The Pope Said No
What faithfulness looks like in the face of empire
I have been sitting with a strange feeling all morning, trying to figure out what to call it. It is not quite shock (nothing feels shocking anymore) and it is not quite anger, though there is some of that too. It is something closer to recognition. Like watching a scene you have read about in a book play out in real life, and realizing the book was trying to warn you about something.
This week, the President of the United States attacked the Pope. He went on social media and called Pope Leo XIV weak, terrible, and suggested that Leo only has his job because of Trump. THEN, forty minutes later, he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ with robes, glowing hands, healing the sick, American flags and fighter jets filling the sky behind him. This is the literal definition of blasphemy, y’all.
What Leo Actually Said
It is worth pausing to understand what Pope Leo did to earn this response, because the answer tells you everything you need to know about what is actually happening here. He looked at a war being waged in the name of God, watched a president threaten to destroy an entire civilization, and said that God does not bless any conflict. He said that invoking the holy name of God to justify discourses of death is wrong. He canceled a planned visit to the United States to go sit with migrants instead.
That is what got him attacked. Witness.
Pope Leo, responding to Trump, said something that I think deserves to be read slowly. He said that Trump’s framing shows “not understanding what the message of the Gospel is.” He said he would not enter into debate. And then he got on a plane to visit migrants in Algeria. That is a man who knows what he believes and has decided to simply keep doing it regardless of who is watching or who is angry.
The Pattern Underneath the Post
Here is what I keep coming back to. When Leo was first elected (the first American pope in history) Trump celebrated. He posted that it was a great honor for the country. He tried to claim him. He wanted Leo to be his pope, an American pope for an American Christianity, a religious leader who would line up behind the flag and the jets and the war and call it blessed. And when Leo would not do that, when he kept saying that the Gospel has something to say about how we treat the poor and the immigrant and the enemy, Trump did what he always does with people who refuse to perform loyalty. He turned on him completely. He called him weak. He suggested he should be grateful.
Then he posted himself as Jesus. (Which he now claims he was depicting himself as a doctor)
What the Healing Stories Are Actually About
I want to say something about that image, because I think it deserves more than a gasp. The image shows Trump in robes, glowing hands outstretched over a man in a hospital bed, surrounded by a nurse, a soldier, and what appears to be an ICE officer. American monuments fill the background. Fighter jets streak across the sky. The whole thing is drenched in the iconography of empire.
And then I think about the actual healing stories in the gospels. Jesus healed a leper—someone the religious establishment had declared unclean and untouchable, someone kept outside the city walls. He healed a Roman centurion’s servant, crossing every social boundary that existed to do it. He healed people on the Sabbath and got in trouble for it because the institution was more concerned with the rules than with the person bleeding in front of them. He healed a woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years and had spent everything she had on doctors who couldn’t help her. He touched people that nobody else would touch.
The people in the background of that AI image (the jets, the soldiers, the monuments, the eagles) those are not the people Jesus was healing. Those are the people he was healing people from.
Read that again. ^
Why This Moment Is Different
I want to be careful here, because I am aware that American presidents have always wrapped their agendas in religious language. This is not new. The civil religion of America has always blurred the line between the flag and the cross, and the church has always had to resist the pull of that conflation. What feels different now is the directness of it. The claim being made is that America is God’s instrument, that the war is God’s war, that the president who wages it is, apparently, God’s stand-in.
And the Pope (an imperfect man leading an imperfect institution, like every human and institution that has ever existed) looked at all of that and said no. He read the Gospel and came to conclusions about what it means, and then he acted on those conclusions even when it cost him something.
I think there is a word for that. And that word is faithful.
What Faithful Looks Like When It Costs Something
After leaving pastoral ministry in 2022 what brought me back, more than anything else, was encountering people who held their faith with both hands even when the institution around them was letting them down. People who kept showing up. People who kept saying the true thing even when the easier thing was available.
Leo is doing that. On a world stage, in a moment when the most powerful person in the world is telling him to get in line, he is just continuing to do what he understands the Gospel to ask of him. He said he would not enter into debate and then he got on a plane.
For those of us who have spent years trying to untangle the Gospel from the machinery that has been built around it or trying to figure out what following Jesus actually looks like when you strip away the political performance and the institutional loyalty and the brand management…watching this is something. It is a reminder that faithfulness is not complicated. It is just costly. And the people who practice it tend to be too busy actually doing it to spend much time talking about it.
The Pope said no. And then he went to be with the people Jesus spent his life with. That’s the whole story.
As a Catholic who struggles with the institution, Pope Leo standing up for the Gospel is really helping to heal me
“He said he would not enter into debate.”
This whole post is worth reading and rereading, but that sentence hit me the hardest. We are a lot more familiar with two other responses to a bully like the president: try to reason or try to ignore. Neither one works. Pope Leo’s response is like watching a martial arts master quietly sidestep and leave the opponent attacking air.