The Catholic Right Is Deeply Divided Over Pope Leo and What His Papacy Will Do

When Pope Francis died, the morning after Easter, prominent right-wing Catholics leapt at the chance to lobby for a more conservative, even Trumpian, leader of the Church. Far-right pundit Jack Posobiec broadcast a call for traditionalist Catholics to “hop a flight to Rome right now, go into St. Peter’s Square, and start taking up space,” reminding cardinals voting in the conclave that would elect the new pope that “now is the time for the traditional ascendance, because we are in a traditional awakening here in the Western Church.” Steve Bannon, who had castigated Francis for years, similarly vowed to organize an online “show of force of traditionalists” ahead of the conclave.

In Rome, Catholic-right journalists distributed a report to cardinals, profiling leading papal candidates from a palpably conservative perspective, while US Catholic-right philanthropists courted Church leaders at upscale gatherings, with one “VIP” saying their network “could raise a billion to help the Church. So long as we have the right pope.”

But on May 8, when the new pope the conclave had chosen—Pope Leo XIV, formerly Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost, and the first US-born pope in two millennia of Church history—appeared on the Vatican balcony instead, the Catholic right’s fervor shifted to despair and alarm. “I can’t believe the cardinals did this,” said popular traditionalist Catholic podcaster Taylor Marshall, author of a 2019 book arguing that the election of the late Pope Francis was part of a century-old plot to undermine the Church, as more than 100,000 viewers tuned into his live stream; Leo was “definitely on the Pope Francis trajectory,” he continued, and, given his comparative youth, his papacy could be a long one. Marshall’s audience chimed in with their own lamentations: that the Vatican had bucked conventional wisdom in picking an American pope so he could “go head-to-head” with Donald Trump or fight to restore funding for Catholic relief work the Trump administration had cut. That the “pope Trump stunt”—Trump declaring himself his own first pick for pontiff and subsequently posting an AI-generated image of himself in full papal regalia, sitting on a golden throne—had backfired, hurting conservatives’ chances.

Almost immediately, conservatives began poring over a since-deleted X account that appeared to belong to Prevost, reporting back with dismay that he’d shared posts expressing prayers for George Floyd, criticism of Trump’s nativist rhetoric, and support for Dreamers, environmental advocacy, and gun-safety laws. In recent months, he’d shared an article from the progressive National Catholic Reporter titled, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others”—in response to Vance’s invocation of ancient Catholic theology to justify Trump’s mass deportation campaign—and an op-ed remonstrating Catholics who were indifferent to migrants’ suffering.

They dug deeper and found that Prevost may have been involved in the removal of Bishop Joseph Strickland from his Texas diocese in 2023, following years of attacks on Pope Francis. And they registered with dismay how, in his first public address as pope, Leo not only praised his predecessor but also called for a “synodal church,” continuing Francis’s vision of lay Catholics and church leaders working together to address important issues. Even one of Leo’s brothers, speaking to media shortly after the announcement, said the new pope likely wouldn’t represent “much of a break in the tradition of Pope Francis.”

As consensus grew that the conclave had found in Leo a continuity pope, prominent Catholic-right groups and figures voiced their outrage. The right-wing Lepanto Institute, a research organization that states it was created to “present the facts” about “dissident and apostate Catholics in politics and other prominent arenas,” responded to Leo’s election by posting, “Prevost!!! Dear God help us!!!” and subsequently declaring Leo a “James Martin pick,” in reference to prominent Jesuit priest Fr. James Martin, an advocate for LGBTQ inclusion in the Church. Fr. James Altman, who gained notoriety in 2020 for a viral video warning that Catholic Democrats would have to repent “or face the fires of hell,” wrote, “The vast majority of the hierarchy have betrayed and abandoned us once again.” Catholic-right outlet LifeSiteNews mournfully concluded, “The man who oversaw the takedown of Bishop Strickland and the rise of [Francis ally Cardinal Robert] McElroy has been handed the keys of Peter. The storm is here.”

While a handful of Catholic-right voices counseled patience—Michael Matt, editor of The Remnant urged followers to consider how a centrist pope might keep the traditionalist Catholic movement united, avoiding the factionalization that could follow the election of a more conservative pope—other commentators, in and out of the Church, proclaimed Leo’s election an intentional rebuke of the MAGA movement. Far-right social media personality Mike Cernovich called Leo a “shitlib”; Trump ally Laura Loomer went with “woke Marxist pope.”

In his live stream from Rome shortly after Leo was announced, Posobiec said, “The choice of an American pope is clearly a reaction to President Trump.” Marshall suggested Leo’s election was an intentional effort to force US traditionalist Catholics into a choice. “We as Catholics are going to be pitted against an American pope and the American president. And I feel the liberals, the bishops, the priests are going to be pushing us: which one are you for? Do you support your president or do you support your pope?” Bannon reportedly declared Leo the “worst pick for MAGA Catholics” and an “anti-Trump pope” selected “by the globalists that run the Curia,” subsequently telling a Financial Times audience, to laughter, that the conclave “was more rigged than the 2020 election,” and would soon cause a schism.

And then, almost overnight, the narrative seemed to change.

On Friday, Marshall’s video responding to Leo’s election was no longer public on YouTube. (In an earlier video, Marshall had also declared Prevost potentially “the worst case scenario.”) He posted a new recording that began with the words, “I submit myself to his holiness Pope Leo XIV.” After prayer, he said, his initial shock had given way to a sense of encouragement, and he reminded listeners of historical cases where popes elected as liberal reformers had unexpectedly become staunch conservatives. Noting that Leo’s papacy might last 20 years, he said Leo “needs to know that traditional Catholics are praying for him, that we wish him the best.”

Other Catholic-right podcasts issued apologies and retractions for their initial response to the news, declaring a “ceasefire” in traditionalists’ decade-long war against the hierarchy of their church, with one titling an episode, “Softening our trad hearts to Leo XIV?” LifeSiteNews, which for years has published some of the most strident attacks on Pope Francis, declared it would “not begin from a place of suspicion or opposition.” The Lepanto Institute wrote, “It’s like finally being able to breathe for the first time in 12 years.”

There seemed to be a number of explanations for the turnaround.

Shortly after Leo’s papacy was announced, two of the most conservative cardinals in the Church, Raymond Burke and Robert Sarah, who’d been among Francis’s leading critics, released statements celebrating the new pope or approvingly quoted him on social media. A third, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who before the conclave had warned that failure to elect an “orthodox” pope would lead to schism, told reporters that Leo’s election had left everyone “content.” A new narrative began to emerge, that a conservative bloc in the Vatican had allegedly formed an “organized resistance” to block progressive candidates, and that US Cardinal Timothy Dolan (Trump’s second-choice for pope) had served as “kingmaker.” Reporting in Italian media claimed that, ahead of the conclave, then Cardinal Prevost had been seen entering Burke’s Rome apartment for a “top-secret summit.” Although subsequent reporting in the National Catholic Register that Burke had never received Prevost at his apartment cast this in doubt, the rumor had already spread widely online, prompting traditionalists to surmise that deals had been made and assurances given.

Rumors also spread that anonymous sources had witnessed then Cardinal Prevost preside over a private Traditional Latin Mass, sparking hopes that, as pope, Leo might rescind restrictions Francis had put on the liturgical form, which had become overwhelmingly associated with his opponents on the Catholic right. Conservatives dug up additional social media posts Prevost had shared supporting conservative priorities. Not to mention that Leo wore the formal papal regalia Francis had scorned, that he spoke and sang in Latin, and that he would live in the Apostolic Palace rather than the Vatican guesthouse Francis had chosen.

On Monday, traditionalists excitedly pointed to a recording of Leo greeting fans at a public event, and seeming to turn away from someone holding a rainbow flag (only to backtrack when it became clear the flag wasn’t a Pride flag but a peace flag commonly seen in Italy). They were happier yet when Leo’s oldest brother was revealed to be a staunch Trump supporter who’d recently shared a social media post calling Nancy Pelosi a vulgar name. Posobiec responded by offering to fly the brother to Rome to talk with Leo about Trump, Vance, and “the issue of illegal immigration.”

Vance, who will lead the US delegation to Vatican City for Leo’s inaugural Mass on Sunday, which also includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has said he didn’t want to “play the politicization of the pope game,” telling conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last week, “I’m sure he’s going to say a lot of things that I love. I’m sure he’ll say some things that I disagree with, but I’ll continue to pray for him and the Church despite it all and through it all.”

But not everyone on the right is giving Leo the benefit of the doubt, with some traditionalists declaring the abrupt about-face a “massive psy-op,” as “pope-splainers” tried to “neutralize the opposition” and sell “the Traditional movement down the Vatican 2 river.”

“I’m guessing there was a memo sent to Trads to use the same talking points: hope, good news, don’t be negative about Leo,” wrote LifeSiteNews reporter Stephen Kokx on X. “My hunch is this is coming from some prominent ‘conservative’ cardinals who may have won some concessions w/ Prevost in exchange for calling off the attacks.” For traditionalists who’d convinced themselves Leo was secretly one of their own, Kokx recalled how “Trad world” had similarly gone “insane” in 2013, after a newly anointed Pope Francis had given “a few sermons about the devil.”

“Do yourself a favor: do not engage in this sort of behavior,” he wrote. “It will only end in disappointment and self-delusion.”

Fr. David Nix, another of traditionalists’ favorite clerics, wrote in a blog post on Sunday that what he saw “coming down the pike in Rome is more promotion of the heresy of religious indifferentism (the heresy all religions will get you to heaven, usually put under the pretext of the hijacked word ‘ecumenicism’) but this time with a little more Latin, a little more incense and a little more meekness than before.”

“I don’t care how nice this pope is. I don’t care how much gold he has on, or his ring, or any of that stuff,” said another traditionalist podcaster, Timothy Gordon. “I want the Latin Mass, but I don’t want the Latin Mass traded for homo stuff. I don’t want the Latin Mass for Amoris Laetitia being here to stay,” referencing Francis’s 2016 encyclical that opened the door for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion.

“He’s going to trick a bunch of the trads,” Gordon continued. “And then, truly, guys like you and I are going to be vox clamantis in deserto”—voices in the wilderness.

But exactly that thought seemed to be in mind for some of those calling on traditionalists to withhold judgment.

As Michael Matt explained in a video message this Sunday, it was “really, really important for traditional Catholics now” to present themselves as a “dutiful, loyal opposition,” if only for pragmatic purposes. “We can start denouncing him if we want—shout and yell ‘down with the pope’ out there in the piazza. Couple of weeks later, guess what we’ll be doing? We’re talking to our mother and some of her friends on YouTube and that’s it. We’re not here at all to put any pressure on what the future of the Church is going to be.” Leo was hardly going to be the pope traditionalists dreamed of, he continued, but his lighter touch might “buy some time for us to continue the Catholic counterrevolution.”

Or as Anthony Abbate, host of the podcast Avoiding Babylon put it, “I also don’t want to come out bashing him and ruin the gestures he’s giving by giving him the middle finger, and then he says, ‘Ok, well, you know what? Maybe Francis was right to punish you assholes.’”

“I can’t see this lasting,” said Mike Lewis, cofounder of the Catholic outlet Where Peter Is, which spent many years of Francis’s papacy tracking the Catholic right’s attacks on the pope. For one thing, over the last 12 years, “the reactionary opposition to Pope Francis had reached a boiling point,” and it would be hard to simply turn off the heat.

“We’ve seen people take up this space where it doesn’t even matter if you think the pope is the pope,” he said. “That used to be the point of no return, and they walked right past it.”

And assuming Leo does emerge as the continuity pope he’s widely expected to be, the traditionalist detente is likely to quickly sour.

“They did that with Pope Francis and they weren’t able to sustain it. I don’t know how the Pope Leo XIV papacy will unfold, but I have a feeling that as he continues to follow in the path of Pope Francis, and to set the Church on a similar trajectory, they will melt down,” he continued. “Whether or not that leads to formal schism, or some huge public clash, remains to be seen. But I think they are ideologically committed to their project, and I don’t see them turning around.”

Catholic-right visions of Leo as a closet traditionalist amount to little more than “wish-casting,” said Steven Millies, a theologian and professor at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, one of Pope Leo’s alma maters.

“The plain fact is that very little has happened yet concretely to tell us what sort of pope Leo will be,” Millies said. Conservatives embracing him now are “seeing a different personality, and so already the papacy feels different.” But Leo’s initial statements as pope—expressing “complete commitment” to Francis’s vision of fully implementing the reforms of Vatican II, to synodality, to care for the marginalized and for “courageous and trusting dialogue with the contemporary world”—to Millies, amounts to “a charter to continue the Francis papacy.”

Millies notes that viewing conflicts within the Church in purely political terms misses much of the point. The most potent quarrels at the heart of Francis’s papacy concerned whether the Church is a centralized institution “that exports itself around the globe” or a global “church of churches, capable of many cultural expressions”—the same questions that lie at the heart of Vatican II. And yet there is, he said, a message in the election of Pope Leo, if one more subtle than Steve Bannon put it.

In the same way that Pope John Paul II’s election, from behind the Iron Curtain, signaled the Church’s willingness to challenge the Soviet Union in 1978, he said, today, “the cardinals have taken a side against authoritarianism and on the side of free systems of government, because a US-born pope offers a visible sign of a different and Catholic way to proceed through this political moment.”

Massimo Faggioli, a Church historian and professor at Villanova University, which Pope Leo attended as an undergraduate, agreed.

“The choice of an Augustinian pope who succeeds a Jesuit sends a particular political message to the USA today, of the national-populism nourished by Catholic fundamentalism that is replacing Protestantism in the halls of power. It is not necessary to be a ‘Jesuit of the peripheries’ to oppose the political-religious project that is Trumpism,” Faggioli said. “For subversive Catholic traditionalism in the US at the service of Trumpism, it will be difficult to discard the Augustinian Prevost as a radical progressive, and it will be impossible to paint him as anti-American.”