“I’m Uniquely Qualified” — Sean Hannity Lectures Pope Leo XIV on the Bible

A Fox host who dropped out of college and quit the Church tried to tutor a canon lawyer turned pope — and the U.S. church, across every ideological divide, is closing ranks around its shepherd.

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On his Fox News show Thursday night, Sean Hannity looked into the camera and offered his credentials for lecturing Pope Leo XIV. “I think I’m uniquely qualified,” the host told his viewers. “I studied Latin, theology, went to Catholic church for twelve years.”

Hannity framed the Fox segment as “a message to the Vatican,” specifically “for Pope Leo.” His argument rested on a biography: twelve years of Catholic school, a seminary in high school, years of Latin and theology, daily Mass.

Then, Hannity announced, he had left the Catholic Church entirely — over what he called “institutionalized corruption… all the way to Rome.” “As of today,” he told his audience, “I no longer consider myself a Catholic.”

Having quit the Church, the host then proceeded to correct its chief pastor.

He cited “over 400 references to war” in the Bible and invoked David and Goliath as proof that God “authorizes” conflict. Then he arrived at Hiroshima. “I don’t think we had a choice,” Hannity said of the atomic bombings. “Same with Nagasaki. It did end a war, did save a lot of American lives.”

That is a sitting Fox host, in the middle of a theology lecture directed at the pope, defending the deliberate incineration of civilians that the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “a crime against God and humanity.”

Hannity’s evidence that Pope Leo is compromised? The pope met recently with David Axelrod and J.B. Pritzker.

“Is it because he’s a run-of-the-mill Trump-hating Democrat that lacks moral clarity about radical Islam?” Hannity asked on air.

As further proof, he offered that Leo “has an old Twitter account” that is “riddled with anti-Trump messages, including posts accusing Donald Trump of fueling racism and nativism, and other posts pushing for climate change and open borders.”

The case against the Vicar of Christ, in the telling of America’s most-watched cable news host, is his old tweets.

Hannity closed the segment with a verdict: “The president is correct, the pope is wrong on so many levels. Perhaps Leo’s judgment is clouded.”

He had previewed it six days earlier on his radio program. “I don’t like the Pope,” Hannity told his listeners last Friday. “That’s why I’m not a Catholic.”

Then he turned his attention to Pope Leo’s treatment of the Iran War.

“Have you even read the Bible?” Hannity asked. “Did you ever hear the story about David slaying Goliath through the power of God with a slingshot against this massive giant? Or the conflicts and the wars of King Saul?”

Hannity is not acting alone. Donald Trump opened the week with a Truth Social post calling Pope Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and accusing the first American pope of “catering to the Radical Left.”

I covered that attack here.

Vice President JD Vance told Fox on Monday that the Vatican should “stick to matters of morality” and leave public policy to Washington — the first of two times in two days he has tried to tutor the pope on Catholic theology.

By Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson was informing reporters that Pope Leo did not understand “something called the just war doctrine” — a doctrine invented in the fifth century by Augustine of Hippo, whose religious order Leo led as worldwide prior general for twelve years.

This is a coordinated assault on the spiritual authority of the first U.S.-born pope in history, launched because Leo refused to bless Trump’s bombing campaign in Iran.

At the Vatican prayer vigil last week, the pope warned against “the delusion of omnipotence,” and on Palm Sunday he quoted Isaiah 1 directly: “Even though you make many prayers, I am not listening — your hands are full of blood.”

The MAGA response to Scripture was to attack the man who quoted it.

Hannity’s pitch to his audience is that twelve years of Long Island Catholic school and a dropout year at St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary qualify him to correct the pope.

Robert Prevost entered religious life at fourteen. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Villanova University in 1977, a Master of Divinity from Catholic Theological Union in 1982, a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome in 1984, and a doctorate in canon law from the same pontifical university in 1987.

From 2001 to 2013, Prevost served two terms as prior general of the Order of Saint Augustine — the worldwide head of the community that traces its vocation to the theologian and saint Speaker Johnson tried to weaponize.

Sean Hannity dropped out of three different colleges and never finished any of them.

And it is this Hannity who now rises to question a pope’s fidelity to the Bible. He left his first wife for a Fox colleague fifteen years his junior. A man with that record has now appointed himself the tutor of a pope on scriptural fidelity.

The American church is noticing.

Earlier this week the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ doctrine committee issued a formal theological correction of Vance, reminding the country that legitimate war requires “self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed” — a standard the Iran war plainly fails.

Across ideological lines, the pews are closing ranks around their shepherd, and Leo himself spoke on the plane to Algiers: “I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel.”

The polling is slowly catching up. Trump recently clocked his lowest-ever ratings among Catholics at 39%

Hannity calls himself uniquely qualified. He is — uniquely qualified to show what happens when a man with a microphone, a convenient new religious identity, and an on-air defense of atomic bombing decides he knows the Catholic faith better than a canon lawyer from Rome who ran Augustine’s own religious order for twelve years.

Leo does not require the instruction. And the American church, across its ideological divides, is beginning to answer the bishops of Fox News with a quieter, more durable response — the response of a people gathering around their pope.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the millions of Catholics and people of goodwill who refuse to let a political movement wrap itself in Scripture to sanctify a war.

Alongside us are the bishops who corrected JD Vance, the cardinals who have spoken for Leo, and the parishioners in every pew who already know the difference between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the script of Fox News.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than the noise coming out of Washington studios and Truth Social feeds — for courage, for truth, and for a pope who will not flinch when a president calls him weak.

My dear friends, make no mistake: the Letters from Leo community is poised to take back this country for those who love the truth, justice, and mercy at the core of the Gospel.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against an administration that has turned the Bible into a weapon — I am asking you to join us.

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