Generations of faith: How American Catholicism gave us Pope Leo XIV
It was not a straight line from the first Catholics landing on the shores of what would become the United States of America to Pope Leo XIV. In fact, the way here has been so winding it defies logic that an American Pope was ever going to be possible. The United States has become a deceptively influential epicenter of Catholicism. But even in this year of the election of the first American Pope, the lines with which American Catholicism are drawn have become ever more crossed.
This history is not one for the faint of heart. The nation that would become the United States of America encompasses a vast array of cultures in a collage that is prone to spats of violence and chaos. Catholicism in this country is similarly a story of diversity soldiering on through headwinds as diverse as the climates of the continental nation. In more than a couple instances we got in our own way more than the people who were shooting at us.
This amateur’s tour of the history of Catholicism in the United States is an attempt to explain Pope Leo XIV as an American Catholic. He has roots in the Caribbean, Spanish, French, and Italian immigrants to this country. The Holy Father is a product of this nation’s sins as much as he is of that same country’s promise of multicultural coexistence and socio-economic mobility. To explain him is to take a tour of that national dream two centuries before the revolution that birthed it.
I wish I could say the American Catholicism that produced Pope Leo XIV had simple, humble beginnings; but the truth is that a faith tradition like the one he is now the pre-eminent leader of is so much bigger than even a country spanning a continent and 250 years. Catholicism was seeded on this continent by colonists for better or for worse, often for worse. By the time one of our own would ascend to the chair of St. Peter it had become ingrained in this place and the people who lived here before the colonists.
The First Thanksgiving to Charles Carroll
Years after Christopher Columbus was taken in chains back to Spain for his immeasurable brutality in the year 1500, Juan Ponce de Leon had a Mass said by his expedition’s priests on the island of Puerto Rico at what is now Pueblo Viejo in Guaynabo. This was the first Mass said in what would become part of the United States of America. In 1565, Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales led the first Mass said in what is now, in 2025, a State in the United States of America in St. Augustine, Florida. There was established the very first parish in North America as well.
To tell tales of a buckle-hat settlers and native tribespeople American Thanksgiving in New England felt inappropriate in a history of Catholics in America. Catholics would not have been welcome at that Thanksgiving anyway. The Holy Mass is a thanksgiving celebration and those first Thanksgivings in what would become the United States of America happened several decades before the fictional pilgrim rendezvouses anyway. Don’t let me fool you, I will share the pious myths as well in this history, but not without the deeper truth alongside.
The Spanish and Portuguese Empires arrived in much of the Americas with priests in tow. During the age of exploration it was not uncommon for the first Europeans landing to claim the land for the crown that sent them and the Catholic Church. While the explorers themselves were manifestly more brutal to the native inhabitants on the whole than the clergy they brought along, the Church was certainly not a blameless passenger in this story. The priests carried guns with their Holy Water. Several Popes of this era directed the colonization of the New World with interventions like the Treaty of Tortisillas and Pope Alexander VI’s (p. 1492-1503) infamous doctrine of discovery which functionally sanctified the practice of dispossessing the natives of all they had for centuries thereafter.
Even as the Church often served as the only institution holding any sway with the colonizers who advocated for the human dignity of natives, the Catholic faith largely remained strictly the practice of the newcomers. That is, until the Blessed Mother stepped in. Yes, the history of American Catholicism does not make sense without a visit south of our modern borders to Mount Tepeyac.
To call the visitation and resulting religious devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe just another Marian apparition in a long history of such appearances is the depths of understatement. What began with those visitations in modern-day Mexico City in December 1531 was nothing short of the total revitalization of the Christian message, at least for the Americas. Divinity touched brutal, repressive reality and transformed it.
The Blessed Mother appearing to a poor native convert in St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin and doing so in the image of an indigenous woman, flowers from Spain in her tilma emblazoned with the starfield of central Mexico as if to embrace all the divided groups including the mestizo middle, was the inflection point of Christianity in the Americas. Here the bringer of Jesus Christ into the world brought him to the New World by showing solidarity with the colonized people there. In some way it foreshadowed the dreams of liberty and freedom that would come to define the Western Hemisphere in later centuries.
Conversions to Catholicism were a slow trickle in 1530. By 1550, inextricably due to the Our Lady of Guadalupe, they were being counted in the millions. Native vocations to the priesthood and religious life would follow and it would not be long before peoples of native and mixed descent in the Spanish colonial holdings of the Americas were ministering to one another. Indeed the earliest forms of resistance to the exploitations of colonialism originated from an increasingly native and mixed-looking Church in the New World.
The institutional epicenter of the Church back in Europe was in the tumult of the Protestant Reformation. Pope Paul III (p. 1534-1549) was the first Pope to meaningfully respond with the Council of Trent beginning in 1545. But this pontiff also took a revolutionary step for his time regarding the Americas: he declared the same God-given dignity for natives of the Americas and banned their abuse and enslavement. Mind you he did this while continuing to allow the enslavement of Muslims in Europe, but the forced conversions and enslavement endemic during the early years of colonization of the Americas would now begin to trail off in the ensuing decades, at least in the Spanish colonies of the Americas.
Indeed Catholicism was spread via the missions up into what we now call the United States of America. While the French Empire made forays into what is now Quebec throughout the 1500s, their permanent settlements after 1608 mark the arrival of French Catholicism and their assorted missions throughout the Great Lakes region. St. Kateri Tekakwitha and numerous missionary saints to my own region of the country were the heralds of this differently enculturated version of the Catholic faith. The French possessions in North America grew down the Mississippi River and its tributaries linking up with other such settlements on the Gulf Coast like New Orleans. In 1700 the vast territories of New France rivaled Spanish and Portuguese holdings in other parts of the Americas.
Via multiple ancestors Pope Leo XIV has all of Spanish, French, and Italian heritage in his background so even in the genetic lineage of the first American Pope there are shades of the history of the faith coming to this country.
Many different colonial trends were all at work across what we now consider the US. However the revolution that would eventually birth that country was fought against the British Empire. Those colonizers were late coming to North America relative to the colonial interests we just covered. While Jamestown in Virginia, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its break off colonies in New England, were founded early in the 1600s, it wasn’t until after the English Civil Wars and the Restoration of the Crown in 1661 that there would be meaningful attention paid to these colonies. Here we find a religious history very different from what the Spanish and French brought but nonetheless foreshadowing of the United States religious ethos.
While the Salem Witch Trials capture the imagination of modern historians, the story of religion in the British colonies was largely a reflection of the homeland’s biases. Witches were only the tip of the iceberg in that regard. Catholicism was flatly unwelcome. In the northern colonies of New England Catholics were often treated with the same malice as they were in Old England. Europe was still fighting over religion a full century after the beginning of the Reformation.
This was the era of Wars of Religion in France and the particularly devastating Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in what we now call Germany. The latter such conflict was positively apocalyptic for the continent and is often cited by historians as the last major European War truly fought over religion. While the big wars stopped being about religion the appetite for fighting over it was not gone altogether, in fact religious violence and seeking refuge from it was imported to the colonies. This came back on the English colonies in North America by way of the second baron of Baltimore Cecil Calvert. This is perhaps the earlier seed that germinated Catholicism in the British colonies on the continent.
Calvert was given a proprietary colony by King Charles I which he named Maryland after that King’s wife, Henrietta Maria. His intentions were not hidden; he meant it as a colony for Catholic refugees of those conflicts in Europe and indeed the worsening overall conditions for Catholics in England as the century went on. The name was a convenient double meaning reference to Our Lady, the Blessed Mother Mary. Functionally this meant religious tolerance for the first time in what would become the United States of America more than a century later. Protestants in neighboring Virginia were not kept out and unlike the other colonies at this time which tacitly or openly established various Protestant denominations as the colonial state Church (often Anglicanism), the Maryland Charter did not.
Maryland as this kind of Catholic bastion in the English colonies would be relatively short lived. After Cecil Calvert’s death in 1675, his son Charles would be overrun by Coode’s Rebellion (sometimes called the Protestant Revolution) in 1689. By that point Protestants had become the majority in Maryland and the Glorious Revolution back in England had in 1688 created permanent, legally binding Protestant rule there. Now the British Empire, which would be formally declared a decade later after Union with Scotland, would prefer Protestantism in its domain. This preference would persist long after the revolution a century later.
The Catholic seeds of the American revolution however were there in Maryland. Henry Darnall, the last Chancellor of the old proprietary colony who was overthrown by Coode’s Rebellion, was the great grandfather of Charles Caroll of Carrollton. That name will become important shortly. After Darnall and Old Maryland was overthrown, Catholics were deprived of the rights to hold office and the faith itself was outlawed. What proceeded then in the 1700s was a sort of underground Catholicism of secret Chapels in homes not unlike the Early Church under Roman persecution. Back in England, as was also the case in many of the colonies, was a formalized legal effort "to prevent the growth of Popery."
As the American revolution drew near in the latter decades of the 1700s, the Catholic faith in the British North American colonies was either insulated by wealth in the case of the few such privileged Americans who professed the faith like Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, or it was the practice of exotic merchants and Irishmen or French emissaries as animosity for the British Crown grew following the French and Indian War (1754-1763).
Maryland, the colony which had been envisioned, at least for a brief time as the colony for Catholics fleeing Britian, saw the first Catholic Diocese erected in Baltimore shortly after the revolution in 1789. Charles Carroll’s cousin, John Carroll was the first Bishop there. American victory in the revolution had brought legal religious toleration re-establishing it in Maryland for the first time since the original Catholic Lords of the Calvert House. It is not unfounded to think Catholics in America at the time of the revolution rejoiced at the creation of a new nation in which they could at least theoretically practice their faith openly.
The Baltimore Basilica, seat of the first Bishop in this country and functionally the mother Church of American Catholicism, was the exception not the rule in those days. The nascent American Republic would never be less Catholic than it was in those early years. Spanish influences were decidedly other and enemy while any Catholicism radiating off French holdings on the continent were now relegated to the old French cities of New Orleans and St. Louis among other enclaves in what would be swallowed up in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
The colonial and revolutionary generations of American Catholicism had mixed experiences and looked different in composition based on where we are talking about. After the revolution physical Catholic Churches would only exist in minority enclaves like Baltimore for decades to come still. This dynamic is, to some extent still with us as American Catholics. The siege mentality, us holding onto our faith packed closely together in a varyingly hostile nation, was adopted by successive waves of other cultural groups of Catholics to arrive on American shores. In the nineteenth century it was muscle memory not out of a false sense of persecution, but a very real sense of danger.
Before continuing on this history lesson I think it is worth pausing on the word politicization. This article is about Catholicism in America producing a Pope. That is, a religion producing a leader for itself through the cultural milieu of a specific political body: the distinct nation-state known as the United States of America. Politics is the lived reality of authority in history. Religion is the lived reality of people of faith. It is impossible to tell this story without identifying the cultural contexts, the politicizations of the faith in particular moments in history, especially if a Pope is your endpoint of the story.
Moreover, Pope Leo XIV is the product of history like we all are. This first American Pope does not exist in a vacuum and did not emerge from one. As America emerges from its fight for independence victorious, the story of Catholicism stateside, and by historical extension, Pope Leo, grows and changes in ways that are inseparable from those lived realities that look like politics to anyone with eyes to see.
American Revolution to Industrial Revolution
One could argue the Civil War was already beckoning on the horizon after the new country survived the War of 1812. Slavery was the great bigotry of this time that caused the eventual civil conflict, but many other nativist bigotries prevailed, especially anti-Catholicism. Great numbers of largely Catholic Irish and German immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s alarmed this nativist streak in the likes of preachers like Lyman Beecher who circulated tracts like “Plea of the West” in 1835 demanding Catholics be banned from westward settlement.
Rhetoric was one thing, but violence was also not uncommon. On August 11th, 1834, an Ursuline Convent in Massachusetts was burned to the ground by an anti-Catholic mob. The fledgling Diocese of Boston and its Bishop Fenwick pleaded with their flocks to not return violence for violence and largely succeeded in that mission with the help of agreeable civil authorities. Perhaps one might see this moment as a true legacy of the faith in the United States: a break in the chain of violence that religious devotion has so often triggered in this country.
It wasn’t just in the vast agrarian expanse where angry mobs targeted people of “popish persuasion”. In 1806 a Christmas Eve Mass at the Old St. Peter’s Church in lower Manhattan was attacked. At the time it was uncommon for Protestants to celebrate Christmas and that celebration was targeted as a “Popish superstition”.
In the midst of this decidedly non-Catholic phase of American history the first person of American citizenship to later be declared a Saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton, converted to Catholicism from the Episcopalianism that dominated the northern states. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton converted and often attended the aforementioned Old St. Peter’s Church in her hometown New York City. She was often seen praying before the altar, eyes fixed upon the crucifixion painting above it. Her story serves as something of a perfect biographical background story for the history of her new coreligionists in the 1800s.
The first wave of the Klu Klux Klan in Ante-bellum America was not afraid to keep Catholics on their hit lists alongside escaped, free-born slaves and the other groups they labelled undesirable. Catholics were a boogeyman in nativist writings across the growing country. In less violent expressions of anti-Catholicism, one might find “Catholics need not apply” as a catchall in job listings in places with deep Catholic legacy like Baltimore, New York, and Boston at midcentury. The nativist know-nothing party even tried to push former President Milard Filmore as an 1856 presidential candidate on a largely anti-Catholic platform.
By the eve of the Civil War there was a considerable number of Catholics scattered across the States, though already clustering in the cities. In a demographic foreshadowing even at this juncture the Catholics who lived outside the major cities were wealthier, able to maintain their practice with patron priests and private Chapels. Rural or Urban, wealthy Catholics insulated themselves from the violence as best they could while poorer, often more recent immigrants to the country, were largely the frontline fodder. The solidarity that existed between the classes would occasionally express itself with the patronage of new Church buildings, but it was an uphill fight for every “Romanist” in these years.
This demographic reality would largely not change until the suburbanization of the twentieth century after World War II. This was the old politicization of American Catholicism. Tiny minorities of Catholics existed in a Protestant sea that hoped for a new religious liberty free of the religious violence of the old world. I say old politicization because it would eventually change and it did constitute an intentionally maintained prejudice, even faintly legally maintained in some places, though the Constitution’s first amendment guaranteed religious freedom.
As history always teaches us: our ideals rarely match the reality, and the United States of America is no exception to this rule. There is no greater evidence in that history than the American Civil War where the nation was torn asunder over its original sin, its great chasm between ideal and reality: slavery.
When the Civil War broke out there were Catholics in all parts of the conflict and its secondary effects. Catholic Nuns of various orders, many notably of the order St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had established out of Emmitsburg, Maryland, served as battlefield medics during the War. You can find abolitions and pro-slavery Catholics, even Bishops, in Civil War America. Catholics served on both sides of the conflict though sampled in much greater numbers in Union blue. By this point there were enough Bishops in the United States for there to be some disagreement among clergy along the regional divisions of the cataclysmic war. Notably there were two Catholics of confederate sympathies among the conspirators to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Their capture and eventual execution helped stoke the post-Civil War rash of anti-Catholicism.
After the War a series of giant waves of immigration brought vastly more Catholics to this country. This time it wasn’t just the Irish, with Italian, Polish, and many other national backgrounds arriving. At this point however, the Industrial Revolution was fully taking hold in the United States and particularly its still more heavily populated eastern seaboard. It is historical fact that these new immigrants were largely held out of socio-economic mobility via primitive, often bias labor laws at the time. They were almost always made to live in squalid, crowded tenement buildings in the cities.
Most Catholic immigrant communities of this era, like any marginally free such immigrant group, took 2-3 generations to work their way out of this poverty as legal and cultural attitudes improved. Their relegation to slums or ghettos came to defined their practice of the faith and supercharged the socio-economic disparity between rural and urban Catholics in this country in the inverse way it worked for most other Christian groups. Like in colonial America, rural Catholics were largely the wealthy ones while the urban Catholics lived an industrial revolution nightmare in the cities.
Practically this means very homogenized sub-populations and culturally different neighborhoods that were more easily discriminated against by the broader authorities of largely WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant) descent: excellent recruiting grounds for organized crime. Criminality is always the accusation against minority groups struggling to get a leg up in a new country. Unfortunately that is often the desired result of the majority group oppressors: keep them locked away in urban ghettos with minimal economic opportunity in order to make many resort to crime and further reinforce the negative biases.
The tremendous political machine of organized crime in New York City, Tammany Hall, grew out of social fraternal organizations in the Irish Catholic ghettos responding to this prejudicial phenomenon. The segregation imposed by the WASP aristocracy in that City reinforced the organization which further sought to get around discriminatory barriers by way of organized crime. There was a thin line between the political organizing and organized crime because legal avenues often provided little recourse and upward mobility.
The religious effects of this segregation were myriad. The third great awakening which was occurring in America around the turn of the twentieth century largely missed American Catholics for better or for worse because it didn’t touch their ghettoized parts of the cities quite as much. It also means that both legally enforced and self-imposed segregation into these areas, “ghettoization” in the phraseology of religious studies, kept Catholicism a fringe, foreign cult in the eyes of many Americans.
American Catholicism would largely remain this ghettoized for 75 years until the time of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen and President John F. Kennedy. That was the American Catholicism Pope Leo XIV was born into… but we are not quite there yet. We are to the point in American history, around 1900, when the American Pontiff’s grandparents arrived in the country. Or, in the case of his maternal side, moved within it.
Pope Leo’s paternal grandfather, Salvatore Riggitano, avoided the ghettos when he immigrated to Chicago from Sicily in 1903. He was a music instructor and teacher of French, Italian, and Spanish going as far as establishing his own school. Riggitano however had an affair during his first marriage and fathered the Pope’s dad and his uncle with the woman who would become his second wife. That wife’s maiden name was Prevost and that is where the Pope’s given surname comes from. The Pope’s grandfather took that name as his new surname out of some shame for the affair which had him imprisoned briefly. The Pope’s paternal grandmother was of French descent and ironically that surname her husband would take on originated with the latin word “to be put in charge”. Just a neat little linguistic foreshadowing for the first American Pope, eh?
Pope Leo’s maternal grandparents were both members of the New Orleans creole community, French in a different way. Creole is a word often used to describe people of mixed race in Louisiana and much of the lower Mississippi river basin. French, Spanish, Native, African, and half a dozen other ethnic backgrounds contributed to the Creole Community in this area. By blood quantum rules of the US in the nineteenth century almost all of the Pope’s maternal ancestors would be considered black.
Those rules were very discriminatory and regressive, not making any distinctions between African heritage, Spanish/Caribbean heritage, and native heritage, but this is why you might hear some refer to Pope Leo XIV as a Black Pope. The Pope’s ancestors only two generations back would have been identified as colored and would have had to use separate drinking fountains among other forms of segregation in the American South.
However the rules of that time worked, Robert Prevost and none of his brothers or their descendants identify as anything other than American white, a racial identifier with far less genealogical backing, continuing to exist in America today as a stealth identifier of cultural status more than any specific ethnic background. Shortly after Robert Prevost became Pope Leo XIV he was informed of some of this background for the first time, another subtle but confronting point about Americans and our attitudes toward our own identities.
While we’re noting racial and genealogical history in a country as diverse as the United States, it is also worth noting that Pope Leo’s maternal grandparents had at least some Cuban and Dominican Spanish in them. There are records that his maternal grandfather’s parents owned at least some slaves while it is also very likely that they could have simultaneously been the descendants of slaves themselves. Yes, this Pope contains volumes on American history in his bones.
Indeed I could write a whole blog post about how the genealogical background of Pope Leo XIV covers a huge swath of American ancestry and history. But this is meant to be more of a history than a genealogy. Either way, Pope Leo’s maternal grandparents moved to Chicago from New Orleans and of their seven daughters, two would become Nuns. Pope Leo’s mother was born in 1912, his father in 1920. His mother a librarian with a master’s degree, a big accomplishment for a woman of that time, and his father a school principal. His parents were active members of their parish in Chicago’s far southside and his mother was even a member of the Church’s altar society, raising her boys Catholic like family generations across the Americas before them.
By the time of the Pope’s birth in 1955, American Catholicism was in a period of very rapid change following the Second World War. Many of the aforementioned immigrant Catholic populations and their children served their new nation in that War even after the proceeding decades of the early twentieth century had not treated them well. The old politicization of American Catholicism would begin to crack as Catholics climbed socio-political ladders in American society before that war broke it entirely.
In the inter-war years American Catholics had begun to successfully climb the societal ladder in some places. Two of my fellow New Yorkers stand out in this regard: Fiorello La Guardia and Al Smith. The former was mayor of New York City from 1934-1946 and remains the most influential Italian American most Italian Americans have not heard of. He was born in the tenement buildings and went onto lead the City during the Great Depression and War years. The latter, Al Smith, was more of an example of how the ghettoized and marginalized Catholicism of this period provided a certain ceiling to even the most enterprising American Catholics with deep roots stateside.
Al Smith’s mother was Irish American, and his father was a rare Italian American Civil War veteran. Smith recalled “growing up with the Brooklyn Bridge” and rose up through New York City government. He was an acolyte of the same progressive political movement of his day which had brought Woodrow Wilson to the White House, though different in some important ways that will become obvious shortly. He had climbed through patronage-rich positions on his way up nonetheless: patronage being the system of jobs for your own allies and cronies that had been the hot button political issue in the country since the end of Reconstruction in 1876.
With some assistance of the powerful aforementioned Tammany Hall, Al Smith first became Mayor in 1918. He lost re-election and was out of office by 1920 but won every mayoral race he ran in for the rest of the 1920s. By 1928 he had his sights set on the White House and became the very first American Catholic to win the nomination of a major political party. He ran against Herbert Hoover in the general election and hit a wall of Anti-Catholicism. The ceiling for public office for Catholics at the time seemed to be what he had already achieved. He landed had the first cracks in that highest ceiling.
The KKK held cross burnings across the country and bigoted myths too ludicrous to address, like the ideas he would simply hand over the White House to the Pope or spend all the nation’s gold building a tunnel to Rome if elected, underlined how many Americans were simply not ready to consider a Catholic President. Al Smith carried the vote among similarly disadvantaged ethnic groups but there was a bad association there. Smith’s party had hoped to reclaim these groups after the bigotry of Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency, a reinvigoration of many American bigotries including anti-Catholicism.
Smith was running as a Catholic in a Democratic party that was not the bastion of diversity many modern Americans associate with it. The Wilson legacy domestically was one of deference to southern racists and unwillingness to make meaningful reforms. Even with Smith largely winning the recently achieved women’s vote, Herbert Hoover won in a landslide, and the first plausible shot at an American Catholic attaining to the highest office in the land ended there.
The ridiculous myths of anti-Catholicism in the inter-war years may have indicated just how shaky that bigotry was becoming. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President in 1933 it was largely because of the Great Depression and hopes he would take more action than Hoover had. FDR, an Episcopalian like much of the country’s WASP elites, turned the tide of tolerance in his party during his long presidency. By 1938 FDR could see war on the horizon in Europe and Asia. He picked an Irish Catholic, Joseph P. Kennedy, for the crucial role of Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Progress though it was, Joe Kennedy did not last long in the role. He had Presidential ambitions he was too loose lipped about. He told a British reporter he expected FDR to lose the 1940 election. Worse more, much of the British government hated Joe Kennedy after he fled to the countryside during the Battle of Britian and espoused what American journalists simply called defeatism about the growing war in Europe. He sought to appease Adolf Hitler and the fascist monsters of Europe when both Britian and the US were hardening their stance against them.
While Joe Kennedy’s service to his country ended in 1940 when he lost his post in FDR’s diplomatic corps, his son John was fighting in the War and would go on to have much better political fortunes than his father in the Post-War world. That Kennedy, better known as JFK, would smash the ceiling of political life for American Catholics in a new age for his coreligionists in the United States of America. The old, bigoted politicization of American Catholicism would give way to a new, divisive politicization, and the hinge was this Massachusetts Irish Catholic who would become President of the United States.
The American Catholicism Pope Leo XIV was born into
When JFK ran for President in 1960 he faced some of the same anti-Catholic headwinds Al Smith had thirty-two years prior. By midcentury however there were cultural currents turning in favor of American Catholicism. JFK himself was of the generation we call the “Greatest Generation” here in the United States because of their sacrifices in the Second World War. If there was a single event in American history which changed the fortunes of American Catholics it was this most deadly war in human history, or at least its aftermath.
In some ways the ghettoized Catholicism that was routine before the War could simply not persist in the Post-War world. Between the GI Bill and dozens of other social programs in law at the time there was never a better time in the history of the nation to climb the socio-economic ladder. Physically unscathed at home by the apocalyptic War and the principle funder of much of the rest of the world’s reconstruction, the United States of America was at its economic apex.
Rapid suburbanization in the United States allowed anyone with the financial means to move out of the cities to do so. Suddenly many Americans had the means to do so. This trend did not spare Catholics and in many of these newly built suburbs it was not uncommon to find Catholic Churches and their parishioners in sizable numbers. The deghettoization of American Catholicism was underway.
For some strains of Christianity in this country, this Post-War period was their first encounter with Catholics, and they saw much of the best of us: whether that be Venerable Fulton Sheen at his preaching peak or the liturgical movements that led into the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Historians now largely agree that the normalization of the faith in this country really began in earnest in those years.
The year after Pope Leo’s birth, the 1956 Suez Crisis led to the US becoming the undisputed leader of the Free World’s collective foreign policy as the Cold War with the Soviet Union saw every international conflict become a proxy front for the two superpowers to vie for influence. The specter of nuclear war hung over all such proceedings. Pope Pius XII (p. 1939-1958) and Catholic leaders the world over condemned nuclear weapons so much it may have even exceeded their fears of the atheistic persecution of the Church under Soviet Communism in some circles. The new politicization of American Catholicism was in its earliest, embryonic phases so what the faith meant to the US at large was changing too.
The deghettoization of American Catholicism was helped in no small part by the rabid anti-communism of this time. Most all religious people were now seen as friendlies in a worldwide conflict against anti-business, atheist communism. This was a boon for the Presidential hopes of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Unlike his father, he read the conditions of the moment a lot better.
JFK used a skill with new mass-technologies like television to his advantage and beat out an ascendant Richard Nixon in the general election. Yes, there were anti-Catholic barbs sent JFK’s way in the primary phase and in the general election to a lesser extent. However the lasting religious impact of the 1960 election, other than bringing the first Catholic into the Oval Office, was something JFK said to defuse the anti-Catholicism he faced.
On April 21st, 1960, Senator Kennedy gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper editors in Washington DC. To say this speech was about his Catholicism would be an understatement. This speech was about Catholicism in America in general and how it fit into the prevailing views of American exceptionalism at that time. Among other things he said “I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I do not speak for the Catholic Church on issues of public policy - and no one in that Church speaks for me.”
To be clear, I am not trying to reflect on the man’s own personal Catholicism. Popular rumors at the time had it that Kennedy was habitually unfaithful to his wife and did not take Mass attendance or the sacraments very seriously. What I am reflecting on here is a watershed moment in how Catholicism, and in a certain way, religion in America more generally changed with JFK. The Kennedy understanding of religion in politics and religion in public life changed everything.
Sincere religious convictions have always and will always effect how people live their public lives. This is an incontrovertible fact of life and sociology. The United States and its multi-cultural view of itself is designed to make diversity, including religious diversity, a strength. JFK’s approach to this, as epitomized in his April 1960 speech, flattened the discourse over what this means dramatically. His understanding, essentially “I am a Catholic in private and not meaningfully so in public”, hollowed out what could have been a far more powerful public discourse on the topic.
Instead, religion would be treated forever after in American life as something you kept to yourself without letting it affect how you voted or wanted the government to function. That thinking now pervaded broad sectors of American society at the very least. This had consequences we are still living with today. Perhaps it was the price to be paid for American Catholicism’s normalization.
To be fair to Kennedy, the Second Vatican Council was still a few years away from affirming the supremacy of conscience, religious liberty, and affirming democracy within the context of subsidiarity within Catholic Social Teaching. All developments that have since greatly defanged anti-Catholic perceptions about Catholics’ commitment to the American experiment. In spite of what appearances and the nature of the papacy may suggest, Catholicism was no longer a religion organized fundamentally upon a monarchical understanding of God over government after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The Church prefers freedom-guaranteeing democracies in 9 out of 10 circumstances these days but that is our reality now: that was not obviously coming down the pipe in 1960.
To Kennedy and his generation there was not a nuanced conversation to be had on what it means for your religious convictions to affect your public life other than you do or you don’t. The institutional Church had played a little too nice with dictators like Francisco Franco in Spain and Antonio Salazar in Portugal and of course Benito Mussolini in Italy in the formative years of Kennedy’s generation. That’s not to mention the centuries prior of crowning monarchs. The Second Vatican Council hoped to put that way of the Church interacting with civil society behind it after the great evils the dictatorships of those years wrought.
JFK didn’t know the changes coming in his faith a few years down the line. His ascent to the White House corresponded directly with that change during the Council. Even if there were the vocabulary and the rhetorical framework in place to have a post-Vatican II conversation about religion in public life it is likely JFK, even with all his grace in public speaking, was not the messenger for it. Nonetheless, the definitive moment of American Catholicism in the twentieth century had come and gone.
I will be referring back to the “Kennedy Compromise” from here on out. This is what I mean: keep your religion private if you want to have an impact on public life and the policy of American governance. I am no theocrat, I don’t want religion to run government, that would be bad for both of them. But isolating one’s religious convictions from their public decision making is unsustainable and set unrealistic expectations for our nation’s politics and, in the decades to follow, contributed to an erosion of America’s internal solidarity.
JFK won the White House, and the First American Catholic President was at the center of what Jackie Kennedy would later call “Camelot”. Kennedy’s beautiful family, numerous children, and other family members in government, lend themselves to a perfectly desirable image of American power for that moment in the life of the nation. They were Catholic and suddenly that was not frightening at all. JFK’s assassination in 1963 tipped off a tumultuous decade plus in American life. This complicated man gained a mythical status with the general public and with Catholics in America.
In house hunting I have come across multiple homes formerly owned by members of that generation and baby boomers who were inspired by him with framed photos of JFK as if he was a member of the family. In a generation flat, Catholicism in America had gone from the disloyal faith of ghettoized urban centers to the fully normalized religion of an American public martyr spoken of in the same sentence as the savior of the Union President Lincoln.
By the time Ronald Reagan became US President in the 1980s, Catholicism was so normalized that the former actor thought it was politically advantageous to formalize diplomatic relations with the Holy See. To say this was unthinkable a generation earlier is an understatement. If JFK had proposed such a thing when he was running for office the Klu Klux Klan would have organized mass rallies in major cities. Perceptions had changed so dramatically that Pope St. John Paul II and Reagan were often wrote about as if they were bosom buddies, two parts of an anti-communist trinity with Margaret Thatcher.
Let us return to the life of the man who would become Pope Leo XIV to further understand where this story is going. Young Robert Francis Prevost was so destined for life in the Church that his brothers reported he would “play Mass” using the ironing board as an altar. He was so clear in this vision of his vocation that he chose to leave his home-state for High School to attend St. Augustine Seminary High School in Michigan. His brother stated Robert Prevost was sure he wanted to be an Augustinian Priest as early as the eighth grade.
Prevost excelled academically and went to Villanova University in 1973 where he earned a degree in Mathematics. He was not distant from his drive for the Priesthood in these years living in the Friary of the Augustinians on campus, their local residence. In 1977 Prevost entered the Order of St. Augustine and he was ordained a Priest in Rome in 1982. Prevost came of age in the immediate aftermath of the Council, and this is an enormous detail in understanding both him and American Catholicism after Vatican II.
Every Pope since Vatican II has known the Council as a programmatic agenda to varying degrees. They were all grown men, all ordained already or in seminary formation in Pope Francis’ case, at the time the Council was occurring. They understood the Council as an event legislating necessary changes in the life of the Church. Prevost would have been only the tender age of 14, still a boy playing Mass yet to go off to High School, when the Council’s changes arrived in the American Church.
For Prevost the Council functionally created the Church he knew and the clerical life he wanted to join. At the peak of his ambition as a young man he saw the post-Vatican II Church in front of him and embraced it with all of his soul and being. The American Catholicism that developed in the six plus decades since the Council is Robert Prevost’s Catholicism. It is the Catholicism that would make him Pope Leo XIV.
American Catholicism at the turn of the twenty first century
To be fair to the new Holy Father, the mission field called him out of his native land. Prevost would be out of the United States for most of his ordained life spending most of that time in Peru during some of that country’s most turbulent years. When the terrorists attacks of September 11th, 2001, happened, Prevost had just been elected Prior General of the Order of St. Augustine. He had become the world leader of the Augustinians just as the world changed.
Let’s take a step back again and look at American Catholicism in the years of his priesthood to understand Prevost’s final ascent to the papacy. Prevost’s absence from his homeland might have spared him from the worst effects of the new politicization of American Catholicism. By the time he was brought into Pope Francis’ Vatican in 2023, nobody in the English-speaking world would really be able to escape the more toxic outgrowths of what living the faith in the United States had become.
After Kennedy, Catholics were now largely seen as merely another, albeit quirky, denomination of Christianity in a Christian majority nation. The Kennedy Compromise assured that broad acceptance would persist just as the civil rights movements, feminism, and the greater cultural transformations the boomer generation stood up for were taking off. The Kennedy Compromise quickly became part of the framework of newly blossoming political partisanship in the country. The very beginnings of the culture wars that seem to consume all of American life today began in the 1970s.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, distrust toward government institutions began evolving into a broader cultural distrust of all institutions that would eventually grip both ends of the changing American political spectrum. Abuses of power occurring concurrently with the cultural transformation caused our politics to begin a long road toward discord. The Kennedy Compromise held religion at arm’s length during these changes in ways that defined the era and the decades to follow.
President Jimmy Carter was the last President I consider hailing from a religious framework prior to the full effects of the Kennedy Compromise. Here was a President who made choices out of his religious convictions and often explained his thinking to you. Some liked this about the peanut farmer. For others it wore thin fast when hard times came. The post-war apex of American life was beginning its speed wobble downward.
The rest of the world was no longer living in the ruins of World War II. The birth pangs of the post-industrial economy saw employment turmoil simmer before exploding into the oil embargo fueled downturn of the late 1970s. Foreign imports like Japanese cars arrived on American streets for the first time as prices for domestic goods climbed. Women now began entering the workforce in droves for the first time since the war, partly for themselves and partly because two household incomes were becoming necessary. Revolution in Iran led to a hostage crisis that gripped the nation for more than a year. Change was arriving in every aspect of American life, but it wasn’t quite the cynicism we know today just yet.
President Carter called it “malaise” in his infamous speech during the height of his administration’s struggles. This moment, more than his loss in the 1980 election, signaled how American religious life was changing. The American people largely felt lectured to. Americans felt sermonized at as if their struggles were for a lack of spiritual resolve. The Kennedy Compromise kicked in and Carter’s religiosity became a liability. But religion in America was evolving, not dying.
While Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr would use religion as a huge part of their political image, they used it in a very different way than their predecessors. A growing cultural movement across Christianity in America had developed a coalition its boosters called the “moral majority” or the “silent majority” depending on who you asked. A neo-conservative movement that was distinctly right-wing sought to create reliable voting blocs out of religious voters along the lines of social issues.
While Catholic nuns were the first to protest the legalization of abortion after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, by the start of the next decade anti-abortion or “Pro-Life” voters consisted of a wide set of different kinds of Christian denominational blocs. Those blocs are a big part of what got twelve straight years of Republican rule elected from 1980-1992. The “silent majority” political program was being elected, a rhetorical program that used religion not as the basis of convictions used to govern as in the pre-Kennedy context, but one used to sufficiently attain power for its own sake, often nakedly devoid of the more ethical thinking religion provides.
No post-Watergate President would be free of a scandal large enough to ruin their legacy to the unbiased observer. Opinions, not convictions, were taking over American political life as it were. If the Kennedy Compromise taught Americans to keep their religious convictions out of government via a faulty understanding of separation of Church and State, then what filled the vacuum was opinion that sounded religious enough to win over votes. For all political persuasions from this point on the name of the game was salesmanship more than true policy-making.
At some point in the Billy Graham-induced Fourth Great Awakening that had occurred in the 1960s and 70s, the phenomenon I recognize as the Kennedy Compromise created a reactionary group of religious Americans who were committed to living their faith very publicly and very focused on the halls of power. This often undermined living their faith sincerely in any way that an objective observer would identify as classically Christian. This movement we know today as Evangelicalism: the Christian denomination that would dominate the faith stateside so much that it broke down most traditional barriers between those denominations.
As the two main political parties in America took their current form in the 1970s, moving toward distinctive ideological alignments, Republicans as right-wing conservatives and Democrats as left-wing liberals, the religious angle played a huge part. American Catholicism was very much subject to this same politicization, after all it was just another Christian denomination now. Evangelicals on the other hand were designed for this politicization and to this day remain the only Christian group in America that consistently and overwhelmingly votes for one party.
More than any particular religious groups aligning with either party, the more significant development of this period was how it formed around the Kennedy Compromise. The Democratic coalition post-Carter was largely committed to the Kennedy Compromise in the belief it served to solidify a more diverse base of support. Jimmy Carter himself would soon be too pro-life for this party. The Republican coalition as constituted in the Reagan years rejected the Kennedy Compromise, or at least paid enough lip service to rejecting it to lock down Evangelicals and a half of all other Christian denominations. Reagan Republicanism as it existed prior to 2016 sought to inject religion into politics for the sake of a dependable base of support more than true religious convictions for doing so. The culture wars began in earnest by the early 1990s.
The public discourse on Abortion, Gay Marriage, and a host of other issues increasingly fell into ideological baskets that were crafted very intentionally to draw people into two increasingly ideologically coherent party coalitions. This would increasingly be to the detriment of actually solving the nation’s problems and its good governance. This was political expediency: vote for us because you agree with our position whether or not we possess any real solutions.
President Bill Clinton tried to find a centrist way to navigate this environment, but his personal failings prevented him. Bill Clinton was, in no small way the embodiment of the baby boomer commitment to the Kennedy Compromise. Politically awakened in his youth by JFK’s ascent, Clinton was a policy wonk dressed in the chaotic social machinations that the Kennedy Compromise caused: a public life of one set of opinions with a private life of very different convictions or perhaps the lack thereof. Clinton’s personal scandals were the perfect fodder for the American culture wars as they had now been constituted.
That discordant, unnatural separation of one’s public and private beliefs was not a feature of one side of the aisle. In the Iran-Contra scandal President Reagan too had compromised moral convictions for political expediency countering Soviet influence in Latin America. Though it was not as lurid and flashy as the Monica Lewinsky scandals it showed true religious convictions had exited the equation in this new politicization of American religion: political tribe over whatever convictions you had religious or otherwise.
Looking back now it’s clear how this dynamic naturally leads to the destructive mindset of party over country and ideology over faith, but now I am getting ahead of myself.
All the while it is worth restating that the growing arena of culture war politics served to distract government officials, the vast array of political junkies in their orbit, and the American people to a lesser extent, from the real issues of the day that affected real people. The AIDS epidemic was largely ignored by the Reagan administration. The drug epidemics in the 1980s and 1990s claimed millions of lives before morphing into an equally destructive opioid epidemic that government under both parties largely deregulated corporations into creating. Think Perdue Pharma and the speedy approval of Oxycodone.
Racial unrest with the Rodney King riots did nothing to prevent a bipartisan bill from passing in Congress that skyrocketed the racial bias of American prison populations. All of this with the backdrop of a growing socio-economic divide brought on by stagnation of wages falling behind inflation by double measures each decade. American needs had been detached from American politics and religion had been brought along the ride too much to help in many cases. The new politicization of American Catholicism helped make it less vibrant in American public life.
We arrive at the 9/11 attacks in 2001 as a country victorious in the Cold War but domestically discordant and dazed. The culture war politics that were now normal by that September day in 2001 had cleaved the Catholic population down the center into separate, rival political camps. The cultural conversation around religion grew more divisive as right-wingers subsumed religious sentiments and bastardized opposition to their approach under the guise of the Kennedy Compromise. It’s too easy to scare a religious base of support out of switching to the opposition when that opposition’s best account of their religiosity is “none” or I keep that to myself.
The American Catholicism Robert Prevost now read about as he traveled the world as the Prior General of the Augustinians was as divided as the political culture around it. Within American Catholicism there were now very distinct rival political camps that prioritized conforming the faith to their political agendas rather than honestly living the faith as they might think Jesus Christ’s Catholic Church would lead them to do so.
Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a Catholic television station founded by TV speaking aficionado Mother Angelica, looked like a polished Catholic version of the Evangelical tele-evangelist preachers on radio and television channels more and more every year. It was the early flagship of the neo-conservative aligned faction of American Catholicism that would go as far as to regularly attack the sitting Pope in the 2010s for not aligning neatly enough with an right-wing American understanding of Catholicism.
Meanwhile American Catholics of a left-wing persuasion found themselves increasingly politically homeless or twisting themselves into knots to support the broader left-wing movement’s support of abortion rights even though it went against Church teaching dating back to the first century. The Kennedy Compromise made their political instrumentalization feel awkward. The social activism that had defined American Catholicism in the decades immediately after Vatican II was lost in the sauce of divisiveness by the 2000s.
Almost three generations of American Catholics had now grown up in the post-Vatican II world and, perhaps more relevantly, after the Kennedy Compromise went mainstream. Culturally pressured to not be too religious in public, generations of American Catholics had seen authentic living of the faith limited to Sundays and other Church events if they were not blessed with great examples of the faith in their own lives.
It seemed religious authenticity within the American cultural context was in such short supply it couldn’t support new generations truly catching a love for God in the faith in large enough numbers to sustain everything. Both vocations to the priesthood and overall Mass attendance were now steadily declining. Perhaps Father Prevost, as he visited his hometown Chicago in 2005 to see his beloved White Sox win a World Series, found the atmosphere of American Catholicism dreadfully divided and too inauthentic compared to the gritty missionary world he had lived in South America. Â
Then the Priest abuse crisis hit.
The clerical abuse crisis as it exploded in the United States following 2002 cemented negative trends the new politicization of American Catholicism had seeded. Even now, twenty-three years on from that initial Boston Globe Spotlight expose, the vast majority of abuse claims date back decades prior. Now the culture war molds formed for American Catholicism over those decades were cracking under the pressure of hypocrisy.
Conservative American Catholics felt the need to justify their brand of the faith as institutional issues that clearly perpetuated abuse were laid bare in the Church. More liberal American Catholics struggled to articulate how their faith, which was now seen through the lens of the scourge of abuse, was actually a force for social change in the world. The 1980s and 1990s saw Americans disinterested in the culture wars flee religious denominations that perpetuated them. This supercharged an already festering authenticity issue within American Catholicism that saw a generation of Catholics drop out of practice, namely the youngest boomers and their children.
Catholic priests were a punchline about pedophilia as the shortage of them reached crisis proportions. Mass attendance hit all-time lows as adults felt more comfortable identifying as non-religious. Young people now widely saw the faith as an aged family ornament like grandma’s scrupulosity or grandpa’s weird insistence over something about how communion was to be received. Not compelling witnesses yes, but also bearing the stink of abuse in their day.
My generation, Millennials (born 1981-1996), and the Zoomers (born 1997-2010) that follow us, now largely only know the faith as ornamental trappings. We cannot delineate the ravages of the Kennedy Compromise on one hand, and the increasingly autocratic tendencies of those who practice the faith with a shut-up-and-listen bent on the other hand. While the abuse crisis undermined the fundamental premise of Christ’s love in the Church, in my estimation it has been the new politicization of American Catholicism following the Kennedy Compromise that has disarmed a potent cultural witness to the faith in public life. A more lively, less politically captured faith makes for a far better public penance for the sins of the abuse crisis than either ideological wing has managed.
To acquire a sincere Catholic faith nowadays for younger generations means walking a tight rope between inauthentically hiding your faith in a neatly arranged private comfort zone and overzealously, and ignorantly imposing it by way of living it loudly in a time when it seems the world has far too much noise. This was the state of the American Catholic Church as Pope Leo XIV was elected on May 8th, 2025; but we have not yet told the full story here.
American Catholicism in the internet age
When Father Robert Prevost finished his second term as Prior General of the Augustinians in 2013 the War on Terror was already old news. The frightening surveillance of that era was becoming normalized with ever more intrusive use of social media following the invention and quick ubiquity of the smart phone. Divisions in American Catholicism, like divisions within broader American society, were now being calcified by the information age as the internet invaded every part of American life.
When Senator John Kerry became the third Catholic to run for President in 2004 by way of a major party nomination as a Democrat, it was hardly relevant at all that he was Catholic. In fact, Kerry’s Catholicism was such a non-issue at this point, at least among the secular media, that few took note of it as something to be discussed over issues like the War on Terror, Abortion, Gay Marriage, or the economy.
Worse more, Catholicism in this country was becoming increasingly internally divisive. Almost fifty years in the past now, the Second Vatican Council became something of a lightning rod within the stateside Catholic church to sow division. Remember this dynamic is unfolding in the internet age so a lot of this division now exists in like-minded echo chambers more than it exists in the real world. Nonetheless, there was a pre-internet lived experience to be addressed there.
Rapid change naturally shakes all social systems but the reception of the reforms of the Council in the US had been scattered by anyone’s standards. In some places fiery preaching, even performatively profane at times, was tried as if something more Protestant looking was the goal of translating the Mass into English. For those who look back in horror on the American Church in the 1970s and 1980s there are no shortage of horror stories of priests riding motorcycles down the aisle or doing skits for homilies with consecrated communion hosts in hand.
There is a great, unanswerable chicken-or-the-egg debate that will probably continue on for decades to come about those early post-Vatican II years: was the decline in Mass attendance and overall priestly and religious vocations the result of the Council’s reforms or the cultural current of change already flowing at the time? Or could the Council’s reforms have left Catholicism contributing to the increasing cultural chaos more conservative minded Catholics saw?
The man who would become Pope Benedict XVI (p. 2005-2013), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was made Pope St. John Paul II’s doctrinal chief in the early 1980s. As a high-placed clerk during the Council, Ratzinger knew about as much as you can know about how Councils effect the history and development of the Church. He wrote immediately after the Council and repeatedly in the decades following, even after being elected Pope himself in 2005, that the two responses to Council reforms are always rupture versus continuity.
Unless truly great corruption occurs there really is no chance of rupture, or meaningful breaking with the core truth of the faith, in Ratzinger’s estimation. The Church does not change with the times, but she learns and comes to accept new ways of making the Gospel comprehensible to new generations, new ages of human history. Almost all of those in the Church’s hierarchy beyond American shores knew the Council was a continuity, not a rupture with the truth of the Gospel in the ongoing teaching authority of the Church. But American Catholics sowing division saw rupture and our American culture, so valuing of that rebellious spirit, fit so naturally into it in the internet age.
As far as Rome was concerned a new corner was truly turned at the Council. Hope emanated from Church documents again, a hope that the Council, with all its declarations of religious tolerance, liturgical accessibility, internal and ecumenical dialogue, would help make the world a better place. When Pope Paul VI (p. 1963-1978) mutually lifted the excommunications that had made official the Great Schism with the Orthodox Church shortly after the Council it was emblematic of hope as a force of action. Concurrently the Church grew by leaps and bounds across the developing world due to the reforms of Vatican II. The US Church was not quite in lock step.
American Catholicism was behaved enough in those Post-conciliar decades. The change settled into normalcy and the talk of rupture was reserved for the truly renegade fringe groups like the Society of St. Pius X: liturgical traditionalists who sought to proclaim the pre-Vatican II liturgy in all its Latin glory as if it were superior. Stateside it was uncommon for these folks to get any attention before the internet.
In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI made the Latin Mass more accessible and relaxed requirements for its use. Suddenly younger, thoroughly post-Vatican II generations had greater access to the liturgical trappings their grandparents had known as the norm. Before Pope Francis restricted these trappings again in 2021, there was time enough in the intervening fourteen years for a distinctly rebellious subculture to develop within American Catholicism. Almost exclusively born after the Council, this group of self-styled traditionalists had varying degrees of authentic worship experiences with the old Latin rites.
However you got closer to God with the liturgy was a side-issue by 2010. American Catholics thought as long as Rome was in the hands of Popes like John Paul II and Benedict, the flavor of the faith would remain conservative enough to not upset the apple cart as it related to such distinctly Catholic preferences. Nonetheless, the internet age trend within the faith stateside colored how we American Catholics were talking to each other by the time the 2010s arrived.
It is important to view this current traditionalist movement with a healthy, heaping helping of cultural context. For the elder boomer generation Catholics this trend looks creepy at best: kids obsessed with a bygone era that even the faithful in that era were evolving out of. For millennials and zoomer generation Catholics the Latin Mass and the growing counterculture around it felt refreshing, the proverbial oasis in the desert of religious inauthenticity as it were. Politically liberal or conservative, authenticity in faith appeared in short supply outside of Holy Orders and religious life and the Latin Mass at least seemed like an authentically religious experience.
Whether converts from Protestantism or reverts from a disinterested Catholicism of their youth, many of the most excited traditionalists saw something different and more honest in the Latin Mass. American Christianity was increasingly looking like two camps by the time I was in High School in the early 2010s: disaffected regular or infrequent Church attenders on one hand or rabid Evangelicals who sought to conform the whole society to their perception of the Gospel on the other. The present traditionalist Catholic movement in America does not exist without the former, but it was always going to look more like the latter just by virtue of the pursuit of authenticity alone.
Yes, this generational interplay outwardly lacks a certain self-giving conviction one normally associates with Christian faith. That is where a new change in the Church was afoot, change rooted in Vatican II but transformational in a new way. The Francis papacy will be remembered as a turning point, particularly for American Catholics. Largely aesthetic, or personal preference driven thinking about religious faith common in the United States for cultural reasons, had nowhere to hide in Pope Francis’ Church. And of course, Pope Francis’ Church is the prefigurement of Pope Leo XIV’s rise, the successor the Argentine Pope catapulted all the way from the priesthood to the Chair of St. Peter.
Pope Leo XIV and the contemporary American Catholic Church
Pope Francis’ election in 2013 upset the roman apple cart in the eyes of American Catholics. Here was a Pope who lived humbly but also governed the Church humbly. Popes had generally governed royally, consolidating power and gladly ruling by decree even if they were humble, spiritual masters when it came to the preaching. Pope Francis was a leader for the moment.
Francis was such a departure from the status quo for conservative American Catholics that by the two-year mark of his papacy EWTN became a bulwark against most of what he said. Suddenly the monied right-wing Catholic interests in the United States, by now the source of the highest sums of private donations to the Vatican, sprung into rebellious action. In 2018 they even used the sex abuse crisis to try to force Francis into resignation.
While Pope Francis did reinvigorate left-wing American Catholics, he was a disappointment to them as well. The Holy Father had laid bare the sinful conceit of the new politicization of American Catholicism: political tribe over faith. It couldn’t exist in this decidedly conflict-driven context in any way that looked faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As the Francis papacy went on this dynamic got clearer and clearer, even to Latin Mass newcomers.
Meanwhile, Fr. Prevost reportedly thought he could still avoid becoming a Bishop: an Argentinian Archbishop he felt he had run afoul of years prior was now Pope Francis. That rift was his self-doubting fiction and Francis made him a missionary Bishop and sent him back to Peru in 2013. Bishop Prevost now thought his ministry was nearing completion as he became a Peruvian citizen. Retirement now appeared on the horizon he might have been thinking. Â
Prevost had not been indifferent or even particularly distant from the vast changes in American Catholicism in his years abroad. He was active on social media and not afraid to tow the Church’s line on controversial issues. Prevost recognized the new politicization of American Catholicism was largely counterproductive to the fundamental missionary task of the Church and lived that conviction. He defended Pope Francis and his program for the Church. More importantly, Prevost lived as a Christian counterexample giving all of himself to his new ministry as Bishop in Chiclayo, Peru where Christ-like self-gift was the rule not the self-aggrandizement of the culture wars back home. Poverty there ensured this was the case for Bishop Prevost’s ministry.
Something changed again during the Francis years for Bishop Robert Prevost. Dialogue defined the Francis pontificate: dialogue rooted in Christ’s Gospel call for his Church to be a “Field Hospital” Church, tending to the needs of the dispossessed in a troubled world. One project within Francis’ broader efforts for greater dialogue in the Church was synodality: the approach to being Church that encourages the participation of everyone down to the smallest, most disadvantaged parishioner all the way on up to the Pope himself. For a Catholic Church always thought of as the most top-down authoritarian Christian Church out there, this was a sea change in the making.
Pope Francis made it the program of the whole Church with the Synod on Synodality from 2021-2024. A worldwide consultation process undertook the largest surveying of individual Catholics perspectives ever, the largest survey canvasing in human history actually. While it didn’t grab flashy secular headlines, it had an impact stateside. It scared many American Catholics accustomed to the division of the new politicization of the faith in this country. Fears of changes to teaching often disguised hedging against opening the doors to the long-othered groups Francis regularly sought to include in his Field Hospital Church.
Listening without imposing one’s own pre-existing biases on the discussion, prayerfully with the Holy Spirit, was, and still is a difficult concept to embrace on a cultural level here in the United States.
Even an issue as mainstream and accepted worldwide as climate change was a lightning rod division-oriented American Catholicism used against Pope Francis. His 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, which fully moved the Church into an environmentalist mindset that takes negative climate trends seriously, pointed Catholics into living at peace with the natural world in a new way beyond merely living at peace with one another. Conservative American Catholicism was scandalized by such an offense against its own orthodoxy.
The final documents of the synod on synodality were immediately integrated into Pope Francis’ teaching authority as Pope, his magisterium, in late 2024. With Pope Francis’ death earlier this year, all that remains of the maiden voyage of this transformative process is implementation. How to carry on in this synodal way of being Church was a significant discussion point as the Cardinals gathered for the Conclave to elect Pope Francis’ successor. Prevost would be there among the electors.
Pope Francis had made Bishop Prevost a Cardinal in 2023 and brought him back to Rome to lead the powerful Vatican office known as the Dicastery for Bishops that advised the Pope on the appointment of Bishops worldwide. Cardinal Prevost was now very close with Pope Francis, meeting with him at least once a week. Prevost had traveled the world as Prior General of the Augustinians and had seen and encountered people in more varied parts of the world then the most well-traveled. This cross-cultural knowledge, service spirituality from his decades as a missionary, both combined with a thirst for education that had made him fluent in half a dozen languages must have caught Pope Francis’ eye for promotion to Prefect for the Dicastery of Bishops.
Back home a Catholic had been elected President for only the second time in American history. If John Kerry’s Catholicism was hardly a blip on the radar, Joe Biden’s would probably be equally immaterial? Quite the opposite: Biden attended Mass and took the sacraments very seriously, certainly compared to JFK’s own practice. But just as with JFK, it’s the legacy here to talk about with Catholics in the White House.
Save for abortion and a handful of other social issues, Biden truly governed as a Catholic prioritizing human dignity focused programs like a new system for paying family caregivers and an order keeping places of worship free from the ravages of immigration raids. He even articulated Vatican II ideals like freedom of conscience from time to time. The new politicization of American Catholicism made him just another partisan opponent for a little over half of American Catholics, nonetheless. Biden communicated his faith in a way that would have been far more culturally powerful had it come out of the mouth of Kennedy, but alas the faith had to take back seat to partisan imperatives.
The 2024 Presidential election saw Biden replaced with the return of a fiery Donald Trump who had just three years earlier attempted to overthrow the government. Prevost was supposedly Pope Francis’ main sounding board on understanding the American context. Cardinal Prevost was the main ghost-writer on a February 2025 letter from Pope Francis to the American Bishops opposing the harsh immigration enforcement stance of the new administration. Without naming names, the Catholic Vice-President JD Vance’s misunderstanding of the teaching “Ordo Amoris” (Order of loves) was explicitly condemned.
America’s new religious politicization had come so far as to create a Catholic Vice President who felt comfortable bending Catholic social teaching to justify immoral policy making. Although perhaps the far sighted could have seen such an endpoint from the dawn of the Kennedy Compromise. Kerry and Biden were abortion advocates after all. Religion in America, American Catholicism as it was increasingly clear based on the ones who made it to the White House, had lost any true loyalty to the faith itself in favor of attaining power. But now a vast majority of Americans also subvert their faith in favor of their partisanship: priorities misshapen by political expediency that had become cultural norms.
In the last months of Pope Francis’ life Cardinal Prevost was elevated to the highest rank within the body that elects Popes, the College of Cardinals. Suspicion Francis was signaling his desired successor is overstated but not completely off base. The Conclave came and a shock occurred. Cardinal Prevost became Pope Leo XIV: the first Pope of American birth in the most surprising outcome of a Conclave since Pope St. John Paul II was elected as the first non-Italian Pope in centuries back in 1978. How will Pope Leo XIV handle the American Catholic Church?
Rise of the American Pope
Pope Leo XIV is somehow both a product of American Catholicism and a great antidote to its current ills. The Holy Father embraced synodality before being elected. He mentioned it in his very first speech as Pope from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. Those reading his biography in the context of the generations of American Catholicism that led to his rise to the papacy, see somewhat clearly that he has all the tools at his disposal to make his Petrine ministry exactly what the world and his homeland need right now.
Synodality is an antidote for the rabid partisanship that has corroded every aspect of American culture to the point political violence has become normal. To listen first as a feature of being Christian is not what most forms of American Christianity has been interested in over recent decades. Its undeniably necessary since most Americans are desensitized to shootings in churches and schools to the point that it doesn’t normally lead the news anymore.
Within global Catholicism there is a clear trend developing of the Church shrinking in Europe and North America, the old lands of the faith if you will, while it simultaneously grows rapidly in the global south, particularly Africa and Asia. That trend is cultural of course but it also shows a certain failing of those old lands of the faith. Religious faith as a mere tool for power is not viable in the United States anymore unless trends in the post-2016 political environment truly denote an endgame for the nation. If that is the case than we will need miracles akin to Pope Leo the Great 1600 years ago, out of our new American Pope’s action toward the Church of his homeland.
The Church had gotten in its own way so much, preferring the privileges of political and cultural status to the complacency of horrific ills in the Church like the abuse crisis, that it became utterly uncompelling to new generations, no matter what the reforms of the Second Vatican Council became. Where Catholicism is new it has been proven the modern world is not averse to faith broadly and this faith specifically. Now Pope Leo XIV finds himself uniquely positioned to renew the face of the Church and if he can’t change the trajectory of American Catholicism its hard to imagine what it would take.
If not him, the next occupant of his chair will probably be dealing with something entirely different from us stateside Catholics. Turning 70 years old only a few weeks before the publishing of this article, Pope Leo is very young for a Pope. He has time, likely to be on the throne of St. Peter for two decades or more, to really make an impact and implement it too. He is also a student of Mathematics, not just anecdotally aware of the contemporary problems of the wider world, but very much seeking how Christ would have his Church answer those problems.
The popular example of this on everyone’s lips is Artificial Intelligence (AI). I could not help myself but mention his impending rulings on this latest techno-cultural revolution when I wrote about AI last month. He said he picked his regnal name, Leo XIV, because he saw his ministry as a new iteration of Pope Leo XIII’s magisterium which championed the rights of workers in the rapidly industrializing society of the late 1800s. Leo believes AI is a revolution on par with the industrial revolution of that day which displaced millions of workers and changed the world forever.
The talk within wonky Catholic circles of news junkies like me is that Pope Leo will take particular attention to being a bridge builder, one of the ancient titles of the Pope, between rival factions within and outside the faith. This would certainly be a welcomed development for divisive American Catholicism at this moment within a culture hopelessly divided in all aspects of life.
Amongst European Catholics there is a sense the battle-oriented Catholicism of the United States might be implanting itself on the Old continent via the likes of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Miloni and others of her ilk: Vance’s “Ordo Amoris” as it were, not the Gospel love of Christ. Leo’s leadership experience prepared him for this moment to some degree: to gently but forcefully repel this growing perversion of the Gospel.
American Catholicism gave the world Pope Leo XIV, but now global Catholicism is poised to give Leo back to his homeland as something of a cure if such a thing is possible. Leo is American Catholicism and knows its sins and saving graces intimately. There is nowhere to hide for partisans anymore: the American Pope is at hand and in due course nothing will be the same for us one way or another.
Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. This book is a sharing of my own spiritual journey in the hopes of helping others know Jesus even if they tried once and failed or feel some serious internal resistance. Check it out and share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about the Catholic Church? Did the article enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?
