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In early July, the United States ambassador to the Holy See gave the New York Times ninety minutes to explain why the pope's condemnation of the war on Iran does not mean what it appears to mean. When Leo XIV talks about the war, Brian Burch argued, he is speaking as the head of state of a country of fewer than a thousand people, one political leader among others, rather than as shepherd to 1.4 billion Catholics. Declaring a war unjust, he went on, is a judgement the pope can't seriously make, since the facts available to him are limited next to what the intelligence agencies hold. And he left behind one line that drowned out everything else: even if the pope declared the war unjust, "he didn't mean it." The print headline reported, with a straight face, that Trump and Pope Leo are "very much aligned."
Rome answered four days later. 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 takes him apart line by line. The title more or less says it all (the Pope always speaks as a shepherd), and the piece goes on to say that when he talks about war and peace, about migrants or about artificial intelligence, the successor of Peter does not turn into the politician of a city-state and simply speaks as what he is. Ten days later Burch went on television to clarify that the pope's two roles are inseparable, which in diplomatic terms is what's called a retreat.
What Washington tried, splitting the papal word into its two natures so that one of them could be dismissed, is an old manoeuvre. The German emperors worked at it for two centuries, Napoleon went as far as arresting a pope, and the Church, which has been litigating that border for nearly a thousand years, knows it better than anyone. The scale is what has changed. For the first time the pope is a citizen of the superpower, and the superpower has just found out that this gets it nowhere.
For over a century, conclaves kept to a rule nobody had written down and everybody understood: never a pope from the superpower. The Church was already accused, everywhere, of being a foreign power, and adding the hegemon's citizenship would have been handing its critics 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 out onto the balcony and spoke in Italian and Spanish without a word in his own country's language. Fourteen months on, it is possible to say what breaking the taboo was for, though the answer isn't the one anybody expected, whether they had feared it or cheered 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. The order twice elected him prior general, its highest office, which he held from Rome between 2001 and 2013. The life he made, though, was somewhere else. He was a missionary in northern Peru from the mid-eighties, apostolic administrator of Chiclayo from 2014 and later its bishop, and in 2015 he became a naturalised Peruvian. When the conclave elected him he held two passports and had a provincial diocese on his résumé, a long way from any imperial archdiocese.
Francis had brought him to Rome in 2023 to run the Dicastery for Bishops, the office every episcopal appointment on the planet passes through, and in early 2025 raised him to the most senior rank of cardinals. The people who count votes knew he was papabile; the public had never heard of him. According to later reconstructions, a quiet alliance of North and South American cardinals paved the way, and the result was also a defeat for the Italian bloc, which had been hoping to take the papacy back after almost fifty years. Trump, with no idea yet of what he was celebrating, did it in his own register: "What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country."
They could have broken the taboo with some New York cardinal who sounds like cable news. Instead they broke it with the least American American on offer, and that detail explains the pontificate. Here is a man formed in the global south, who talks about Chiclayo as home, and whose family compresses his country's whole history: immigrant grandparents and, on his mother's side, as he said himself in an interview this week, descent from both slaves and slaveholders, the Creole roots of New Orleans. Washington could have waved away an Argentine or a Polish pope as a foreign voice, which it can't do with this one. That was always the risk an American pope posed to America, since he is the one critic nobody can accuse of not understanding the country.
On February 28, what began as an Israeli strike turned within hours into a joint American-Israeli operation against Iran. The Pentagon named it Epic Fury, and the stated objectives included, verbatim, changing the country's leadership. The campaign killed Khamenei at his residence in Tehran, flattened what was left of the nuclear programme and ended in an April ceasefire, with the Islamic Republic decapitated and at the negotiating table. As a show of military power, nothing else in the decade made the case so emphatically that the United States is still the only operational superpower on the planet.
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 that the pope is "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for foreign policy." No American president had ever attacked an American pope in public, for the simple reason that the pairing had never existed before. Then on June 6, on the flight taking him to Spain, Leo dropped 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."
There are sixteen centuries of canon behind that sentence. Just war doctrine, unlike pacifism, accepts war under certain conditions (just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionality), and Augustine sketched it out when the empire was Rome, as a way of telling power when its sword was licit. Leo took the canon, ran Iran through it, and the canon came back negative. That the verdict landed on his own country is an accident of biography; he would have used the same yardstick on Moscow or Beijing.
Realism means admitting that the condemnation didn't stop a single bomber. Spiritual power moves no carrier groups, and it didn't alter the outcome of Epic Fury in the slightest. What it did do was put on the doctrinal record, which is where the Church writes down whatever it can't enforce, that the most successful military operation of the decade failed the moral examination the Christian West set itself sixteen centuries ago. Washington won the war and lost the ruling, something a government thinking in terms of office can more or less shrug off, though for an institution that thinks in centuries it is the only thing that lasts.
Then there is the domestic file. 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. Put the two remarks side by side and you get a method, the same yardstick for both wings of American political Catholicism, each of which had spent decades treating doctrine as a partisan arsenal and has now run into a pope who treats it as doctrine.
In November he backed the US bishops, meeting in Baltimore, in their message against the mass deportation raids, called the treatment of detainees "extremely disrespectful," and pointed out something that anywhere else would go without saying, that there are courts and a system of justice. Days earlier he had asked for chaplains to be let into detention centres, after detainees at Broadview, Illinois, which is his own home ground, were refused Communion on All Saints' Day. This year he picked the Fourth of July to remind the country that defending life means welcoming the immigrants whose hopes and sacrifices built it from the beginning. And this week, in an interview with NBC and Telemundo, he said flatly that he is not afraid of the White House.
The coverage, though, tends to cut the quote off wherever it suits. Leo also said that nobody is proposing open borders and that every country has the right to decide who comes in and by what means. He accepts American sovereignty over its border. What he argues is that methods have a floor, and that the floor is set by an anthropology, which isn't something you poll. That disposes of the caricature of a globalist pope at war with the nation state and leaves something more awkward for everyone, a pope who grants the state its right to a border and grants it no exemptions on the dignity of whoever crosses it.
If Leo were the imperial chaplain some feared, China would be the easiest place to catch him at it. During the interregnum between Francis's death and the conclave, Beijing went ahead on its own and selected two bishops, the standard way of testing a vacant See. Leo neither denounced nor broke anything off. He kept the 2018 agreement on episcopal appointments running 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. With Washington confronting Beijing on every front, the American pope is signing off episcopal appointments with the Chinese Communist Party. Vatican diplomacy runs on its own track, and the pope's passport hasn't bent it to his country's foreign policy. For anyone arguing he is the empire's pope this is the most inconvenient fact going, and I suspect that's why it is the most important one of the pontificate.
Ukraine went the other way, with the same lesson. In May 2025, with Vice President Vance sitting across from him, Leo offered the Holy See as a venue for talks between Kyiv and Moscow. Nobody took him up on it, and the war has now passed 1,600 days with the front stuck more or less where it was. The offer still stands, which is about all a papal offer can do.
That leaves Beirut. The pontificate's first trip abroad, in late November, was to Turkey and Lebanon, and at İznik, ancient Nicaea, he prayed with Patriarch Bartholomew beside the sunken basilica where the Creed was written 1,700 years ago. From there he went on to the port of Beirut, prayed for the victims of the 2020 explosion and asked 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 can't defuse a front once the hardware is moving, and the Church, having spent centuries asking for peaces that never came, knows that better than anyone. It goes on asking anyway, because what it has on the horizon is every war there is, and the next one is just one more.
The pope has confirmed to Milei that he will visit Argentina, and the Vatican has made clear there's no trip to the United States 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 choice of name to the cardinals. Leo XIII had 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." That might have been inaugural rhetoric, and it turned out not to be. On May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary to the day of Rerum Novarum, he signed his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. It runs to forty-two thousand words in five chapters, and he presented it himself in the Synod Hall, something popes don't usually bother to do, rather than leaving 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. One Catholic editor wrote that it was like picturing Leo XIII inviting Rockefeller along to hear him on the dignity of labour. This was a few weeks after the ceasefire with Iran, and in the same address Leo remarked that artificial intelligence "is also dramatically changing how war is waged."
Nothing shows better what the conclave bought when it broke the taboo. A government thinks in electoral cycles and a company in quarters (the ones that claim to think in decades tend to say so in investor presentations). In 2026 the Church picked up a conversation it had opened in 1891, on the same day of the calendar and with the same name on the signature, as though the 135 years in between were internal paperwork, and no other institution in the West could pull that off. A papal document on artificial intelligence is written for the long archive, for whoever wants to know, a hundred years from now, what the Church said when the machines began to think, while the laboratories' papers and the European regulations will be obsolete in five years. That sense of time, which the modern world has all but let die out, is where the real counterpower lies, and it goes past Washington more than it stands against it.
So the tension between the superpower and the pope is better understood as a coexistence, and there's little point trying to resolve it as if it were a contradiction. American power runs the world's present, with an efficacy Epic Fury has just put on display. Rome runs something else, the world's memory and its horizon, and measures with another yardstick, that of licitness, which is counted in centuries while efficacy is counted in mandates. Kissinger and Augustine are answering different questions, and a serious country needs someone to answer both.
On May 8, 2025, the first American pope stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter's and spoke Italian for Rome and Spanish for Chiclayo, and gave Chicago nothing. He spoke to his own country fourteen months later, in English and on television, to tell it he isn't afraid. For a century the conclaves had worried that a pope from the superpower would end up as the empire's chaplain. They elected one and got the 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, but neither of them can take the word away from him, because the word was never America's to give.