In early July, the United States ambassador to the Holy See gave the New York Times ninety minutes explaining why the pope's condemnation of the war on Iran does not mean what it appears to mean. When Leo XIV speaks about the war, Brian Burch argued, he speaks not as the shepherd of 1.4 billion Catholics but as the head of state of a country of fewer than a thousand people, a political leader on a par with other political leaders. Declaring a war unjust, he added, is not a judgement the pope can seriously make, since he works from a limited set of facts compared with what the intelligence agencies hold. And one line hung over the rest: even if the pope declared the war unjust, "he didn't mean it." The headline in the print edition reported, with a straight face, that Trump and Pope Leo are "very much aligned."
Rome took four days to answer. On July 13 the Vatican's media published an editorial by its editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, approved at the highest levels of the Curia, which never once names Burch and refutes him line by line. The title does all the work: the Pope always speaks as a shepherd. Whether he is talking about war and peace, about migrants or about artificial intelligence, the successor of Peter does not turn into the politician of a city-state; he speaks as what he is. Ten days later, Burch clarified on television that the pope's two roles are inseparable. Diplomacy has a word for that: retreat.
The intellectual manoeuvre Washington attempted is an old one, splitting the two natures of the papal word so that one of them can be dismissed. The German emperors tried it for two centuries, and Napoleon took it as far as arresting a pope. The Church has been litigating that border for nearly a thousand years and knows it better than anyone. What is new is not the quarrel but the scale: for the first time the pope is a citizen of the superpower, and the superpower has just discovered that this buys it nothing.
For over a century, conclaves operated under a rule nobody wrote down and everybody understood: never a pope from the superpower. The Church already carried, everywhere, the accusation of being a foreign power; adding the hegemon's citizenship would have been handing over the argument. On May 8, 2025, on the fourth ballot, 133 cardinals broke the rule. They chose a man from Chicago who had spent most of his adult life outside the United States, between northern Peru and Rome, and who stepped onto the balcony to speak in Italian and Spanish without a word in the language of his own country. Fourteen months on, it is possible to say what breaking the taboo was for, though the answer is not the one expected either by those who feared it or by those who celebrated it.
Robert Prevost was born in Chicago in 1955, served as an altar boy on the South Side, and joined the Augustinians at twenty-two. His order twice elected him prior general, its highest office, which he held from Rome between 2001 and 2013. But the country where he made his life was another one: a missionary in northern Peru from the mid-eighties, apostolic administrator of Chiclayo from 2014, then its bishop. In 2015 he became a naturalised Peruvian citizen. When the conclave elected him, the man carried two passports and a provincial diocese on his résumé, not an imperial archdiocese.
Francis had brought him to Rome in 2023 to run the Dicastery for Bishops, the office that vets every episcopal appointment on the planet, and in early 2025 raised him to the most senior rank of cardinals. The men who count votes knew he was papabile; the public had never heard of him. By later reconstructions, a quiet alliance of North and South American cardinals paved the way, and the election was also a defeat for the Italian bloc that had dreamt of taking the papacy back after almost fifty years. Trump celebrated in his own register: "What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country." He did not yet know what he was celebrating.
Because the detail that explains this pontificate is that the taboo was not broken with a New York cardinal who sounds like cable news. It was broken with the least American American available, a man formed in the global south, who talks about Chiclayo as home, and whose family compresses his country's entire history: immigrant grandparents and, on his mother's side, as he recounted in an interview this week, descent from both slaves and slaveholders, the Creole roots of New Orleans. An Argentine or a Polish pope could be waved away in Washington as a foreign voice. Not this one. That was always the risk an American pope posed to America: he is the one critic who cannot be told he doesn't understand the country.
On February 28, what began as an Israeli strike turned within hours into a joint American-Israeli operation against Iran. The Pentagon called it Epic Fury, and the declared objectives included, verbatim, changing the country's leadership. The campaign killed Khamenei at his residence in Tehran, flattened what remained of the nuclear programme, and ended in an April ceasefire, with the Islamic Republic decapitated and negotiating. As an exercise of military power, it was the decade's most emphatic demonstration that the United States remains the planet's only operational superpower.
Leo opposed it from day one. In April he asked people of goodwill to seek peace and reject war, "especially a war which many people have said is an unjust war." Trump answered on Truth Social on April 12: the pope is "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for foreign policy." An American president publicly attacking an American pope, something without precedent for the simplest of reasons: the combination had never existed. And on June 6, on the flight taking him to Spain, Leo stopped speaking in the conditional. I believe this has already been made very clear, he told reporters: "in Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present."
It is worth understanding what that sentence is, because it is not an op-ed. Just war doctrine is not pacifism; it is a sixteen-century-old canon that admits war under conditions, just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionality. Augustine sketched it when the empire was Rome, precisely to tell power when its sword was licit. Leo did not opine on Iran. He applied the canon, and the canon came back negative. That the verdict fell on his own country is a biographical fact, not a doctrinal one: the yardstick would have been identical for Moscow or Beijing.
Realism requires the other half. The condemnation did not stop a single bomber; spiritual power moves no carrier groups and changes nothing in the outcome of Epic Fury. What it did was something else, it entered into the doctrine, which is where the Church writes down what it cannot enforce, the finding that the most successful military operation of the decade failed the moral examination the Christian West set for itself sixteen centuries ago. Washington won the war and lost the ruling. To a government that thinks in terms of office, that is irrelevant. To an institution that thinks in centuries, it is the only thing that lasts.
The other file is domestic. Asked at Castel Gandolfo about his country's politics, Leo answered that someone who claims to be against abortion while accepting the inhumane treatment of immigrants in the United States, "I don't know if that's pro-life." In the same conversation he added that being against abortion while favouring the death penalty is not really pro-life either. Taken together, the two sentences are a method: the same yardstick for both wings of American political Catholicism, which had spent decades using doctrine as a partisan arsenal and discovered that the pope uses it as doctrine.
In November he backed the message of the US bishops, gathered in Baltimore, against the mass deportation raids, called the treatment of detainees "extremely disrespectful," and recalled something that in another context would be a banality: there are courts, there is a system of justice. Days earlier he had asked that chaplains be allowed into detention centres, after detainees at Broadview, Illinois, his own home ground, were denied Communion on All Saints' Day. This year he chose the Fourth of July to recall that defending life means welcoming the immigrants whose hopes and sacrifices built the country from its beginning. And this week, in an interview with NBC and Telemundo, he said flatly that he is not afraid of the White House.
Here the coverage tends to cut the quote where it suits. Leo also said that nobody is proposing open borders and that every country has the right to decide who enters and by what means. He is not disputing American sovereignty over its border; he is arguing that methods have a floor, and that the floor is set by an anthropology, not by polling. The distinction dismantles the caricature of a globalist pope at war with the nation state. What exists instead is more uncomfortable for everyone: a pope who grants the state its right to a border and grants it no exemptions on the dignity of the person crossing it.
If Leo were the imperial chaplain some feared, there would be an easy test to catch it: China. During the interregnum between Francis's death and the conclave, Beijing pushed ahead on its own with the selection of two bishops, the classic way of testing a vacant See. Leo neither denounced nor broke. He kept operating the 2018 agreement on episcopal appointments as if nothing had happened, named an auxiliary in Fuzhou within a month of taking office, and in July this year the fifteenth bishop under the agreement was ordained in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, approved over his signature. While Washington confronts Beijing on every front, the American pope signs episcopal appointments with the Chinese Communist Party. Vatican diplomacy runs on its own track, and the pope's citizenship has not subordinated it to his country's foreign policy. It is the fact most inconvenient to the thesis of an imperial pope, which is why it is the most important fact of the pontificate.
With Ukraine the result was the reverse and the lesson the same. In May 2025, with Vice President Vance sitting across from him, Leo offered the Holy See as a venue for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow. Nobody used the table. The war has passed 1,600 days with the front nailed where it was. The offer still stands, which is everything a papal offer can do.
And there is Beirut. The pontificate's first journey, in late November, went to Turkey and Lebanon. At İznik, ancient Nicaea, he prayed with Patriarch Bartholomew beside the sunken basilica where the Creed was written 1,700 years ago. Then Beirut: the port, the victims of the 2020 explosion, the plea for peace for the country that needed it most. Three months later Lebanon was at war again. The fact does not humiliate the pope; it measures him. The papal word does not defuse a front once the hardware is moving, and the Church knows this better than anyone, having spent centuries asking for peaces that do not come. It keeps asking because its horizon is not the next war; it is all of them.
One scheduling detail deserves its own paragraph. The pope has confirmed to Milei that he will visit Argentina, and the Vatican has clarified that no trip to the United States is on the books. If the calendar holds, the first American pope in history will set foot in Buenos Aires before Washington.
Two days after his election, Leo explained the name to the cardinals. Leo XIII answered the social question of the first industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum, he said, and the Church today faces another industrial revolution, that of artificial intelligence, with new challenges for "the defence of human dignity, justice and labour." It could have been inaugural rhetoric. It was not. On May 15, 2026, the exact 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, he signed his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Forty-two thousand words, five chapters, and a gesture popes do not usually make: he presented it himself, in the Synod Hall, rather than delegating it to cardinals.
Among the speakers at the presentation was Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, one of the laboratories building the technology in question, and the pope thanked him by name for accepting the invitation. A Catholic editor wrote that it was like imagining Leo XIII inviting Rockefeller to hear him speak on the dignity of labour. In that same address, Leo noted that artificial intelligence "is also dramatically changing how war is waged." He said it a few weeks after the ceasefire with Iran.
It is worth pausing here, because this is the move that best explains what the conclave bought when it broke the taboo. A government thinks in electoral cycles. A company thinks in quarters, and the ones that claim to think in decades do so in investor presentations. The Church picked up, in 2026, a conversation it had opened in 1891, on the same day of the calendar, with the same name on the signature, as if the 135 years in between were internal paperwork. No other institution in the West can do that. When the pope signs a document on artificial intelligence he is not competing with the laboratories' papers or with European regulation, which will be obsolete in five years. He is writing for the long archive, for the reader a hundred years from now who wants to know what the Church said when the machines began to think. That temporal scale, which the contemporary world has all but let go extinct, is the real counterpower, and it does not oppose Washington; it exceeds it.
Which is why the tension between the superpower and the pope is not a contradiction to be resolved but a coexistence to be understood. American power administers the world's present, with an efficacy Epic Fury has just displayed. Rome administers something else, the world's memory and its horizon, and measures with another yardstick. Efficacy is measured in mandates, licitness in centuries. Kissinger and Augustine are not answering the same question, and a serious country needs someone answering both.
On May 8, 2025, the first American pope stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter's and did not address his country: Italian for Rome, Spanish for Chiclayo, nothing for Chicago. Fourteen months later he addressed it, in English, on television, and what he told it was that he is not afraid. For a century the conclaves feared that a pope from the superpower would end up as the empire's chaplain. They elected one, and the result was the exact opposite: the one voice the empire can neither buy nor fire. The White House can dispute his politics, and an ambassador can explain that he doesn't mean it. What none of them can do is take the word away, because the word was never America's to give.