American Pope

When Donald Trump was triumphantly returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, he immediately became ex officio the most important, the most powerful, the most prominent American in the world. Then, exactly 11 months ago, on May 8, 2025, somewhat surprisingly and unexpectedly (at least to most people), Robert Cardinal Prevost, a Chicago-born, Augustinian Friar, who had been a missionary priest and bishop in Peru, was elected Pope - instantly blowing up the traditional expectation that no American could or would ever be elected Pope. In 2025, an American-born Pope immediately became ex officio the other most important, the other most powerful, the other most prominent American in the world. What this means - and the hope that Pope Leo XIV's election may bring to the Church and the world in the era of President Trump - is the focus of CNN Vatican correspondent Christopher Lamb's American Hope: What Pope Leo VIV Means for the Church and the World.

Despite the conventional wisdom that no American would be elected Pope, Lamb argues that Trump's re-election caused a recognition that the U.S. role in the world was changing. He claims that Cardinal Prevost was on his own short list of papabili. Even so, when the white smoke appeared so quickly on the second day of the conclave, he assumed the winner was Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State, who had been widely seen as the frontrunner. But, when Cardinal Mamberti announced Prevost's name, Lamb's "previous feelings of deflation turned to excitement."

I too had heard Prevost's name mentioned prior to the conclave, but I still assumed that his American nationality would count against him. In fact, that very morning when someone had asked me if I thought there would be a new Pope that day and who it might be, I had answered that the only thing we could predict for certain was that it would not be an American! 

Of course, having been born in the USA is not the only noteworthy aspect of Pope Leo's background and life story. Lamb rightly highlights his membership in (and his leadership of) the Order of Saint Augustine and his missionary service in Peru - both as important aspects of who Leo is and as important considerations which made an American-born pope's election even possible. "He would not be pope were it not for the years he served in Peru, a time which profoundly shaped him and which brought him to the attention of Pope Francis." He was thus the "least American" of the American cardinals. His Augustinian identity, Lamb also argues, wrote "community, contemplative prayer and unity" into his "governing style," while his two terms as the Augustinians' Prior General had given him "insights into the growing churches of Africa and Asia, and experience of leading a complex, international Catholic community."

Lamb is also extremely preoccupied with demonstrating continuity between Pope Francis and Pope Leo - even while acknowledging Leo's "balance and moderation" and his desire to be "an expert listener and community builder," qualities that somewhat differentiate him from his more polarizing predecessor.  The author's emphasis on continuity, even while recognizing the ways in which Leo is temperamentally different from his predecessor, almost seems like a case of protesting too much. Also, given that Leo in certain respects represents the Global South as much as the U.S., Lamb devotes much more space than one would therefore expect to contentious first-world issues (like women's ordination, which Francis himself in continuity with his predecessors had rejected). 

Nonetheless, Leo's Americanness is an important theme of Lamb's analysis. He does not expect Leo to seek deliberate confrontation with Trumpism. "He is measured and careful with his language, and far less provocative than his predecessor." On the other hand, while Francis was easily criticized as someone who "simply did not know enough about the United States," that "cannot be said of an American pope."

Leo's papacy offers an alternative vision to the one emanating from the White House, a vision that is built on unity and spirituality and which is allergic to divisive rhetoric and polarization. Lamb quotes Fordham University's David Gibson: "While Leo's exposition of Catholic teachings will contradict many of Trump's policies and statements, it is Leo's character that stands in contrast to Trump, both as a Christian and as an American. ... This is about two diametrically opposed ways of being in the world."

Lamb contrasts Pope Leo not only with President Trump but also with the most prominent American Catholic layman, Vice President JD Vance, who was received into the Church in 2019 and claims his conversion was influenced by Saint Augustine. "JD Vance takes his faith seriously, and the story of his conversion, which he laid out in The Lamp magazine, reveals someone who has made a sincere engagement with the Catholic faith, and who wrestles with how to apply the teachings of Christianity in his life. Yet in the vice president of the United States, Leo also faces someone whose Catholic faith is tied to a political worldview." Vance is a "post-liberal," who "believes that society is better served by stronger communitarian and social bonds rather than by the autonomy of the individual." Such ideas resonate with some traditional Catholic teaching and in their more extreme form have become increasingly prominent in a revived ideology of Catholic integralism, an alternative which inevitably challenges the post-conciliar Catholic Church's apparent accommodation with liberal democracy.

Meanwhile, in his first Urbi et Orbi Easter Message a few days ago, Pope Leo issued a challenge which it would be hard not to understand. "We are growing accustomed to violence, resigning ourselves to it, and becoming indifferent. Indifferent to the deaths of thousands of people. Indifferent to the repercussions of hatred and division that conflicts sow. Indifferent to the economic and social consequences they produce, which we all feel." One of the most damaging consequences of our current politics is precisely how it has normalized violence, hatred, division, and the economic and social consequences of inequality and bigotry. The Pope's challenge is both perennial and contemporary: "let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination, and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars and marked by a hatred and indifference that make us feel powerless in the face of evil." 

Lamb concludes American Hope with his worry about whether Pope Leo's "low-key style, his desire to see all sides of the argument, and his sometimes studious aversion to making news headlines, could be dangerous if it creates a perception of a papacy that has no clear narrative." He contrasts this with President Trump, whose "success is his uncanny ability to shape the narrative" and with Pope Francis, who "within hours of his election established a clear narrative for his papacy." Lamb worries Leo could cede the narrative to outside events as he believes happened with Pope Paul VI. 

There may be something to this argument. In contrast, however, I would suggest that Pope Leo's "low-key style," etc., may be among his great assets. Trump is bold. (So, in different ways, was Pope Francis.) The alternative to such Trumpian norm-shattering boldness that America and the world so desperately needs lies precisely in calm, balance, moderation, intelligent discourse, and - above all - empathy, all of which have already formed the basis for Pope Leo's counter-narrative. Lamb himself hints at this when he suggests that Leo "embodies the very qualities people hold up to be the best of America, at a moment when it's often said that the American President is undermining them."

The DayAfter

 

God raised this Jesus; of this we are all witnesses. So proclaimed Peter in the reading we just heard from the Acts of the Apostles. Every day for the next seven weeks - from Easter to Pentecost - the Church reads from the Acts of the Apostles, Luke's wonderful sequel to his Gospel. It is Luke's artful account of the experience of the very first Christians, the first ones to experience in their own lives the effects of Jesus' resurrection. Acts also recounts the early growth of the Church, as the good news of Jesus' resurrection spread from Jerusalem all the way to Rome.

During the 40 days of Lent, we identified ourselves with our catechumens preparing for baptism, renewing our own experience of conversion to Christ and his Church. Now, during these 50 days of Easter, we identify ourselves with the newly baptized, recalling the experience of the very first Christians, gathered like them into one Church by the power of the Risen Christ present among us.

(You surely noticed the reference in the Opening Prayer to the newly baptized. In ancient Christian Rome, this whole week was especially devoted to them. They wore their new white robes to Mass every day. On Saturday, back at the Lateran Basilica where they had been baptized, they removed and stored their white robes.Then next Sunday, at St. Pancras, they would appear for the first time in ordinary clothes.)

Yesterday, the Gospel reading proclaimed the discovery of an empty tomb. That was an essential but incomplete sign that God had done something new and wonderful in raising Jesus from the dead. The disciples needed to experience more, and so do we, which is why we need to hear this wonderful story of how the disciples were transformed from frightened followers of a dead man into Spirit-filled witnesses of Christ's resurrection.

We read and hear the resurrection’s effects on the disciples in the Gospel accounts of the Risen Lord's appearances and in the preaching witness of Saint Peter and others in the Acts of the Apostles. We rad and hear the resurrection’s effects on the world n people’s responses to the apostles’ amazing story and in how the story has since spread, in the dynamism at the heart of the Church’s existence that has propelled it outward in 2000 years of world-transforming activity.

Finally, the resurrection's effects become evident in us, transformed in mind and changed in heart, by the unique power of this utterly unexpected event, which has glorified (almost beyond recognition) the humanity Jesus shares with each of us, and which has brought us together in a way in which nothing else could have, empowering us (despite all the world's bad news that competes for our daily attention) not so much with new knowledge as with a new hope.  If, as the saying goes, “knowledge is power,” hope - Christian resurrection hope - is even more so!

Homily for Easter Monday, Saint Paul the Apostle Church NY, April 6, 2026.

American Religious Revival???

Holy Week was traditionally when newspapers and magazines tended to highlight religious news coverage. For obvious reasons coverage of religiious news has grown in recent years and has become increasingly year round. Still, Holy Week does tend to bring out some particularly thoughtful pieces. Among them, this year are two that I found especially interesting. Both appeared on the Tuesday of Holy Week (March 31).

In The Atlantic, staff writer Luis Parrales published "The Real Religious 'Renewal' Happening in Gen Z" [https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/03/christian-revival-generation-z/686612/].

Parrales sets the scene by describing a weekly Sunday evening "Young Adults" session at the Dominican Friars' St. Joseph's Church in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Weekly, some 150 young people, primarily ages 21-35, mostly young professionals attend these discussions, which appear as part of an apparent revival of religious interest among younger Americans. This Easter, according to Parrales, nearly 90 people are set to join the Catholic Church at St. Joseph's, another 70 at Old St. Patrick's Cathedral Basilica nearby, some 50 at Harvard's Catholic Center, about another 50 at Arizona State, 40 at the University of Michigan. Moreover, the numbers of those to be initiated into the Church at Easter seem to be up in many other parishes as well, as is Mass attendance - as is devotional life (e.g., Eucharistic adoration and contemplative forms of prayer like the Rosary). Certainly something is happening.

To counter the obvious optimism that these trends may invite, the author offers some sobering demographics. "Members of Gen Z are less likely than people in other generations to profess belief in God without doubts, for example, according to the 2024 General Social Survey. Gen Zers are also the least likely to attend religious services regularly and the most likely to never attend them. Many weren’t brought up religious, and many of those who were have left the faith. Only 28 percent of adults born in the 2000s to highly religious families remain highly religious, according to Pew. And despite the claim that Gen Z men are leading a resurgence in traditional Christianity, they in fact are simply leaving the Church at a slower rate than women are."

The worst statistic of all: "For every Catholic convert, for example, roughly eight Catholics leave the faith." And classic American revivals like the 18th and 19th century Great Awakenings emerged "in multiple places" and galvanized "a statistically significant portion of the population." On the other hand, "some of history's most consequential periods of religious renewal have been led by particular people in particular places, often not as representatives of a new common culture but as a committed counterculture."

Two things can be true at the same time. Christendom is not coming back - at least not anytime soon. Nor can the Christian cultural hegemony that characterized the U.S. from the Second Great Awakening more or less through the 1950s be expected to revive. On the other hand, the good news is still being preached and increasingly being heard by those disposed to do so. "Most Gen Zers may not have questions about Christianity or faith, but those who do are seeking answers."

The broader cultural question. is the subject of a very different piece by NY Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, "Can Christianity Be Restored to the Center of American Life?" [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/religion-revival-america.html].

Anyone familiar with Douthat's work will know that the cultural role of religion in American society has long preoccupied him (cf. his earlier book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics). Douthat's present concern in this article whether "a Christian center can be restored in American life." By that, he means "a set of religious beliefs and institutions that are embraced and respected in the broad middle of the country, cultivate a widely shared interpretation of the American story and operate effectively at the elite level, informing political conduct and intellectual arguments even among nonbelievers."

For Douthat, we once had such a religious center in the institutions of mainline Protestantism, which "went into steep and perhaps terminal decline" between the 1960s and the 1980s. Here he draws on political theorist Joshua Mitchell's argument ("Whither the Reformation in America?) that "the relationship between the Protestant tradition and the American idea" was founded on a "civilizational wager" that modeled modern American society on biblical Israel's "sense of divine mission and a covenantal relationship with God."

Of the possible successors to the old mainline Protestantism, Mitchell regarded evangelicalism "as fundamentally anti-worldly," and Catholicism "and the intellectual conservatism that it has ended up powerfully influencing" as too Old World. A third alternative, "the direct heir of the defunct Protestant establishment" is woke progressivism, which, however is. neither Protestant nor Christian anymore.

Based on Mitchell's generalizations, Douthat argues that to "lead and shape America, a religious tradition would need to be, first, worldly in the sense of relating in a serious way to a complex cultural and political and intellectual landscape where many people do not share its beliefs." Secondly, it would need to believe in an American "national mission and sacred destiny." Thirdly, it would need to be actually Christian.

He agrees that unworldly evangelicalism is insufficient "to form and shape an intellectual elite and to engage politically outside of Manichaean categories." Catholicism's insufficiency "is its still uncertain relationship to the American drama as a whole — not because most Catholics in the United States aren’t patriotic, but because a vision of America as a promised land and almost-chosen people still does not integrate easily with Catholic ideas and categories." (I might add that, as Catholicism become ever more associated with the global South and less with Europe and North America, that "relationship to the American drama as a whole" will likely become, if anything, even more, not less, uncertain.)

As for the third alternative, according to Douthat, "the insufficiency of woke post-Protestantism is that it believes in sin but not in God."

Thus, this Holy Week at least, neither author envisions a recovery of American Christendom. That said, an alternative model of a Great Awakening in an authentic but more modest, more intentional, more diasporic movement of grace can yet be detected among our not quite so secular almost chosen people.

Passover

 

The great Jewish holiday of Passover begins tonight. It was, of course to celebrate the Passover that Jesus and his disciples traveled to Jerusalem. Instead of sacrificing the Passover lamb in the Temple, however, Jesus offered himself as the Lamb of God on the Cross. In place of the Passover supper that he and his disciples never got to celebrate, he left us the eucharistic meal which is the central act of the Church's worship.

Passover possibly pre-dated Exodus as an ancient nomadic, pastoral, spring-time sacrifice, celebrated at the end of Nisan 14, on what would have been the brightest night of the month (the full moon). Roland de Vaux considered the possibility that this was the feast that the Israelites sought permission from Pharaoh to go to celebrate in the desert (cf. Exodus 5:1). That permission famously having been denied by Pharaoh, the ritual with its lamb and blood acquired a new meaning as a night of vigil, to bring them out of the land of Egypt ... a vigil to be kept for the Lord by all the Israelites throughout their generations. (Exodus 12:42). 

By Jesus' time, the sacrificial meal of the Passover festival had effectively been united with the  seven-day agricultural feast of Unleavened Bread (Nisan 15-21), which originally marked the beginning of the barley harvest. The week-long Unleavened Bread festival was long observed as one of Judaism's three great pilgrimage feasts. The combined Passover and Unleavened Bread feast gathered great crowds - including Jesus and his disciples - in Jerusalem. 

According to the Gospel of John (the Gospel that shows the. most knowledge of Jerusalem and Judaism and that has traditionally set the chronological tone for the Triduum), Jesus and his disciples celebrated a pre-Passover meal together ante diem festem (John 13:1). That meal we remember as the Last Supper, which soon became the ritual basis for the Christian Lord's Supper. According to John, Jesus, the Lamb of God, died late on Passover eve, the "Preparation Day," while the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in the Temple. Having identified Jesus' death with the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb, the New Testament further identifies Jesus with the "first fruits," the sheaf of new grain which was to be ritually waived before the Lord either (interpretations vary) on the day after the first day of the Unleavened Bread or the day after the Sabbath during the feast of Unleavened Bread (Leviticus 23:11). Either way, according to John's chronology, that would have been Sunday, the day Christ the first fruits of those who have died was raised from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:20).

With the Roman destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, the prescribed ritual sacrifices could no longer be performed - including the Passover sacrifice, which despite its domestic origins had long before become something to be done in Jerusalem. Accordingly, the Passover was transformed into a domestic family meal which could be celebrated anywhere - a ritual retelling of the Exodus story in a symbolic remembrance of the lost sacrificial meal. The Seder ("order") formatted the ritual into a non-sacrificial festive meal, incorporating a shank bone as a symbolic representation of the missing passover lamb. This is the festival meal which Jews throughout the world will celebrate tonight. 

The Passover seder serves as a joyful commemoration of the exodus from Egypt, a permanent recollection of Jewish liberation and the creation of the nation. At this problematic  juncture in our history, however, as anti-semitism increases worldwide on both ends of the political spectrum, it is also a sobering contemporary reminder of the ongoing challenge which that liberation and national creation entail. In every generation let all look on themselves as having personally come forth from Egypt, proclaims the Passover ritual. It was not only our ancestors, blessed be He, that the Holy One redeemed, but us as well did he redeem along with them. … In every generation they stand up against us to destroy us, and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand.

Holy Week

 

Today's Gospel reading [John 12:1-11], symbolically set six days before the Passover and read today six days before Easter, provides us a unique introduction to Holy Week.

On his way to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover festival, Jesus visits his friends in Bethany, Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead, his sister Martha, who plays part of the mistress of the house, and their sister Mary, who took a liter of costly perfumed oil made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair. Such extravagant display naturally attracted attention and provoked criticism. But, just as Jesus would accept royal kingly honor from the crowds on Palm Sunday, so he accepted this extravagant display from his good friend Mary, giving it a longer-term significance: "Leave her alone. Let her keep this for the day of my burial."

As we enter this great week - since 1955 it is officially called hebdomada sancta (Holy week), but before that it was known as hebdomada major (the Greater Week) - as we enter this great and. holy week, the Church, like Mary at Bethany, spares no expense. she pulls out all the stops, so to speak, celebrating lavish ceremonies intended to appeal to all our senses, thus to highlight beyond any doubt the importance, the greatness, the. holiness of the events being remembered.

For Holy Week recalls not just some long ago historical occurrence. Just as Jesus died and was buried, so through the Church he invites us to die with him symbolically in the renewal of our own baptismal experience so as to rise with him in his and our eventual resurrection. Then as now, the great and. holy message of this week was not well received by the political powers of the time. Now as then, the great and. holy message of this week again poses a challenge to our world's commitments to power, domination, and control.

Homily for Monday of Holy Week, Saint Paul the Apostle, NY, March 30, 2026.