A few days ago, Pope Francis was hospitalized for what is turning out to be a complex illness. Pope's health a 'complex clinical situation', Vatican says. Francis is 88 years old and has been having health problems for some time. Even if he survives this time, the likelihood is close to 100% that sometime in the next 4 years, that is, during the reign of Trump, the Catholic Church will be faced with choosing a new leader.
While Francis has had a mixed record as pope, he has tried to modernize the Church and has made some gestures toward recognizing its structural problems. Half-hearted as some of those gestures have been, they have still angered conservative Catholics. Pope says conservative U.S. Catholics have replaced faith with ideology. Pope Francis says conservative critics have a ‘suicidal attitude’. Perhaps more to the point, Francis has spoken in opposition to Trump and Vance: Pope Francis calls US Catholics to listen to Jesus, not Trump, on immigration:
Pope Francis issued a clarion call to U.S. Catholics Feb. 10 [2025] to reject the anti-immigrant narrative of the Trump administration. He also rebutted Vice President JD Vance’s appeal to ordo amoris to justify the administration’s “America First” policies.
And, the Pope Informs J.D. Vance He’s Wrong About Migrants, Christianity:
Perhaps Vance is preparing an erudite response to Francis’s encyclical that will put the pontiff in his place and cheer MAGA Catholics who regard migrants as cat-eating criminal scum rather than replicas of the baby Jesus in his flight into Egypt. But Vance may not be as smart as he thinks he is. Evaluating a recent speech by the vice-president claiming religious liberty as a legacy of the early church, the National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters demolishes Vance’s “lousy attempt at historiography” and concludes he is “an ingenu [i.e., immature] or a demagogue. Or both.”
In the words of the headline of Winters’s piece, Vance is “in over his head” when he tries to pose as a wise doctor of the church equipped to instruct Catholic bishops and presumably even the Pope. [bracketed words in original]
Vance, much like Trump, does not like to be questioned, critiqued, or corrected. (Vance Shuts Down Criticism Of Munich Speech, Scolds CBS Host For Questioning His Strategy.) And as a recent convert to Catholicism, he really ought not to claim to know more about his new-found than a man who has not only led the Church for a number of years, but who spent his career before that as a Jesuit scholar.
Trump, of course, thinks any criticism of him, or anything less than abject submission, is treason (even if, in this case, it comes from a non-American. Trump is not particularly noted for consistency. Or logic.) Trump’s henchman, Tom Homan, had this to say in response to the pope’s rejection of his deportation policy: Trump's "border czar" tells Pope Francis to "stick to the Catholic Church" as pope slams mass deportations:
When asked Tuesday by a Fox News reporter to comment on the pope's "harsh words," Homan replied: "I've got harsh words for the pope: I say this as a lifelong Catholic. He ought to focus on his work and leave enforcement to us. He's got a wall around the Vatican, does he not?"
Of course, speaking out on moral issues — such as the cruelty of Trump’s deportation plans — is the pope’s work, or ought to be. And Homan is catching flak from other religious groups as well: 27 religious groups sue Trump to protect houses of worship from ICE.
In Europe this week, Vance (much like Musk before him) has been meddling in German politics, much to the disgust of the Germans. Vance Shocks Europe With a Message That He Has Long Promoted at Home.
All of this suggests to me that Trump, Vance, Homan, and probably Musk, will see the election of a new pope as an opportunity to swing the Catholic Church back to their side on matters ranging from immigration to racism to the status of women and LGBTQ (in some cases, back even more to their side). Vance has not been getting along with the majority of American bishops: See Offers Already a subscriber? Sign In The Lede J. D. Vance Brawls with the Bishops Over the Trump-Musk Agenda— but there is an emerging far-right Catholic movement that is on his side —'Load the muskets': An emergent Catholic right's hopes for the White House to the Vatican— that would love to see Francis replaced by someone more in the mold of, say, Pius XII.
Stalin once famously asked, “How many divisions has the pope?” Well, there are at least 1.4 billion Catholics in the world (2022 numbers), or about 17% of the world population. Brazil alone has 103 million, 50% of its population. Around 24% of the adult US population say they are Catholic. Whether or not they can be called divisions, they can certainly be called voters. While the Vatican’s influence, much less rule, among Catholics has fluctuated significantly since Vatican II and Humanae Vitae (the papal encyclical banning birth control), it still commands one of the loudest voices in the religious world, and the pope, as the closest thing to an absolute monarch, gets to decide what that voice will say.
It’s an irresistible opportunity to meddle for those who have already gained power through meddling.
One last point, and it’s one I’ve made over and over: Far-right Protestants do not like or trust Catholics. I’d say most Protestants, which is historically accurate, but in recent decades ecumenism and religious diversity have softened some attitudes. A Vance-led attempt to control the choice of the next pope will have the effect of, among other things, further pushing the United States to a religious war on the scale of the Thirty Years’ War and for some of the same reasons.