“I’m Excited to Be a Catholic Again” — James Carville on Pope Leo XIV
At 81, the architect of Bill Clinton’s war room told me the church should “stay out of the goddamn sex business” — and explained how Francis groomed the American pope. We talked Democrats, Catholics, and the road back.
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“I’m excited to be a Catholic again,” James Carville told me in an interview earlier this month — 81 years into a life that began with the Nine First Fridays devotion in a Louisiana river town and very nearly ended its run with the church in anger and disgust.
The architect of Bill Clinton’s war room has been circling this homecoming in public for a year. He wrote in the National Catholic Reporter last July that Pope Leo XIV’s election brought “an immense amount of joy” to his heart. He told Raymond Arroyo in a January interview that the church’s structure — its seasons, its rituals, its liturgical calendar — is what pulled him back after decades of drift.
For half an hour on the phone, we ranged from his altar-boy childhood under Pius XII to his strategic advice for the American pope, the Democratic Party’s collapse among Catholic voters, and the state of Israel.
“I just don’t think we had much between John XXIII and Francis,” he said. The thaw began in Buenos Aires, where Carville worked as an international consultant while Jorge Bergoglio was archbishop. “Somebody said, that’s the cardinal — he rides the bus to work every day. I actually saw him on a Buenos Aires bus.”
What began as respect for a cardinal on a city bus became, under the first American pope, something closer to a homecoming.
The Consultant’s Memo to the Pope
I asked Carville what he would tell Leo if the pope ever hired him for political advice.
“Every time the church talks about sex, it digs itself in a hole. Every time it talks about charity, or love your neighbor as yourself, it elevates itself. So I wouldn’t so much do a mea culpa — just stay out of the goddamn sex business. All of it.”
“It’s the rule of holes,” he added. “When you’ve dug yourself into a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging.”
Leo has so far governed like a man who mostly agrees. His wide-ranging in-flight press conference on the way home from Africa in April spent its energy on war, migration, and the death penalty — the issues this papacy has chosen as its terrain.
“A Very Well-Crafted Political Move”
Carville reads the 2025 conclave the way he reads a campaign org chart: find the person who controls the patronage.
“Francis groomed Leo,” he said. “He brought him to Rome and made him the guy dispensing the patronage. Cardinal So-and-So is coming to Rome for a meeting? He would determine where he was going to stay, business class or coach. He had all the power.”
The history backs him up. Francis named Robert Prevost prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in 2023 — the office that vets nearly every bishop appointment on earth — then elevated him to the highest rank of cardinal ten weeks before his death.
“I think Francis — you know, maybe guided by the Holy Spirit — put him in a position to succeed,” Carville said. “It was a very well-crafted political move.”
Leveling With the Faithful
The deepest wound in Carville’s Catholic life, by his own telling, came from discovering that the institution had not told him the truth — about Pius XII, about the authorship of the Gospels, about where doctrine came from.
“You were told the pope is great, he’s infallible,” he said. “And then I found out who Pius XII was, and I felt like I was lied to. ‘Pius XII was a man of peace’ — there’s no such fucking thing. He was a man of power. You’re better off just leveling with people. That’s the most destructive thing to faith.”
He rates Paul VI the worst pope of his lifetime for rejecting his own birth control commission — a body whose majority found no doctrinal barrier to contraception — and he argues the wound Humanae Vitae left on the American church belongs in the same conversation as the abuse crisis. That crisis, he believes, is ultimately purgative: “For all of the grief and everything it caused, I think it’s having a cleansing effect on the church. I know it is.”
The Party That Forgot the Al Smith Dinner
Democrats lost Catholic voters in 2024 by double digits — 56 to 41 in the Washington Post’s exit polling, the worst Democratic presidential showing with Catholics in decades. Kamala Harris skipped the Al Smith dinner — the first nominee to do so in 40 years. I asked Carville what we do about it.
“If you took the top 20 people in the Harris campaign, I don’t think 18 of them had any fucking idea what the Al Smith dinner was,” he said.
The road back, in his telling, runs through the social gospel and through a bigger tent. Carville managed Bob Casey Sr.’s 1986 campaign for governor of Pennsylvania — an anti-abortion, pro-labor Catholic Democrat of the kind the party once produced in bulk — and he bristles at the legend that Casey was silenced at the 1992 convention for being pro-life.
He calls it “a great piece of bullshit,” arguing Casey was refused the stage because conventions do not platform speakers who oppose the plank, and noting the importance of the choice issue “is not near what it used to be.”
I asked whether anti-abortion Democrats belong in the party at all. “There are people who are genuine liberals who are genuinely pro-life,” he said. “They arrive at that position honestly.” Pope Leo has pushed in the same direction, defending Sen. Dick Durbin against single-issue bishops and insisting “pro-life” covers every stage of a human life — a fight I have chronicled throughout the year, and in particular in the Democratic Party’s efforts to broaden their tent.
“I Want to Be in That Guy’s Frat”
Democrats now view Pope Leo far more favorably than Republicans do, and the pope outpaces Trump by 54 points on net favorability after two months of MAGA attacks. I offered Carville my theory: we are a leaderless party, and Democrats see in Leo a man who stands up for uncompromising values while our own leaders seem timid.
He took the premise and ran toward likability. “He’s from Chicago — he’s very sharp. He knows what he’s doing. And the opposition obviously helps him, because no one thinks Trump is a moral person.”
Then he reached for an analogy he warned would send chills up my spine. “Leo’s built a brand. I want to be in that guy’s frat. He’s likable. He’s like the George W. Bush ‘want to have a beer with’ argument — someone you want to hang out with. Spend ten minutes asking him about the White Sox.”
The contrast he drew was with the church’s old guard: “You ever see these old Cardinal Burke types? There’s nothing likable about him. No one wants to follow him. These Society of St. Pius X assholes — who wants that?”
Israel, Gaza, and the Two Different Things
Carville has warned that anti-Israel “loudmouths” could cost Democrats elections and has called antisemitism a growing problem in the party. I asked how a Catholic Democrat squares that with Leo’s insistence on a ceasefire and Palestinian dignity in Gaza.
“Anti-Israel and anti-the-government-of-Israel are two different things,” he said. “I’m very pro the idea of the state of Israel. I’m very anti the government of Israel. Netanyahu does not reflect the founding principles of the state of Israel at all. He hurts the cause of it.”
What He Wants the Church to Be When He Gets Home
Carville wrote last summer that as he faces the journey home, he is delighted to walk hand in hand with the church for the rest of his life. So I closed with the personal question: what should Leo’s church look like when he completes that journey?
“I want it to embrace pluralism, and above all, to teach — really, at the core, it’s love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else is commentary. I hope the church continues its emphasis on pluralism, continues its emphasis on marginalized people, and its passion for peace. When it abandons that, it loses its moral authority — and when it owns it, it enhances its moral authority.”
He laughed at where the century has landed him. “If you had told me in 2007 that the two people the world might pay attention to most would be the English monarch and the pope —”
For a party that has forgotten how to speak to believers, an 81-year-old operative coming home to the pews is the tell: people follow leaders who make moral seriousness magnetic, and right now the most magnetic moral leader in American life is a White Sox fan in Rome. The question Carville leaves for Democrats is whether we have the humility to learn from him.
My full conversation with Carville, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows — along with a moderate rumination on what holds up and what was a little off. To keep him talking, I saved the fact-checking for after we hung up. The full exchange is open only to paid subscribers.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with every Catholic who walked away in anger and is looking for a reason to come home. James Carville found his reason in a pope who leads with the medicine of mercy — and millions of Americans, whatever their politics, are discovering the same pull toward a church that defends the dignity of every human person.
Across the country, people are straining to hear a voice in the wilderness, and a new generation is rising to answer it. Young Catholics and people of goodwill are stepping forward to reclaim this country for the common good, hungry for a faith that does justice instead of one that blesses power. That hunger is why this has become the fastest-growing Catholic community in America.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
