Pope Leo XIV Will Outlast Donald Trump — and Why We Will Defeat MAGA Anti-Catholicism

Trump started this fight. JD Vance picked up the baton. The American Catholic Church has buried every movement that came for her since 1776 — and she will bury this one too.

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Before you read on, join 50,000 Americans and sign our letter to President Trump demanding that he apologize for attacking Pope Leo XIV. We’ll deliver it to the president via JD Vance

Donald Trump started this.

On Sunday, the President of the United States took to Truth Social and declared that Pope Leo XIV is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Then came the AI-generated portrait of Trump as Christ, a blasphemous image that even diehard MAGA evangelicals called deeply disrespectful.

Picking up the baton, JD Vance — a convert who has been Catholic for all of seven years — ordered the Successor of Peter to “stick to matters of morality” and stay out of American policy.

America’s bishops publicly rebuked him. Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune, no friend of Rome, dismissed Vance’s lecture: “Isn’t that his job?”

None of this is new. Anti-Catholicism is in America’s DNA. MAGA is its newest face.

In the spring of 1844, nativist mobs in Philadelphia burned two Catholic churches and a Catholic seminary to the ground because Catholic parents had asked that their children not be forced to read the King James Bible in public school. Twenty people died.

James G. Blaine spent a generation pushing state constitutions to bar public funding of Catholic schools — bans that survived in some form into our own lifetime.

The Klan rebuilt itself in the 1920s on hatred of Catholics, lighting crosses outside convents and across the open fields of the Midwest to terrorize Al Smith out of the White House.

The men of MAGA have inherited the torches and the rope. They have simply traded the burning cross for the smartphone and the rally stage.

Now let me say plainly what every Catholic should say. To reject the pope is to reject the Church. Catholicism does not exist apart from communion with the Bishop of Rome. The Second Vatican Council taught it without ambiguity: the Successor of Peter is “the permanent and visible source and foundation of unity” of the universal Church.

A Catholic who chooses Donald Trump over Leo XIV has chosen something other than the Catholic faith. Theology does not bend to politics. It never has.

The Church is our mother. We will defend her.

For 250 years, American Catholics have founded hospitals, built universities, fed the hungry, sheltered refugees, educated children in the poorest corners of this nation, created some of the most beautiful art and music in human civilization, and fought for justice in places where justice had no other advocates.

The Ursulines opened the first charitable institution on what would become American soil in New Orleans in 1727. Georgetown rose under John Carroll in 1791. My undergraduate alma mater, Xavier, was founded in 1831.

The Sisters of Mercy crossed an ocean to build hospitals across Chicago. Catholic Charities was born in 1910 to do the work that Washington still cannot. Dorothy Day fed the hungry on the Bowery while the rest of the country looked away.

More than any other institution, we built this country.

We owe nothing to a vice president who found his way to the faith last Tuesday. The president who manipulates the holy name of Jesus for a Truth Social post does not get to define our Church. Every movement that has ever sought to capture, divide, or destroy Catholicism in America has failed; this one will too.

This morning Pope Leo XIV stood in St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Bamenda, Cameroon — half a world from the rage of Mar-a-Lago — and spoke for the universal Church. The world, he said, is being ravaged by “a handful of tyrants” pouring billions into war while children starve.

He continued: “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

Donald Trump heard the message. JD Vance is reading it now. We’ll make sure of it.

Pope Leo XIV will outlast Donald Trump. The Church will outlast them all. Christ promised it himself, in the only voice that matters in this argument: the gates of hell will not prevail.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of American Catholics who refuse to let a president, a vice president, and the movement they lead twist the faith of our mothers and fathers into a chaplaincy for cruelty.

The Church is not a prop for Truth Social. We will not allow a seven-year convert to lecture the Bishop of Rome on what the faith permits.

And the Catholic faith — built on this soil by the Ursulines and John Carroll, sustained by Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, buried with every immigrant family in our cemeteries — does not belong to the men in Mar-a-Lago.

In an era poisoned by cruelty and cynicism, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and authoritarianism.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda.

They are looking for courage, for truth, for love made visible in action — and right now, as a sitting president attacks the Bishop of Rome and his vice president lectures the universal Church on its own theology, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of the Church and the human person against MAGA’s contempt for both — I am asking you to join us.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.