Weekend Update’s Colin Jost Derides Right-Wing Ire At First American Pope: “There Are No Woke Catholics”

Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update had its fun with the headlines this week, including the naming of the new sovereign of the Vatican City State, Pope Leo XIV, the first American in the role.

“As an American Catholic, I could not be more proud, which is a sin, and now I’m ashamed,” co-anchor Colin Jost began.

Born Robert Prevost, Jost continued that “you can tell he’s from the South Side [of Chicago] because he’s got his hands up,” which elicited a mix of laughs and hesitant reactions from the audience.

“This pick was a welcome surprise for me because when I heard the pope was a super-religious guy from Chicago in a funny robe, I was worried it was Kanye,” he said, referencing the rapper’s recent affinity for white supremacist ideologies.

Addressing right-wing ire and assertions that the new pick is too progressive, Jost quipped, “I also love that conservatives are already complaining this pope is too woke. How woke can a 69-year-old man from Chicago be? It’s not like he came out and was like, ‘Hey, I’m Pope Leo XIV, he/him.’ The reality is there are no woke Catholics. If you’re a woke Catholic, you’re just not a Catholic anymore.”

Some other highlights:

Making a crack at Fox News host Jeanine Pirro’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., co-host Michale Che said she “celebrated with a bottle of wine every day for the last 50 years.”

Discussing insider reports that President Donald Trump is attempting to “create tension” between potential successors Marco Rubio and vice president JD Vance, Jost joked that it was “mostly by pointing at them and saying kiss.”

While Trump’s proposed 100% tariff on movies made outside the U.S. would devastate the film industry, Che maintained it’s “no problem for me because all the movies I watch were filmed in a Florida condo on a leather couch.”

On POTUS’ desire to reopen Alcatraz because it represents something “horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable and weak,” Che quipped that those words are “also his nicknames for his five children.”

Despite claiming that Catholics “loved” Trump’s AI-generated pope image, Che doubted “that anyone in the Catholic church would be into something so juvenile,” with the audience taking a moment to realize the double entendre.

Also on Weekend Update: Marcello Hernandez’s reprisal of his enthusiastic yet ill-informed Movie Guy, Mikey Day’s “A Guy Who Just Walked Into A Spiderweb” failing to discuss Trump’s tariffs and Heidi Gardner’s “Dianne, the mom who’s only read about New York on Facebook” — the latter two highlighting their physical comedy chops.