During the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, where bishops, archbishops, and abbots convened in 1884 to, among other issues, discuss the establishment of the Catholic University of America, the Archbishop of Minneapolis John Ireland delivered a star-spangled homily. “The choicest field which providence offers in the world today to the occupancy of the Church is this republic,” intoned the County Kilkenny-born bishop, “and she welcomes with delight the signs of the times that indicate a glorious future for her beneath the starry banner.”
For all of Ireland’s often-admirable theological heterodoxy, including fervent support for racial justice, the most unusual thing in his vision was this variety of American exceptionalism within what the faithful understand is a universal Church. This idea of America as a singular and unique beacon—a “City upon on a Hill,” as the Puritan preacher and Massachusetts governor John Winthrop memorably put it in 1630—was always more a species of Protestant idiosyncrasy than something Catholic.
As a Catholic immigrant to a largely Protestant nation, Ireland had nonetheless imbibed the American patriotic triumphalism that reigned during the beginning of the Republic’s second century, perhaps understanding such sentiments as a means to acceptance in a nation whose leaders frequently espoused nativist bigotry. This variety of nationalist assimilation was associated with clerics like Ireland, as well as fellow-immigrants such as Dubuque Archbishop John J. Keane and James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore.
Yankee-born Protestant converts to Catholicism, from the founder of the Paulist Fathers, Isaac Hecker,* to Orestes Brownson, were even more zealous in fusing Catholic piety with American patriotism. Somebody who wasn’t enthusiastic about this project was the Pope, who in an 1899 encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae condemned this belief that the “Church in America is to be different what it is in the rest of the world,” identifying the ideology of American exceptionalism with a little-known heresy called Americanism—which is like a proto-Christian nationalism, though more progressive than reactionary. That pope was Leo XIII. The next pontiff to take that name was elected last week—and with some irony he’s the first American-born occupant on the Throne of St. Peter.
That the conclave elected Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, formerly Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, but born in Chicago, was an outcome not envisioned by those for whom a pontiff from Asia or Africa was far more likely than one from the United States. Though Prevost was sometimes included as a dark-horse candidate among lists of the papabile, he was rarely spoken of in the same manner as cardinals like Italy’s Pietro Parolin, the Philippines’ Luis Antonio Tagle, or Ghana’s Peter Turkson.
Long has it been assumed that the curia would avoid naming an American as pope, for the simple reason that the outsized financial and military significance of the world’s only remaining superpower made the ascension of a pontiff from that nation undesirable to the College of Cardinals. That the admittedly wealthy American Catholic Church, or at least the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has in some regards become an ancillary of the Republican Party in a manner out-of-step with at least European and Latin American Catholics was yet another reason to doubt the election of a pope from the United States. That Prevost should be elected during the second Trump administration is either more shocking or, as Megan Goodwin writes, it “signal[s] a deep concern about the global spread of fascist authoritarianism broadly and the US’s financial and ideological support for that rising threat specifically.”
What must be understood about Prevost (who holds dual-citizenship with Peru) is that he may have been an American bishop, but he is now an American bishop. Apparently close with his predecessor Pope Francis, for whom he was the powerful prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops (which makes suggestions on ecclesiastical appointments) the “Latin Yankee”—as he was supposedly known within the Vatican—is a bishop in a very different mold than New York’s conservative Cardinal Timothy Dolan or Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke.
Fluent in Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German (he gave his opening invocation from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in those first three languages, but not his native tongue), Prevost was formed by his mission in Chiclayo, where his parishioners faced both environmental devastation and labor exploitation. As Janina Sesa, the Chiclayo director of Caritas, a humanitarian relief organization, recalled to NPR, “[the future Leo XIV was a] bishop who put on a helmet, boots, and went out to meet people, very close, very, very humble with everyone.”
The choice of his papal name makes sense in this context, as Mark Silk notes, a manner of honoring Leo XIII or the “Workers’ Pope” who during the Gilded Age formulated Catholic Social Doctrine, not least of all in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum which advocated for workers’ rights, including that of unionization, by concluding that “To be lacking what is necessary for life is a crime.”
During our own Gilded Age of grotesque inequity and ever-increasing economic stratification the choice to honor a pontiff like Leo XIII sends an important message in the same vein as Prevost’s predecessor, but in considering that 1899 encyclical against the heresy of Americanism there might also be a hint as to how the first American pope plans to lead in an era in which American fascism is increasingly plausible.
The context of Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae and an earlier encyclical of 1895 entitled Longinqua, were particular to that time, and in part had to do, not just with the Church in the United States, but with arguments that the pope had been having with reformers in the French Republic. Much of what Leo XIII chastises in those encyclicals are liberal theological positions, from pluralism to a free press, making it difficult for a contemporary progressive to find much to recommend, even with that pope’s deserved reputation as a reformer.
But it would be a mistake to see the heresy of Americanism as simply synonymous with modernism, for what Leo XIII was most disturbed by was something like Ireland’s claim about the United States’ providential role—this faith in America as a kind of light unto the nations. In that regard, Prevost’s papal name may not just signal concern for workers and the poor, it may indicate that he views himself less as an American pope than a global one.
As the American Church has become ever more conservative, allying frequently with evangelical Protestants in right-wing culture wars, there has developed a vein of thinking that idolatrizes the nation in a manner that would have been familiar to Leo XIII. If the Americanists of the nineteenth-century were that era’s progressives, then their descendants today are the large swathes of the Right who hold the decidedly nontraditional Catholic belief that the United States is in some manner chosen.
A central element of Christian nationalism, this belief is frequently associated with evangelical Protestants and Pentecostals, but also with reactionary Catholics, particularly those categorized as so-called “trad-Caths,” such as Vice President JD Vance. Indeed Leo XIV has already denounced Vance’s views on migrants and refugees (as had Francis), tweeting five times in the past year against the draconian policies of the Trump administration in general, and the Vice President’s misinterpretations of the Catholic teaching ordo amoris in particular.
MAGA Republicans are certainly noticing, as influencers like Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer melt down over the election. (Loomer, who isn’t Catholic, called Leo XIV a “WOKE MARXIST POPE.”) Before the conclave even began, Steve Bannon warned his followers about the possibility of a Prevost papacy. Figures like Posobiec, Loomer, and Bannon, as well as Trump and Vance, are among the chief proponents of an Americanist heresy today; they craft a Golden Calf out of the idea of America itself..Which supports the explanation noted earlier that the conclave selected an American pope at this particular juncture as a means of denouncing the dangers of American exceptionalism—and to do so with an American accent.There’s always a risk with projecting too much hope onto a new pope. For all his tweets denouncing Trump’s immigration policy or in supporting Black Lives Matter, there are bigoted comments to journalists in the past about the LGBTQ community, or his role in helping to obscure the Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse scandals.
Regardless, at this particularly dark moment in history, there are reasons to hope when a powerful figure with an American accent speaking a foreign tongue promises “[a] Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, which always seeks to be close especially to those who suffer.” There’s something undeniably moving in this Chicago priest, of European, Latin, and African ancestry, now leading the world’s largest religious community; the possibility of a moral counter-voice in Rome to those other American voices coming from Washington.
*The founder of the Paulist Fathers was initially identified as “Paul” Hecker. RD regrets the error.
