Rocca Is Right: Abortion Isn’t the Top Issue for the Catholic Church Anymore
Francis Rocca’s Atlantic essay captures the shift — but the roots run deeper than Trump. Pope Leo's first year reveals a deliberate, quiet recalibration from Rome.
Dear friends —
Francis Rocca — one of the finest Vatican journalists working today — published an essay in The Atlantic last week arguing that abortion is no longer the most urgent political issue for the American Catholic hierarchy. Rocca’s piece is behind The Atlantic’s paywall, but all paid subscribers to Letters from Leo will receive a gift link below so you can read his essay in full.
Today’s subscriber-only essay is my response.
Rocca gets the “what” exactly right: the American bishops have undergone a genuine shift in emphasis, from the Communion wars of the Biden era to the USCCB’s rare “special message” on deportation to the border bishops’ letter on the morning of Trump’s State of the Union.
But what his essay captures less fully is why. The answer begins in Rome — with Pope Francis’s famous 2013 admonition that the Church had grown “obsessed” with abortion, and with Pope Leo XIV’s quiet first-year decision to carry that recalibration forward in his own distinctive voice.
I also examine how Leo’s approach is already shaping the American episcopacy, from Archbishop Hicks’s relationship with New York Mayor Ali Mamdani to the USCCB’s new leadership.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Rocca’s essay is here (gift link). I encourage you to read it in full.
He’s right. Immigration and war have displaced abortion as the issues that define Catholic public witness in this country. Rocca traces the arc with precision. What his essay captures less fully is why. The answer begins in Rome.
The Francis Precedent
In September 2013, Pope Francis sat down with Fr. Antonio Spadaro for a landmark interview. The Church, he said, had grown “obsessed” with preaching about abortion, gay marriage, and contraception.
The moral edifice of the Church risked collapsing “like a house of cards” if it could not find a new balance. He wanted a Church that was a “home for all” rather than a “small chapel” consumed by a narrow doctrinal agenda.
It was a seismic moment. Conservative Catholics recoiled. Progressive Catholics exhaled. And for the remaining twelve years of Francis’s pontificate, the tension between those two reactions defined the internal politics of the global Church.
Francis never wavered on abortion itself — he once likened it to “hiring a hitman.” His opposition was visceral and unequivocal.
But he believed the Church had allowed a single issue to eclipse the full breadth of the Gospel, and he spent his papacy rebalancing the ledger: immigration, climate, poverty, war.
When he wrote to the American bishops less than three months before his death, urging them to defend migrants, he was issuing a final directive from a man who had spent a decade trying to widen the Church’s moral field of vision.
Pope Leo XIV inherited that project. And in his first year, he has carried it forward with his own distinctive voice.
Leo’s Quiet Recalibration
Consider what Leo has actually talked about since ascending to the Chair of St. Peter.
