“In the One, We Are One” — A Letter to My Conservative Catholic Friends

First published in the Catholic Herald alongside a response from Fr. Robert Sirico. A brother’s appeal to conservative Catholics after Donald Trump mocked Pope Leo XIV.

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Dear friends —

The essay below first appeared this week in the Catholic Herald, a conservative Catholic publication with global reach. Dialogue with our conservative siblings is always an honor, because before anything else, we are one family in Christ.

Fr. Robert Sirico offered a generous response alongside the piece, and I encourage you to read him at the Herald. My original essay is reprinted here in full:

‘Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.’ The great Benedict XVI wrote those words in Truth and Tolerance more than twenty years ago, and they hang over recent days like a warning finally come due.

On April 12, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social and mocked the Successor of Peter, calling Pope Leo XIV ‘terrible on Foreign Policy’ for the Pope’s opposition to the widening wars in Iran and Venezuela. Hours later, the president posted an AI-generated image of himself depicted as Christ the healer. Evangelical pastors erupted — among them Doug Wilson, whose parishioners include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, along with the podcaster Riley Gaines. Within a day, the Christ image came down. The post mocking our Holy Father stayed up.

There is one honest reading of that sequence. The president heard his evangelical base and hit delete. The Catholic outcry that followed his mockery of Peter did not move him at all. One post was a political problem for him; the other was not.

I write as a brother, not as an opponent. For more than a decade in Time and elsewhere, I have written about the failures of my own party — its condescension towards working-class believers, its reflexive secular gaze, its long habit of treating Catholic voters as a constituency to be managed rather than a people to be honoured. I have not spared the Democrats, and I have no intention of starting today.

But we are in a moment of peril, and I would betray the Gospel if I stayed quiet. The coalition many of you joined in good conscience did not lift a finger in recent days to defend your Pope. Vice President JD Vance, the administration’s most senior Catholic, said nothing while his commander-in-chief belittled the Successor of Peter. The men you helped elevate to power would not spend a dollar of political capital on Leo XIV. Consider what that silence reveals about how much your voice actually matters inside that coalition.

I understand why so many conservative Catholics made the alliance in the first place. The causes are real and rooted in the magisterium. Protecting life from womb to tomb sits at the foundation of the Church’s social teaching. John Paul II called the family the primordial cell of society, and a reverently celebrated liturgy is doctrine made visible.

I grant every one of these commitments without caveat, and I believe they deserve a political home willing to defend them — not a host that tolerates them when convenient and ridicules their highest earthly shepherd when the mood strikes.

Pope Leo XIV has given us a motto to carry through this season: In the One, we are one. It is his Augustinian inheritance, his pastoral gift and his summons to a fractured Church — communion that refuses to flatten the particular gifts each tradition brings to the altar.

Pope Francis liked to repeat a line from Paul VI: that politics is one of the highest forms of charity because it serves the common good. That instinct is precisely what Truth Social lacked in recent days.

Charity does not ridicule the man in the white cassock who begs the world to lay down its bombs, nor does it flirt with blasphemous imagery and then plead confusion when caught. A political movement that cannot summon that baseline of reverence for the Vicar of Christ cannot credibly claim to be a Catholic home. At best, it is a place where Catholics rent the furniture.

So let me say to my conservative Catholic friends the thing I have wanted to say for a long time. Your movement has been hijacked by a celebrity populism that puts evangelical grievance ahead of Catholic conscience, and only you can take it back. The faithful who built the American Catholic conservative tradition — who prayed the rosary outside clinics, fought for school choice, defended the reverence of the Latin Mass when bishops would not — those faithful did not sign up to be silent partners while the Pope is insulted.

You do not owe fidelity to men who will not defend the Holy Father. Your fidelity belongs to Christ and to the Church he founded upon Peter.

For my part, I promise this. Those of us on the other side of the aisle must earn your trust back through deeds, not slogans — through policies that honour the unborn and the immigrant alike, the family and the worker, the reverence of the sanctuary and the dignity of those living on the street.

Changing your convictions is not what I ask. I ask only that you refuse a bargain that requires your silence while your Pope is treated as a punchline.

Benedict warned us what happens when politics tries to do the work of God. We saw it in recent days on a small screen — a man portraying himself as Christ while treating the Vicar of Christ as a fool. That, in Benedict’s exact word, is demonic. The hour for conservative Catholic silence has passed.

Before we are Republicans or Democrats, we are Christians — siblings in the Lord. And in the One, we are one.

A note on the dialogue: the Catholic Herald paired this piece with a thoughtful reply from Fr. Robert Sirico. You can read his response and the full exchange at the Catholic Herald here.

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