclesiastical History:

Reduced to this extremity, he bade farewell to all logical resources, and made God his refuge, devoting himself to continued fasting and never ceased from praying. Communicating his purpose to no one, he shut himself up alone in the church called Irene: there going up to the altar, and prostrating himself on the ground beneath the holy communion table, he poured forth his fervent prayers weeping; and this he ceased not to do for many successive nights and days. What he thus earnestly asked from God, he received: for his petition was such a one: ‘If the opinion of Arius were correct, he might not be permitted to see the day appointed for its discussion; but that if he himself held the true faith, Arius, as the author of all these evils, might suffer the punishment due to his impiety.’

And it would appear that God heard Alexander’s prayers:

The emperor being thus convinced, ordered that he should be received into communion by Alexander, bishop of Constantinople. It was then Saturday, and Arius was expecting to assemble with the church on the day following: but divine retribution overtook his daring criminalities. For going out of the imperial palace, attended by a crowd of Eusebian partisans like guards, he paraded proudly through the midst of the city, attracting the notice of all the people. As he approached the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died. The scene of this catastrophe still is shown at Constantinople, as I have said, behind the shambles in the colonnade: and by persons going by pointing the finger at the place, there is a perpetual remembrance preserved of this extraordinary kind of death. So disastrous an occurrence filled with dread and alarm the party of Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia; and the report of it quickly spread itself over the city and throughout the whole world.

My European friend, hearing all this, immediately understood my meaning.

“So if faith can move mountains,” he quipped, “can it also give us exploding popes?”

We both had hearty laugh at that. Gallows humor was all faithful Catholics could muster in those days.

Entertainment value aside, it’s important to note that stories like what happened to Arius formed the backbone of my understanding of how God would deal with heresiarchs gaining too much power and influence within his church. The fact that no such intervention ever slowed the advance of the Bergoglian pontificate as it bulldozed the papacy and the church and the deposit of faith as anyone had previously known them, began to rapidly eat away at my belief.

I wanted to reassure my audience, my friends, my family, and myself, that “God will not be mocked” and that it was HIS Church and HE was in control and HE would intervene to stop the scandal and the error from growing any worse. I expected that in some way, perhaps with a bit less gross anatomical drama, God would step in and remind us all whose Church it was, and that Francis would not be allowed to re-make it in his own image.

It was a moment that never came.

And now, here we are. Francis’s reign of terror is over, and not because of exploding bowels or a bolt of lightning, but from natural causes. So now we find ourselves with a new pope, a relative enigma, the first American to ever sit upon the Throne of St. Peter.

That in itself is interesting; the idea of an American pope has long been controversial to the point of being considered absurd. The European dominance of the papacy was much more likely to be usurped by a pick from Africa or Asia. (I personally suspected Tagle, from the Philippines, to be the chosen one.) I can’t quite make sense of this body of electors, handpicked by Francis, choosing an American—even one who has spent a career in Latin America, as Prevost has done. My best guess is that the choice was made under two possible considerations:

1. As an American, Prevost might act as a more effective ecclesial counter to the Trump administration and the potential future election to the Presidency of the current Catholic Vice President, JD Vance.

2. As an inside man who understands American culture, which produced the most vocal, most effective resistance to the Francis pontificate in the form of online media, blogs, and podcasts. I had the sense throughout my tenure at the helm of 1P5 that we had Rome on the back foot, because they were unused to having their narrative challenged openly and directly by Catholics of an independent and rebellious spirit. Prevost should, if he has not been out of the country for too long, remember what it means to be an American and how the American Church plays a pivotal role in both the financing and the influencing of the larger global Church.

All that being said, a number of indicators point to the idea that Prevost—Pope Leo XIV—will be a man very much in line with his predecessor. He seems temperamentally unlikely to take drastic steps to advance the Bergoglian agenda, and much more suited to implement the previously inflicted chaos and institutionalize it. Make it permanent. At just 69 years of age, he is quite likely to have a lot of time to do so. (Bergoglio was elected at 76, but he never seemed particularly healthy and was plagued by ailments throughout his pontificate. He died at 88.)

Prevost is a member of the Order of Augustinians, ordained in 1982. He was appointed bishop and elevated to the cardinalate by Pope Francis, in 2014 and 2023, respectively. The same year he was made cardinal, he was chosen (again, by Francis) as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. He has therefore been influential in the selection of bishops who are ideologically compatible with the Bergoglian agenda, and is rumored to be very close to the detestable Cardinal Cupich of Chicago.

Notably, Prevost was involved in his predecessor’s decision to bring women into the process of voting for the nomination of bishops and to allow women to vote at the Synod of Bishops—both innovations in service of a more “inclusive” Church. His career has largely been focused on missionary work in Latin America—specifically Peru—and it is no surprise therefore, that social justice, service of the poor, environmental advocacy, and promotion of the marginalized are high on his list of priorities. He is alleged to be staunchly pro-life (unlike his friend, Cupich) and opposed to gender ideology. These positions should not, in my opinion, be held as unshakeable, or even as indicators of his general ideological tenor. They are held too broadly, even in more progressive sectors of the Church, to indicate much about the remainder of a given individual’s theology.

Earlier this year, we did get one signal, when Prevost—who is somewhat active on social media—chided Vice President JD Vance for his comment (concerning immigration) that “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

On X, Prevost fired back:

That said, he is also claimed to be more reserved, more diplomatic, more careful and conciliatory than Francis—which, considering what a wrecking ball Francis was, is not a very high bar to meet. Similarly, Prevost appears to understand the symbols of the office, and arrived on the loggia after his election dressed like an actual pope, unlike the ostentatiously “humble and simple” Bergoglio in 2013.

It’s almost impossible not to be more likable than Francis, and to therefore be seen as more moderate by default. Francis had a reputation for casual cruelty and insults, and early on in his pontificate I had dinner with an employee of the Vatican who told me that he treated the staff very poorly.

This all fits with what I wrote in my piece about the death of Francis last month:

In some respects, it’s better for Catholics now that Francis is gone. But the damage is done. Early in his tenure, I referred to it as “The Kamikaze Papacy,” because it looked to me like he was drawing as much of the office’s power as he could in order to destroy that very office.

And he largely succeeded. There is a smoldering crater where the papacy used to be.

And his successor will almost certainly not be better. If anything, he will quite likely be less overt, more subtle, and have an even longer tenure. Even Francis’s allies were not fans of his boorish, bull-in-a-china-shop ways. He lacked tact and refinement, and he rewarded allies and punished enemies in a way that was incredibly gauche.

He also stacked the deck with the Cardinal electors, so despite the fantasy that the Holy Spirit will work some miracle, the odds are ominously bad. If you think I’m kidding, the numbers don’t lie: he elevated 108 of the 135 cardinal electors. That’s roughly 80%. He chose the kind of men who would continue on the path he blazed.

The Church has already been remade in his image. There is no going back.

Perhaps that last line is why this election feels so oddly…fake.

I don’t know how better to describe it. For two conclaves in a row, a candidate has emerged as the successor to St. Peter about whom I knew nothing at the time of election, whose name I had never so much as heard in passing in all my time spent covering the inside politics of the Catholic Church. But if Bergoglio’s appearance on the loggia filled me with a sense of preternatural dread, Prevost’s appearance is so underwhelming and anticlimactic that it feels like a staged production of some kind. It makes me think of watching a scene in a movie where a papal election is happening on-screen, but isn’t even central to the plot. It has no emotional resonance because it has no connection to anything that matters.

At least, that matters anymore.

Maybe it’s because I’ve left the faith, maybe it’s because I’m not immersed in the minutiae of the Vatican’s endless machinations every day, but it’s very surreal to me how empty it all feels.

I suspect it’s largely because Bergoglio killed the Church, at least as I knew and understood it. Like a lame duck presidency or the remaining games for a football team that has already been disqualified from the playoffs, there is a perfunctory, pro forma aura around the whole thing.

Nothing about it feels authentic or true anymore.

We are treading a scoured path, picking our way through the smoldering debris of something once majestic and grandiose that has been reduced to ruin. All the pageantry and the rumors of papal potential have roughly the same gravitas as an email notification that a software license for some product you need but don’t actually want is up for renewal. They’ve added a couple of “new features” but it’s really just the same old thing for a similar price to the one you’ve already been paying for years.

If you had some other solution, you’d cancel in a heartbeat and never look back.