On Sunday, when the Vatican celebrates the inaugural Mass of Pope Leo XIV, the highest US official in attendance will be JD Vance. The scene will be fraught, even if decorum and ceremonial prevent any overt awkwardness: the US Vice President embodies the insurgent populist spirit sweeping the developed world — against which the newly elected pontiff has spoken out, in particular when it comes to immigration.
But for Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, the faith’s social teaching inspired his turn against conventional GOP orthodoxy (free trade, low taxes, deregulation). Before Donald Trump tapped him as his 2024 running mate, then-Sen. Vance’s major legislative initiatives bore a distinct Catholic imprint, from railroad reform to the fight for lower insulin prices and a proposal to claw back CEO pay from bailed-out banks.
Upon Leo’s election, many seized upon the fact that, back when he was Cardinal Robert Prevost, he had repeatedly taken issue with Trumpian populism, singling out the veep in particular. In February, an X account associated with him reposted an article headlined: “JD Vance Is Wrong: Jesus Doesn’t Ask Us to Rank Our Love for Others.” It took issue with Vance’s interpretation of the ancient concept of ordo amoris (“the order of love”) to justify a pinched account of what Americans owe foreigners.
Progressives took this as a (delicious) sign that Leo would carry over his immediate predecessor’s hostility toward populism, and maintain the hierarchy’s fairly uncompromising recent line in favour of the free movement of people across national frontiers. If Vance emerges as the Republican presidential nominee for 2028, his opponent’s debate barb writes itself: “Your own pope slammed your deplorable views.”
“As a Christian statesman, Vance can help Leo decode the secular signs of the times.”
The Vice President has publicly brushed off Leo’s pre-papal posts. Vance is aware that Leo’s considered views on immigration are more sophisticated than his social-media footprint might suggest. The sort of mass, low-wage, South-North movement that surged over the past decade, he has said, “is a huge problem, and it’s a problem worldwide. There’s gotta be a way to solve the problem but also to treat people with real respect.”
This recognition that migration is a crisis — straining wages, public services, and social cohesion in receiving countries — jars with the stereotype of a Church always proclaiming “let them come”. Even Pope Francis sounded more nuanced notes, insisting that immigration is a “two-way process” that entails a duty of integration on newcomers. In a message to the US bishops rebuking Trump II deportations, Francis reiterated the right of nations to control their borders.
Still, these tensions suggest a far deeper clash of worldviews and sensibilities: between a fundamentally universalistic faith and Western populations fed up with universalism, or at least, the liberal kind. Between people redoubling to nationalism and a Church called to baptise panta ta ethnē (“all the nations”). Between the pride and particularism of the Appalachian “holler” and a two-millennia-old body that inherited the administrative forms of the Roman Empire.
As these two forces barrel towards each other, each has to wonder if a collision can be averted. A full accommodation is out of the question, of course. No more can the Church bend itself to 21st-century populism than it could to, say, the Napoleonic surge in the early 19th century. But mutual understanding and engagement aren’t out of reach. Indeed, they are essential. It helps, then, for each camp to start by trying to see the world through the other’s eyes.
The Church’s default political form is empire. That’s a scandalous term in our time, owing to its association with recent European imperialism and colonialism. But in this context, it should be taken in a strictly “neutral” way: a society that encompasses many smaller units (tribes, nations) — indeed, one that theoretically aims to encompass all. In the Church’s telling, the imperial form was pressed on Catholic Christianity not by accident, but by providence and the gospel itself.
It began with ideas. Before the Church took up the universalist political forms of the Roman Empire, it embraced the universalist yearnings of Greek philosophy, blending these with the harsh desert monotheism of the Jewish people. It was just this synthesis — the unlikely but surprisingly durable synthesis of Greek logic with the voice from the burning bush — that made possible Christianity’s global span.
Christianity universalised salvation: from a story centred on a single nation, the Jews, to one that invited the Gentiles into the tent — now refigured from a building to a person, a God-Man. This universalism, as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out, was already latent in exilic and post-exilic Judaism, as contact with foreign overlords forced the Israelites to proclaim Yahweh “as the God of heaven and earth” — who, in parallel to Socratic philosophy, mocked local or national myths.
The Academy and the Temple, in other words, courted each other. The Christ event deepened this courtship, leading to the marriage between a Greek philosophy in search of the ultimate wellspring of reality, and the God of the Jews, held up as just that. As Benedict taught, it was no accident that it was a Macedonian man who appeared to Saint Paul in a dream, pleading with him to “come over and help us” (Acts 16:9).
Just as Christ’s Davidic lineage was no accident, so there was a reason that the founder of Pauline Christianity enjoyed overlapping identities as both a Jew and a Roman citizen. From the Catholic perspective, it likewise wasn’t a mere coincidence that Christianity put down its deepest early roots on the Mediterranean shore, among commercial and shipping hubs; in fertile soil already tilled by the Greek passion for universal ideas and the Roman love of law.
Yes, Rome persecuted the early Church, driving believers into the catacombs. But as the French historian Henri Daniel-Rops showed, all along the Church of the catacombs was preparing itself to conquer Roman administrative structures for Jesus. Underground, the Church was already a highly organised, hierarchical, corporate institution. With the Constantinian conversion, it got the chance to go overground. Now, 1,700 years on, the Church is ruled by a pontifex maximus, who is advised by a curia, overseeing worldwide dioikesis, according to a codex.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, this apostolic empire confronted the rise of nationalism (often in connivance with liberalism). Modern nation-states grouped ethnic and linguistic tribes into “pure”, prickly, militant little sovereignties. For the Church, this was a trauma. It meant the dilution of papal authority over the hearts and minds of individual Christians, as well as the end of Christendom as a larger geographic and spiritual society, folding in many nations.
Hence why it was Catholic political thinkers who first championed the European Union. Hence why senior churchmen down to our own time prize transnational institutions like the United Nations, and invariably seek regularised, well-administered relations with even hostile worldly powers, such as Beijing. And hence why the Church looks askance at immigration restrictionism and militarised borders. These are all deeply Roman impulses and yearnings.
In short: no one can understand Christianity’s largest denomination without appreciating the Roman-ness braided, even fused, into its institutional soul.
But for Vance’s voters, and similar populations in Europe, transnationalism has come to mean an entirely different set of outcomes. The erosion of solidarity and bargaining power by corporate globalisation. Dislocation brought about by rapid demographic change. Above all, the loss of agency, as decisions about how to organise society were removed from democratic political contestation and placed under “expert” determination or judicial and bureaucratic fiat.
The rise of postwar, liberal (or neoliberal) transnationalism — an empire of autonomy without limits — has come at the expense of the political community, where the common good used to be properly located, defined and contested by competing classes and interests. Liberal transnationalism did well by multinationals and the educated managerial classes that service them, to be sure, but it left behind many others.
Laid-off workers, whether they resided in the French rust belt or the American inner city, were told to take up their complaints with the immutable and incontrovertible laws of the market and “globalisation”. Nothing substantive could be contested; global supply chains, you see, were too large and tangled up. EU membership meant that, whether they liked it or not, individual nations had to bear the burdens associated with Angela Merkel’s decision to admit some 1.3 million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa over the course of a year, many of them hard-to-integrate welfare migrants.
To be sure, many of these voters live messy, unchurched lives — divorce, children born outside of marriage, addiction, etc. are common. Nevertheless, they sense that biblical universalism and the liberal kind aren’t necessarily congruous. Sometimes, they two are downright inimical. And the populist voters have half a point. The apostolic empire can’t be identical to the liberal imperium, whose subject, as the French thinker Pierre Manent has said, “no longer acknowledges any limits ‘because he deserves it’”.
When Christ charged his disciples to teach and baptise all the nations, was the Lord thinking of a European Union that militantly repudiated John Paul II’s appeals to include a mild reference to the Continent’s Christian roots in its constitutional documents?
Christianity is not the patrimony of a single ethnos, as churchmen rightly insist. But should they also not question liberal transnationalism’s drive to impose on all nations a single law — the smooth operation of the market and maximal autonomy for the unbound, unattached individual or corporate actor?
Indeed, they have: for example, in his book-length meditation on the Hail Mary, Pope Francis skewered a neoliberal elite “that does not know what it means to live among the people” and lacks “any sense of belonging to a family, to a land, to our God”. An elite that has “no need of mother, of father, of a family, of a homeland, of belonging to a people”.
A patria. A people. The Church can and has maintained that these things matter, even as it has rejected the idolatry of the nation. While Almighty God universalised salvation history through the fiat of a Jewish woman of the Galilee, he didn’t thereby obliterate her Jewishness.
So can the two — the universalist Church and Western populations recoiling from one recent form of universalism — come to some accommodation? Can they see eye-to-eye? Not totally. When the Trump administration dumps Venezuelan hairdressers into a Salvadoran gulag (for life, without due process), the Church can’t but rebuke and chastise. Ditto, when the more goonish populists make idols out of nations or races, much as Communists made idols of social classes.
Yet the Church, especially since Vatican II, has made a priority of encounter — of going out into the world and meeting people, especially the poor and marginalised. At this moment, with secular politics and Christian universalism poised to clash, the imperative to encounter should be widened to include not just the barrios and colonias of the desperately poor in Latin America, but also the dispossessed of the North: once-proud manufacturing workers scrabbling for jobs, often forced to compete at the lowest rungs with migrants willing to work for even less.
Here, Vance and Leo XIV do have meaningful things to say to each other. The new pontiff has taken the name Leo, he has said, in tribute to Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching in the late 19th century. Responding to the dislocations and miseries inflicted upon working classes in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution, Leo XIII preached not class war, as the socialists did, but class reconciliation, an ideal that jibed with the movements for social and Christian democracy in Europe and the New Deal in the United States.
Yet as I’ve argued in these pages, reconciliation in the Leonine vision doesn’t come about from merely exhorting the asset-rich to do right by the asset-less. It requires empowering the latter relative to the former. Leo called for the state to require employers to pay a living wage, as a matter of justice — not charity. He also defended the right of workers to band together in labour unions in defence of their mutual interests and to boost their bargaining power.
In light of this teaching, Leo XIV can rightly chide the Trump-Vance administration for acting no better than its establishment-Republican predecessors in attacking America’s National Labor Relations Board and weakening regulatory guardians of the poor such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among other populist disappointments.
At the same time, as a Christian statesman, Vance can help Leo decode the secular signs of the times. The Vice President has repeatedly told me, for example, that he views the free movement of labour as a key component of the neoliberal models of exploitation which Francis decried and which Leo XIV surely abhors (given his choice of papal name). Can Leo, for example, deepen the Church’s theology of migration in a way that upholds the dignity of the sojourner while addressing the rights and concerns of recipient countries?
We can only hope. Indeed, Catholics on both sides of this divide must pray for such engagement. For the populists, it’s a matter of taking seriously the counsels of an institution that has outlived countless ideological enthusiasms in the past. For the Church, meanwhile, at stake is the ability to hear and reach fed-up working- and lower-middle classes in the Global North, even as it champions the claims and aspirations of the South.
