The American Pope and the Theology of Power

By trading a White House anniversary for a migrant outpost, Pope Leo XIV is challenging the administration’s claim on the American soul.

Timothy Lesaca MD

Apr 11, 2026

In the East Room of the White House—its chandeliers suspended over a space that can feel, at times, curiously airless, Donald Trump has taken to speaking about the “soul of the nation” as if it were a property awaiting acquisition: something to be secured, renovated, perhaps even rebranded. 

Lately, however, that soul appears to have acquired a second custodian. With the elevation of Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, the moral vocabulary of the American project has encountered a figure who shares the President’s passport but not, it seems, his premises.

The development carries a certain irony. For years, segments of the American religious right imagined a more assertive papacy, one that might exchange the Vatican’s global, conciliatory posture for something closer to the idioms of national strength. In Leo XIV, they have their Chicago-born cleric. What they may not have anticipated is the Augustinian cast of his thinking. Where the administration tends to describe a world divided into winners and losers, Leo more often speaks in the older, less transactional language of neighbors and strangers. Borders, in this framing, do not disappear, but they begin to resemble something less like fortifications than injuries.

The disagreement has not remained at the level of abstraction. As Washington’s posture toward Tehran has hardened, some of the rhetoric surrounding the conflict has taken on a distinctly theological coloration, less the language of strategy than of moral purification. When Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, spoke recently of the need for decisive, even overwhelming force, the phrasing prompted an unusual public rebuke from the Vatican. Leo XIV, in remarks delivered with the measured cadence of a Midwestern schoolmaster, described such invocations as “truly unacceptable,” an assessment that, while brief, carried a wider resonance.

In Washington, the reaction has been less restrained. Reports have circulated, though not all are easily verified—of tense exchanges between Pentagon officials and the Vatican’s diplomatic representatives, suggesting a relationship that has cooled considerably in recent months. If there is a shared assumption behind these encounters, it may be that a papacy unwilling to align itself with American strategic aims risks diminishing its own relevance. The history of such assumptions, one might note, is uneven.

Leo’s response, characteristically, has been less argumentative than symbolic. His decision to forgo appearances at the United States’ semiquincentennial observances in favor of marking the Fourth of July on Lampedusa, an island whose name has become shorthand for the Mediterranean’s ongoing migrant tragedy, amounts to a quiet but pointed relocation of attention. The gesture does not so much reject the American narrative as reposition it, suggesting that its moral center might be found not in ceremony but in proximity to suffering.

There is precedent for this kind of tension. Twentieth-century Europe offers several examples of political leaders who regarded the papacy as, at best, an accessory to power and, at worst, an obstacle to it. The outcomes were mixed, though rarely in the way those leaders anticipated. Temporal authority, even at its most expansive, has often discovered limits when confronted with institutions that traffic less in coercion than in conscience.

As the conflict with Iran extends into its second month, and as figures within the administration attempt to articulate a theological rationale for its conduct, Leo XIV has emerged as an unlikely counterweight, less a partisan critic than a competing interpreter of the same moral texts. It is not yet clear how much influence such an interpretation can exert on the course of events. It is clearer, perhaps, that a war framed in religious terms does not remain solely within the control of those who first invoke them.