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Dear friends,
Today is the feast of St. John Paul II. The Church keeps it on Oct. 22 because on that date in 1978, a 58-year-old cardinal from Kraków stood in St. Peter’s Square at the Mass inaugurating his pontificate and told the world, “Do not be afraid.”
He followed it with a demand that every politburo in Europe understood: “Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic and political systems.”
It is nearly midnight as I write, and I keep coming back to that homily, because I am convinced the Holy Spirit is preaching it again, this time in an American accent.
A Polish Pope Behind the Iron Curtain
Eight months after that Mass, on June 2, 1979, John Paul II knelt and kissed the tarmac at Warsaw’s airport. That afternoon he celebrated Mass in Victory Square, a plaza the communists had renamed, before hundreds of thousands of Poles. He closed his homily with a prayer the regime had no answer for, crying out from “the depths of this millennium” that the Spirit would “descend and renew the face of the earth. The face of this land.”
The crowd answered by chanting, “We want God!” Fourteen months later, the shipyard workers of Gdańsk founded Solidarity, and in November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down.
John Paul II never fired a shot. He told the truth in public, over and over, in a language ordinary people could carry home, and he refused to let a government decide who counted as fully human.
As I wrote last October, that witness lit a long fuse under an empire built on lies.
The threat he confronted came from the far left, an atheist Marxist state that jailed priests and outlawed free unions. Here at home, in 2026, the danger to human dignity wears a red hat and speaks the language of the right.
Just as God raised up John Paul II behind the Iron Curtain to stand up to communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas, from inside the walls of MAGA authoritarianism, to stand up to it.
“Use It Well, America”
John Paul II already told us what he thought of a country that closes its heart to the stranger. He told us twice, in fact, on consecutive days in October 1995.
On Oct. 4 of that year he landed in the rain at Newark International Airport, where President Bill Clinton was waiting on the tarmac. Clinton, a Baptist, welcomed him on the feast of St. Francis and quoted the saint’s prayer for peace. Then the pope stepped to the lectern with the presidential seal and delivered a charge to the most powerful nation on earth.
“Your power of example carries with it heavy responsibilities. Use it well, America. Be an example of justice and civic virtues, freedom fulfilled in goodness at home and abroad.”
He went on in the next breath to say what that goodness looks like. “From its beginning until now, the United States has been a haven for generation after generation of new arrivals,” he said, before adding that it “would indeed be sad if the United States were to turn away” from that spirit.
The next evening, at a rain-soaked Mass for 83,000 people in Giants Stadium, he invoked the landmark just across the harbor.
The Statue of Liberty, he said, stands as “an enduring witness to the American tradition of welcoming the stranger.” Then he asked a question that now reads like an indictment.
“Is present-day America becoming less sensitive, less caring towards the poor, the weak, the stranger, the needy? It must not!”
In the same homily, he called the unborn child “the stranger in the womb” and warned that an America that “were to turn in on itself” would mark “the beginning of the end” of the American experience itself. He refused to split the stranger at the border from the stranger in the womb.
“We Will Stand Up”
Sixteen years earlier, on Oct. 7, 1979, John Paul II became the first pope to celebrate Mass on the National Mall. An estimated 175,000 people stood on the grass to hear him. His homily that afternoon rang with a refrain.
“And so, we will stand up every time that human life is threatened.”
Among the threats he named, one could have been written for this year: “When freedom is used to dominate the weak, to squander natural resources and energy, and to deny basic necessities to people, we will stand up and reaffirm the demands of justice and social love.”
Read that homily next to a newsfeed of ICE raids and tell me which side of the Mall John Paul II would be standing on.
I am convinced that if John Paul II were alive today, he would stand foursquare against MAGA authoritarianism. The man who faced down the Kremlin would not be cowed by a 22-foot golden statue at Doral.
What Leo Learned From the Polish Pope
Robert Prevost was 24, a young Augustinian studying for the priesthood in Chicago, when John Paul II preached on the Mall. As Pope Leo XIV, he has spent the past year putting that homily into practice.
Leo learned first that a pope speaks to a nation in its own words. John Paul quoted Emma Lazarus to Americans.
Leo sent the American people a letter for the 250th anniversary, dated June 25, insisting that “defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants, whose hopes, sacrifices and contribution have formed part of the history of this country from its very beginning.”
Eight days later, at Mount Rushmore, President Trump warned of “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country.” Notice the inversion.
The pope who actually helped bring down communism told America to remain a haven for new arrivals, while this president wields anticommunism as a club against them.
Leo spent the Fourth of July with the migrants of Lampedusa rather than in Washington. I was on the island that morning. In one of the longest homilies of his pontificate, he turned the Good Samaritan loose on a continent: “before any intellectual consideration or ideological conviction, the encounter with those who lie before us, stripped of everything, calls us to be close to them.”
His predecessor also taught him that a pope cannot be enlisted.
In January, Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, then Leo’s ambassador to the United States, to the Pentagon for a lecture on American military supremacy, and an official in the room invoked the Avignon Papacy, the 14th-century era when French power bent the bishop of Rome to its will.
John Paul II knew that game. He never bought access to the Kremlin with silence. Leo has refused to strike that bargain with the White House, too.
Then there is JD Vance. The Catholic vice president told Laura Ingraham on June 30 that the Holy See’s views on immigration are “troubling” and said he hoped Church leadership had learned from what he, Marco Rubio and the president had said.
Four weeks later, sitting with NBC’s Tom Llamas at Castel Gandolfo, Leo called the people America has welcomed “one of the greatest wealths of the United States.”
What matters most is the Gospel itself. John Paul II did not oppose communism because he was a conservative.
He opposed it because it lied about the human person, and he would oppose any regime, right or left, that did the same. Leo has taken up that same argument, with the same Christ at its center.
Do Not Be Afraid
Forty-eight years ago today, the Church heard a Polish voice tell her to open the borders of states and systems to Christ. Nobody in St. Peter’s Square that morning expected the Iron Curtain to fall within eleven years.
Plenty of Catholics assume MAGA authoritarianism will outlast us. I don’t. Empires built on cruelty and lies have a shelf life, and the Church has buried every one of them.
St. John Paul II, pray for us, and for the American pope now carrying your fight into his own country. The strangers at our door are waiting to see whether America will still use its power well.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of American Catholics (and countless others of goodwill) who believe the stranger at our door bears the image of God, and that no government gets to decide who counts as fully human.
John Paul II taught a frightened continent that the truth, spoken plainly and often enough, is stronger than any regime. In an age of deportation flights and golden idols, we remain rooted in that same faith.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for courage and for a Church that refuses to bow. Right now, as the American pope takes up the fight of the Polish pope, that hunger has never been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against MAGA authoritarianism, I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
“Here at home, in 2026, the danger to human dignity wears a red hat and speaks the language of the right. … Empires built on cruelty and lies have a shelf life.”
espoir ღ.
I stand with Pope