A White Cassock Against A Wounded Ego:
The Trial of an American Pope
No one says it outright in the vaulted hush of the Sistine Chapel during and after the conclave, but the tension hangs there like incense after vespers: the anxious murmur of a Church now shepherded by a North American pope.
It isn’t a question of intellect, piety, or polish. Americans have those in abundance. No, the concern lies deeper—less a matter of theology than of temperament. The ghost of Leo XIII lingers still, whispering caution about the spirit of Americanism—not merely its democratic ideals, but its deeper sensibility: that blend of optimism, rugged individualism, and market-friendly morality that turns faith into personal branding and doctrine into a sales pitch. The founding promise—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—has, in many circles, become a slogan emptied of soul and pressed into the service of property, profit, and privatized virtue. Once a vision of human flourishing, it is now, too often, a license for exploitation. And so it is not the people’s freedom that concerns the Church—but what has been done in its name.
Yet now, with no small sense of irony, the Holy See has elected Leo XIV—American by birth, Peruvian by citizenship, Augustinian by formation, but most notably, one who matured not in Washington, but in the highlands and barrios of Latin America.
That final detail matters. For the empire that bore him also sent him far from its imperial heart. Before the curia, before the cameras, Pope Leo was in the margins—preaching with the latinos in Peru: from the Jesuit colleges of Bolivia to the Campesinos of Peru, understanding the language of the have-nots, the tounge of those mostly who end disenfranchised and deported from their adopted lands. Such experiences would say are not taught in Boston or Chicago: the quiet speech of suffering, the catechism of dispossession, the dialect of dependency and dashed hopes- and these are not lessons one forgets, even when the white smoke billows and the world cheers.
Still, the burden of his passport remains. His vowels, though softened by years abroad, still mark him as a son of the United States. That fact trails him into every chamber, colors every pronouncement. He is not simply the Bishop of Rome; he is, to some, the Pope from the Pentagon. For a Church that has long struggled to define itself apart from worldly powers, this is no small predicament. The fear is not that he will speak as a pope—but that he will be heard as a president.
Meanwhile, the specter of Trumpism still lingers—its rallying cry, “Make America Great Again,” echoing through airwaves and pulpits alike. But the greatness it conjures is thin and brittle, offering little to the average Joe or Jane. It is a hollow ideal, wrapped in a patchwork of distorted nationalism, fortified borders, and the vilification of migrants—fueled by a marriage of white grievance and borrowed Christian vocabulary. These voices claim to uphold conservative values, yet remain conspicuously silent on the “matters of the stomach”—the cry for living wages, affordable housing, and dignity for the working American. Pope Francis challenged this vision directly—speaking not of walls, but of bridges; not of markets, but of people; not of Wall Street, but of the Amazon and the favela. But Pope Leo cannot merely echo that legacy. He must translate it. He must speak not from the outside looking in, but from within the very system that formed him. And that is far more difficult.
And in these turbulent years—years of not forgetting the Capitol Riots, threats of ICE versus documented and undocumented migrants, and Elon Musk preaching "efficiency" at the expense of the programs America needs—the notion of an American pontiff carries freight. One cannot ignore the image of America abroad: proud, ascendant, but also bruising. From Tarriffs and statements versus the global south people know what American policy has meant. And it is not surprising that there are people who can recall missionaries who came bearing both Bibles and intelligence. That remember dictators and juntas quietly blessed by clergy or that of clergymen and laypeople who took arms and siding with the oppressed and the needy. And they will not easily forget.
It is not surprising, then, that Pope Leo meets opposition not just from skeptics in Rome but from critics within his own homeland. For some, he is too much the outsider—too concerned with migration, poverty, and foreign wars. They would rather he keep to spiritual matters, like any respectable evangelist, and leave the questions of war, borders, and human dignity to diplomats and generals. They demand a pope who stays in his lane. Abortion, yes; Gaza, no. Conscience, yes; capitalism, off-limits. But Pope Leo seems not to have read their memo. And so the charge is made: that he is meddling, politicizing, even betraying his station. That he is, in a word, inconvenient.
Not surprising, either, are the voices of those who clutch tradition in one hand and silence in the other. These are the Christians who cry out for pomp but go mute on poverty. Who would prefer a pope crowned and carried aloft in the sedia gestatoria than one speaking plainly about war and wages. They extol reverence while shunning reform, dreaming of another Pius whose obstinacy preserved antiquated orders, forgetting the living truth: ecclesia semper reformanda est—the Church must always be reformed. They babble with pride, “Roma locuta; causa finita est,” as if Rome’s speaking were always final, even when the world bleeds anew.
Some even mimic that curious sermon once offered by a British prime minister—Thatcher’s “Sermon on the Mound”—that tried to confine Christianity to private virtue while leaving “matters of the stomach” to the invisible hand of the market. They forget—or perhaps never learned—that Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum did not emerge from marble halls but from the cries of workers, coal-streaked and overworked, asking whether the Church had ears.
As an observer, it is hard not to notice the irony. These “Christians” moralize just enough to make the exploited seem dignified, yet never enough to challenge the system exploiting them. They blur the line between private and personal property when it suits them, yet fail to distinguish between the mom-and-pop shop and the monopolies that hollow out towns. The community is subordinated to the market. Humanity becomes not a neighbor, but a demographic—or worse, a statistic.
Under this pressure, Pope Leo wears two garments. One is visible: a white cassock, stitched with centuries of ritual, hope, and humility. The other is invisible, yet ever present: the American identity, with its privileges, contradictions, and shadows. He cannot shed either. But he can choose which one he serves.
If he allows his memories to shape him—the voices of the poor, the faces of the forgotten—then perhaps his Americanness becomes not an inheritance but a wound. Not a badge, but a reckoning. And perhaps only such a wounded pope can speak honestly to a wounded Church.
He could then speak of peace not as abstraction, but as confession. Of justice not as theory, but as repentance. He could reject the fantasy that the Gospel can share a bed with domination. He could remind the faithful that the Church was not born to accompany empire, but to exorcise it.
There will be calls for balance, for restraint. He will be tempted to preserve unity at the expense of truth. To temper his witness for the sake of comfort. But the Church is not suffering from too much courage. It is starving from too little.
The crucified do not speak in the language of empire. They speak in wounds. And if Pope Leo dares to do the same—if he risks being misunderstood, reviled, even betrayed—then perhaps he will not merely be remembered as the first American pope. He will be remembered as a true one.