Mario Puzo is best known for The Godfather – one of those rare examples where the movies are almost as sublime as the book – but it’s not his only book on the Mafia. There’s The Sicilian, which is part of The Godfather universe and even has a cameo from Michael Corleone, and it’s about real-life mobster Salvatore Giuliano. There’s The Last Don. But perhaps, the real sequel to The Godfather – not the money-grabbing efforts – is The Family, which was published two years after his death and covers high intrigues and conspiracies in the Vatican.The Vatican and the Holy Pontiff may be in the news for its ties to Donald Trump, but the Vatican has always been an institution that – while claiming spiritual authority – spent much of its history negotiating, exercising and exercising political power, in the sense that before World War II, the group that controlled the Catholic Church dictated the moral vocabulary of Western civilization.Pope Leo I stopped Attila the Hun in his tracks. Pope Gregory VII forces Henry IV to submit at Canossa. Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade and began Europe’s long legacy of passing off war as a civilizational movement. Pope Innocent III excommunicated kings and placed entire kingdoms under interdict, effectively ceasing their legitimacy overnight.Pope Boniface VIII tried to assert supremacy over the kings, but was drawn into a violent confrontation with Philip IV of France. Pope Julius II himself led the armies into battle, leaving the Papacy as just another player in Italy’s endless wars.But perhaps the Pope towards whom the POTUS may have felt true kinship was Pope Alexander VI, the hero of Mario Puzo’s The Family, who ran the Vatican the way some people run Bollywood. His foreign policy was Catholic as opposed to Catholic and largely focused on self-aggrandizement and consolidating power for his nepo infantales (illegitimate children), to such an extent that in modern Italian terminology, his Valencian birth name (Borgia) is synonymous with libertinism and nepotism.Now a foreign policy based on obtaining the most advantageous terms for one’s family, improving one’s relationship with Maimon, and getting the best deal may sound familiar in this day and age, but that is no longer the Vatican’s operating procedure. Over time, church and state have drifted apart not on the basis of morality but because of declining influence, and after World War II, the Pope is largely a spiritual figure, given lip service by explicitly Christian-leaning secular nations, who treat the Pontifex as a supporting figure rather than the patriarch of the Catholic world.However, like all the other well-organized conventions, pretending to be a rules-based international order, making considerable pretensions to post-colonial structures, and not mocking Europe for its growing irrelevance, the convention to honor the Pope went out the Overton window when Trump posted on Truth Social: “Pope Leo is weak on crime, and terrible at foreign policy. I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because that’s what I want.” “Doing what I was chosen for, in A.” Landslide, to…” Trump’s post seemed to suggest he believed the Pope’s current role was that of a RoboCop meeting Terminator, whose job it was to physically bring about Judgment Day.A little later, Trump set the cat among the pigeons after posting an AI-generated image of himself as a messianic, Jesus-like image. Now Washington commentators have always said breathlessly that Trump has no red line, but it looks like we’ve finally found one: portraying himself as Jesus and taking on the Pope.In a rare reversal, Trump claimed he accidentally posted the photo because he thought it was a doctor, because who among us hasn’t mistaken a carpenter for a doctor? After all, they are both surgeons operating on inanimate objects.But why did Trump go full TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out?)
Now some believers in MAGA – as they are wont to do – have even gone so far as to say “not my Pope”, which is not an option in Catholicism and can lead to someone being labeled a schismatic. So, for those keeping count, heresy is the denial of belief in the divine and the Catholic faith, apostasy is the complete denial of the Christian faith, and schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff. And “not my Pope” is not optional for believing Catholics.There are staunch Catholics in Trump’s administration, including the two men seen as his most realistic successors: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance. Vance’s promotion to the Trump ticket was much of the story about how the atheist rediscovered his Christian roots and was baptized, though critics prefer to point out that the previous Pope had cast off his mortal coil after a meeting with Vance.Earlier, according to a report by The Free Press, the Pentagon had subpoenaed a Vatican official and invoked the era of the Avignon papacy, when Pope Clement moved the papacy from the Vatican to Avignon between 1309 and 1376, amid a conflict with the French crown.Now opposition to Pope Leo XIV began even when he was announced, with some wondering whether he was too ‘woke’.As SNL’s Weekend Update co-host Colin Jost said, there’s no such thing as a ‘woke’ Catholic, and if you’re a ‘woke’ Catholic, no one is Catholic anymore, but Trump posting an image of himself as Jesus was reprehensible even to staunch supporters.
Rod Dreher said that Trump was “channeling the spirit of the Antichrist”. Pastor Douglas Wilson called the image “blasphemous”. John Yep admitted that he was “a little out of his element”.One of the lame reasons offered for attacking Iran is the claim that it is a holy war in which ‘Trump has been appointed by Jesus to fight Iran.’For some time now, MAGA’s band of merry propagandists has positioned Trump as God’s chosen warrior, an idea that reached fever pitch when he survived an assassination attempt, and Jack Posobiec claimed that the timing of the shots fired at 6:11 pm was the time stated in Ephesians 6:11, suggesting that God operates on Eastern Daylight time.Trump has often been characterized by non-denominational evangelicals who see him as the Messiah – even if he is ignorant of the Bible – who will fulfill a modern prophecy. The Johnson Amendment, now named for Lyndon B. Johnson, once barred churches from endorsing candidates, though Trump’s executive order blurred that line.The reason why there is this line in the sand is simple.Reading: ‘Anointed by Jesus’: Who MAGA Claims Iran War Is ‘Holy’?In Catholicism, Jesus is not someone to be imitated; He is the Son of God, and portraying oneself as such is a violation of the first commandment. It also draws parallels with the Antichrist, a figure defined by elevating himself to divine status and demanding loyalty to God.American evangelicals will endure much – sin, scandal, foreign wars, even ignorance of scripture – but Christ is not negotiable. One can be compared to the Biblical king, one can be anointed, one can be a chosen warrior, but one cannot become Jesus.Catholics are not another constituency; They are a faction that operates within a hierarchy older than the Republic. Trump has performed brilliantly with that group, winning 55% of the Catholic vote in 2024, and about 22% of his voters are Catholic. Despite his distance from the church, he received support from conservative Christians after the Roe v. Wade protests.
Despite only having two Catholic presidents, the community has long held a disproportionate influence in American politics. The Al Smith dinner in New York is one of those last rituals where politics briefly bows to faith. Harris’s abandonment of it in 2024 and the subsequent election results further strengthened that point.And like all religious problems, this one moves into the political sphere.Given that Pope Leo was one of the most vocal critics of the wars against both Palestine and then Israel, it was no surprise that Trump would ultimately attack the pontiff. Pope, for his part, said he has no fear of the Trump administration, revealing he is indeed from Chicago, and took a cool jab at Truth Social: “It’s ironic — the very name of the site.” Leo has also made it clear that the name of Jesus cannot be used to sell war.Trump has spent a decade bending institutions, but this was the first time he faced institutions that won’t bend.
At least, in a political culture where most American institutions have either accommodated Trump or adjusted to him, there is still an American who wants to stand up to him, and do so not through force or office, but through something much older – the claim that there are limits to power.If anything, this moment feels like a rare theological stretch, a reminder that the church, for all its history of intrigue and compromise, still retains its oldest function: to define the boundaries of right and wrong when politics refuses to do so.In a world of moral turpitude, there’s still something to see an American Pope standing up to a megalomaniac president — a reminder that the Church, however diminished, is still not a moral vacuum.
