By Brad Miner
And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother: Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against. (Luke 2:34)
By 1973, there had only been one papal trip to the U.S.: Paul VI’s in 1965, and that was for just 15 hours. And before that visit, no Pope had even left Italy since Pius VII was forcibly taken to France by Napoleon’s troops in 1812. Even so, Catholicism managed to foster conversions.
I would never argue against evangelization. In one way or another, evangelizing is what the contributors to The Catholic Thing do daily. We proclaim «Jesus Christ, and him crucified». (1 Corinthians 2:2) But that the clergy immerse themselves daily in the media frenzy or that Popes have wings (John Paul II made 104 pastoral trips outside Italy) may not be as conducive to conversions as the doctrines and rituals of the Faith are.
Moreover, not all Popes have been as focused and charismatic as St. John Paul. In any case, when we remember him, we don’t think of the comments he made about conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, or South Asia. And this is because, as a general rule, he didn’t make them. He was more of a catechist than a commentator.
In its essence, the Catholic Church is (and must be) at odds with the «world» because Jesus is.
When Cardinal Karol Wojtyla gave the Lenten meditations to Paul VI and the Roman Curia in 1976, he welded «a sign of contradiction» into the Catholic imagination. Jesus is that sign: either you’re for Him, or you’re against Him. Everything about Jesus Christ clashes head-on with every worldly ambition that seeks to view life in terms other than the Cross.
However, the Church—and by this I mean the «official voices» of the Vatican—now inserts itself into every imaginable secular matter, reducing, to a greater or lesser degree, the message of Christ to a mere alternative to the various Times (New York, London, India, Israel), and TASS, BBC, NBC, Xinhua, etc., ad nauseam. The Church seems determined to root us in every imaginable finite matter when it should be guiding us toward the ineffable infinite.
And this attention to the «world» inevitably makes the Church seem more and more worldly. Trump, Putin, Xi… Leo? You choose. They all seem to be in the same business. Well, I don’t mean to suggest the end of Animal Farm: «The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which».
In that, Leo XIV surely stands apart. And yet, I believe that, so far, he has allowed himself to get too close to the secular abyss. For example: Trump.
One might wonder if the Pope’s decision not to come to the U.S. for the 250th anniversary of the founding of the nation of his birth had anything to do with the current occupant of the White House. I don’t know. But a Pope’s visit to the White House is simply a matter of protocol: one head of state welcoming another. It is in no way an endorsement of that president, just as a president, in meeting with a Pope, is not confirming the authority of the Holy Father.
No Pope has slept in the White House, and the only bond between a Pope and a president that became more than mere protocol was that of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan. Before becoming president, Reagan had been inspired by John Paul’s visit to still-communist Poland, which became the model for the Reagan era’s relations between the U.S. and the USSR. And, of course, they connected through their shared experiences of having nearly died at the hands of assassins. More than that, they appreciated and admired each other.
If Leo believes he too must be a traveling Pope, he should have included July 2026 in the United States of America among his first trips. Yes, there would have to be the obligatory photo op on July 3 with DJT (without expecting apologies from the «leader of the free world» for his anti-Catholic rants on Truth Social), but then (the same day, it seems to me) off to Philadelphia for the fourth, after which to Chicago for a true homecoming (White Sox vs. Red Sox on July 7), and then back to his daily work in Rome.
Am I being sarcastic? Yes. Well, in a way. But the main point of my sarcasm is the problem of papal trips and the endless papal and Vatican commentary.
When St. John Paul II went to Poland, he did not make direct criticisms of the communist government. The closest he came was when he told the crowd in Victory Square in Warsaw that «in any length or latitude of geography, the exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man». I imagine Edward Gierek turning to Wojciech Jaruzelski and asking: «Do we have to believe in Christ now too?». It’s like the well-known Catholic joke about a recently deceased person:
—He wasn’t Catholic, was he? —No. But now he is.
My point, which—whether you agree or not—you’ve surely grasped, is that the best way to grow an already growing faith even more is to profess that faith. Shoehorning Jesus into the Iran conflict or U.S. border control, while not a useless task, risks sinking Roman Catholicism into the worst version of synodality: as an amorphous, continuous, and transformative thing equal to The Blob.
In any case, let me nearly conclude by inviting Your Holiness to change his plans and come to America. We are a divided people at this moment and, Holy Father, your presence among us can only remind Americans what «In God We Trust» really means. Be a sign of contradiction.
By the way, Steve McQueen, star of The Blob (1958), drew near to Christ at the end of his life while dying of cancer.
—But, Brad, McQueen became a born-again Protestant. He wasn’t Catholic. —No. But now he is.
About the author
Brad Miner, husband and father, is senior editor of The Catholic Thing and a senior fellow of the Faith & Reason Institute. He was literary editor of National Review and had a long career in the book publishing industry. His latest book is Sons of St. Patrick, written with George J. Marlin. His bestseller The Compleat Gentleman is now available in a revised third edition and also as an audio edition on Audible (read by Bob Souer). Mr. Miner has served as a board member of Aid to the Church In Need USA and also on the Selective Service System draft board in Westchester County, New York.