Today, the College of Cardinals—an elite group of churchmen tasked with selecting the next pope—will enter the Sistine Chapel to begin the election process. Along with discussing the internal needs of the Catholic Church, many are asking what kind of leader they want to navigate a global realignment precipitated by U.S. President Donald Trump.
There have now been three non-Italian pontiffs in a row: a Pole, a German, and an Argentine. The conventional wisdom has been that tapping someone from the world’s largest superpower to head the world’s smallest state has long been seen as a bridge too far, but these are unorthodox times.
As this college heads into the conclave, it is representative of more countries and cultures than ever before. And with the United States now a diminished superpower, an American who understands and appreciates that diversity could prove to Trump that the papacy is no laughing matter.
For two centuries, the United States and the Vatican have operated in what Italian journalist Massimo Franco once termed “parallel empires,” with their own separate spheres of influence.
When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, anti-Catholic bigotry forced him to assure voters that he wouldn’t be taking advice from the pope if elected as the nation’s first Catholic president. Those fears led him to keep the Vatican at an arm’s length for his first two years in office, but he would later welcome Pope John XXIII’s soft power efforts to stave off nuclear war. President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II offered a united front in their opposition to Soviet-led communism, paving the way for the United States and the Holy See to formally reestablish diplomatic relations in 1984.
Those relations were strained when the Vatican and President George W. Bush’s White House clashed over the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as the president rebuffed the Polish pope’s plea not to wage war. While Pope Francis largely condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Vatican was uncomfortable with U.S. efforts to escalate the war, and the U.S. support of Israel’s ongoing siege of Gaza has also garnered criticism from top Vatican diplomats.
But despite the occasional volatility, diplomatic ties between the two states have increasingly evolved and matured. Kennedy certainly would have never imagined a scenario where President Joe Biden, the nation’s second Catholic president, would keep a photo of Francis in the Oval Office. Biden’s praise for the late Francis was so effusive that it led to him bestowing the pope with the Presidential Medal of Freedom “with distinction”—the only person to receive such a designation from Biden.
The Vatican has no economic power or military strength—only moral persuasion. And despite secularization trends, that voice still seems to matter, as evidenced by the 50 heads of state of 10 reigning sovereigns that showed up for Francis’s funeral last month (along with the likes of Biden, former Secretary of State John Kerry, and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi).
On the eve of U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s visit to the Vatican last month, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin—Pope Francis’s secretary of state and himself a much-talked about front-runner—lamented that the United States no longer seems interested in engaging in the sort of multilateralism that has long defined the Vatican’s approach to foreign policy.
“It is clear that the current U.S. administration’s approach is very different from what we are used to and, especially in the West, from what we have relied on for many years,” he told the Italian daily La Repubblica.
Fueled by increased U.S. isolationism and disregard for the multinationalism that the Vatican has helped buttress since the end of the Second World War, the Trump administration is on a potential collision course with the Holy See, along with many other traditional allies. An American pope could change that calculus, but it would represent a big departure from tradition.
When Cardinal Robert McElroy, now the archbishop of Washington, D.C., was asked in 2022 about the possibility of an American being elected pope, he bluntly dismissed the idea. “I don’t think an American should be pope,” he said in an interview. “I would oppose any American being elected.”
The United States, he said, has too much power in the world, and an American being elected to the papacy would only add to that—and diminish the global perspective that the head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics needs in order to govern a universal church. McElroy’s opinion has historically been widely shared by members of the College of Cardinals. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII even wrote a letter warning of the dangers of “Americanism”—particularly expressed through an overzealous emphasis on individual liberty—as a potential heresy.
Those still fearful of such unorthodoxy likely were unnerved by the recent behavior of Trump. Just a few days after returning home following the funeral of Pope Francis the U.S. president posted an apparently artificial intelligence-generated image of himself on social media dressed as the pope. The image was later shared by official White House accounts.
When asked by a reporter if he had any thoughts about who should be elected next, Trump joked: “I’d like to be.” He then went on to suggest that “we have a cardinal that happens to be out of a place called New York who’s very good, so we’ll see what happens.”
New York’s back-slapping, hot dog-loving Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who offered prayers at both of Trump’s inaugurations, is not a likely contender in this looming conclave. But both he and Trump are profiles of exactly the sort of American-style pope that many would fear.
Instead, two potential candidates from the United States are getting some serious attention: Cardinal Robert Prevost and Cardinal Joseph Tobin.
While the personal styles of the two men differ greatly, they share similar biographies that have managed to disarm most U.S. skeptics.
Prevost, 69, is the head of the powerful Vatican office that identifies potential bishops around the world. The Chicago-born Prevost has spent the bulk of his adult life in Italy and Peru. As the former head of the Augustinian religious order, which operates in nearly 50 countries around the globe, he has extensive experience and exposure among many of the cardinals who will be voting on the next pope.
Tobin, 73, is the archbishop of Newark, New Jersey. He formerly worked in the Vatican department that oversees religious orders and congregations. Before that, however, he was the head of the Redemptorist religious order, and like Prevost, he’s spent much of his life outside of the United States.
In short, while they both carry U.S. passports, neither cardinal is generally thought of as Americans around the Vatican—at least, not in the usual sense. As former heads of religious orders, they were in charge of both the mission and management of thousands of their members. Both men are polyglots, and due to their travel and contacts, both have as much—if not more—familiarity with the international scene than they do their homeland.
And critically, while they may be from the United States, they are both invested in a vision of what Pope Francis called “a better kind of politics”: one that prioritizes concern for the common good over a country’s borders.
In the conclave that elected Francis in 2013, we know that Cardinal Sean O’Malley, then the archbishop of Boston, managed to rank in the top four contenders in the first round of voting. O’Malley is now retired, but like Tobin and Prevost, he shared a similar biography of belonging to a religious order and a peripatetic life on the road.
Back in 2022, when McElroy was discussing the prospects of an American pope, he noted that foreign travels allow one to “see all of these different perspectives,” noting that “the world looks quite different from our [American] reference points.”
“That doesn’t mean our reference points are wrong,” he added. “But it means those wider perspectives need to be added to it.”
Yet with the ascendancy of Trumpism, that perspective seems to be shrinking. Someone from the United States taking charge of the last absolute monarchy in the world? It seems wildly counterintuitive. But someone who could use that bully pulpit to counter other bullies? A potential game-changer.
While there is no official nominating process for the potential popes, and all the voting is done in secret, both Tobin and Prevost have ended up on many front-runner shortlists. Although cardinals do not publicly back candidates and reporters are forced to read between the lines, Prevost’s support seems to have surged on the eve of the conclave. It seems that he has gained particular backing from Latin American cardinals who view him as one of their own, despite his Chicago roots.
Prevost’s remarks from an interview last year—saying that a Catholics bishop is “not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom” but instead is “called authentically to be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them, to suffer with them”—have reverberated in Rome in recent days.
Such a sentiment strikes many of those men who are about to head into the Sistine Chapel as the type of leadership that could draw a stark contrast from what is happening elsewhere on the world stage—including in Cardinal Prevost’s homeland.
The post Will the Conclave Elect an American Pope? appeared first on Foreign Policy.
