Immigration, Iran War Test MAGA Catholics’ Tolerance of Papal Authority

On Easter Sunday, as Pope Leo XIV stood before tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square and called on “those who have the power to unleash wars” to choose peace, President Trump was posting all-caps threats demanding Iran open the Strait of Hormuz or face annihilation.The contrast was as jarring as it was intentional: the first U.S.-born pontiff urging world leaders to lay down their weapons while the U.S. president escalated his wartime rhetoric to a pitch rarely heard from any American commander-in-chief. Two days later, the pope went further, stepping outside his residence at Castel Gandolfo to call Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” an act that was “truly unacceptable.”Hours later, the two countries reached a ceasefire less than two hours before Trump’s self-imposed deadline, with the United States and Israel agreeing to suspend bombing Iran for two weeks, subject to Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Pope Leo welcomed the announcement with what he described as “great satisfaction.”The timing landed against a backdrop that few could have scripted. Just days earlier, the Pentagon had hosted a Good Friday service for more than 3,500 employees, explicitly for Protestants only, with an internal email from Air Force leadership making the point bluntly: “Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel.”The decision not to hold a Catholic observance was notable given that roughly a quarter of United States service members identify as Catholic. For the American right, a movement that spent years treating the Catholic Church as its ideological home, the rupture with Rome has never looked more complete. “This is both a political identity crisis and a theological disagreement in the sense that there are partisan influencers exploiting areas of theological disagreement to get clicks or raise money,” a professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union, Steven Millies, tells the New York Sun.“But also, really, it’s neither — because political identity shouldn’t matter much in the Church and, in questions of faith and morals, there is no real room to disagree theologically with the doctrine of a just war.”The making of a MAGA ruptureTheology experts contend that the apparent rupture did not have to go this way.When white smoke rose over the Sistine Chapel in May 2025 and Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago, a registered Republican, stepped onto the balcony as Pope Leo XIV, a significant portion of the MAGA faithful allowed themselves a moment of cautious optimism. That hope, however, evaporated quickly.Before he even entered the conclave, Father Prevost’s social media history had gone viral among MAGA circles. Steve Bannon called Leo’s election “an anti-Trump vote by the globalists of the Curia” and declared him “the worst choice for MAGA Catholics.”Pundit and occasional Trump whisperer Laura Loomer was even more scalding, firing off a series of posts the moment the white smoke cleared, calling Leo “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis” and dismissing him as “just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”Pope Leo’s background is far from politically steeped. He had spent decades in Peru and later the Vatican’s bureaucratic inner sanctum, removed from the American political landscape he was suddenly expected to navigate. Leo’s preoccupations, proponents underscore, were global and ecclesiastical, not ideological.His American origins, initially a source of conservative pride, emerged as a source of friction once his actual positions came into focus: a consistent pro-life framework that challenged the death penalty alongside abortion; criticism of any perceived mistreatment of immigrants; a willingness to condemn the Iran war as unjust; and a refusal to treat any single political party as the natural home of Catholic values.The founding dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, Professor Mark Rozell, told the Sun that the fault lines run deeper than any single papacy.“Political differences between the White House and the Vatican are inevitable,” Mr. Rozell said. “For Biden, it was abortion and federal health mandates; with Trump, it’s immigration, growing economic inequality, and now foreign American wars.”Despite the differences, Mr. Rozell also notes that papal influence on Catholic votes is thin. Data consistently show party loyalty outweighs church teaching when it comes to the ballot box. “Partisan leanings tend to be too heavily baked in to be swayed by the Pope taking a stand,” Mr. Rozell said.The events of last fall tested that dynamic in ways that were hard to ignore. In October, when Leo argued that politicians should be judged by the full meaning of the Church’s pro-life position — not simply on whether they oppose abortion — Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, a Catholic, fired back on social media, calling it “a terrible answer from Pope Leo.”Beneath the culture-war theatrics lies a deeper theological argument about who gets to define what it means to be “pro-life.” His Holiness has said plainly that someone who opposes abortion yet supports the death penalty is “not really pro-life,” and that someone who opposes abortion while supporting the inhuman treatment of immigrants — “I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”Yet the founding dean of the Catholic University of America, Professor John White, rejects the framing that the pope’s positions are primarily political.“The conflict between MAGA-aligned Catholics and Pope Leo XIV isn’t a political conflict,” Mr. White told the Sun. “It is a conflict based on the Gospels and Catholic teaching. Jesus Christ and the Gospels are clear about welcoming immigrants and how others should be treated.”On the war, Professor White is equally direct: “Catholic teaching about just wars does not support the Iran War.”“This war causes innocent civilian deaths, certainly children and pregnant women, as surely as abortion does,” added Mr. Millies.The Pentagon, the pew, and the fracture lineThe Good Friday episode at the Pentagon added another layer to an already strained picture.The controversy over the decision to not host a Catholic liturgy landed amid mounting scrutiny of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s embrace of far-right evangelical Christianity, including an invitation to Pastor Doug Wilson — co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — who has advocated for a vision of Christian governance that would ban public Catholic rituals, including Masses, Marian processions, and Corpus Christi devotions.Late on Good Friday, a Defense Department official offered an explanation: the chaplain’s office priest was out of town. Officials did not say whether the traditional Good Friday service was planned and then canceled or never scheduled at all.“There are no Masses on Good Friday in the Catholic Church — ever,” President of the Catholic League, William Donohue, told the Sun, downplaying the episode’s significance. “So, this is much ado about nothing.”Academic director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame, Timothy O’Malley, concurred.“I suspect this was a basic misunderstanding,” he told the Sun. “Typically, the Pentagon has Mass each day for Catholics. But there is no Roman Catholic Mass on Good Friday.”A Georgetown professor of government, Clyde Wilcox, however, identifies something deeper in Mr. Hegseth’s particular brand of Christianity.“Hegseth’s pastor is very anti-Catholic, and there is a long history of anti-Catholic thinking and rhetoric among Pentecostal and fundamentalist Christians,” Mr. Wilcox said. “But this can fracture the MAGA alliance because Catholics are a sizable chunk.”On the question of schism, scholars are largely skeptical. Director of Data for Political Research at Denison University, Paul Djupe, argues the institutional stakes are lower than the headlines suggest.“With the degree of political polarization in the United States today, Americans prioritize their partisanship. Their faith has long given way to their political positions,” Mr. Djupe told the Sun.That dynamic helps explain why, despite the volume of the conflict, most scholars stop short of predicting a formal break. The Catholic Church and its discontents have coexisted through worse, and the incentives on both sides cut against a clean split among America’s faithful.“I don’t think a formal schism will come about, but depending on which party is in power, there will continue to be clashes between the Church and politicians, especially when the two political parties right now are not especially aligned with a religious vision of the human person,” Mr. O’Malley said.A long bet on a longer papacyFor others, the absence of formal schism is beside the point. The more consequential question is not whether the Church formally splits, but what quietly takes root in the space between Rome and the pews while no one is looking.“Once American politics and foreign policy kept in check and at the margins the extremist voices of Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism, but now they have become mainstream,” an expert on Vatican II and a professor of ecclesiology at the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin, Massimo Faggioli, told the Sun.“Pope Leo has to save Christianity and the Church from being identified with the portrayal of God and Christianity that comes from Trump’s America now.” The danger, he argues, is not a dramatic rupture but quiet erosion.“The problem is whether United States Catholicism can be saved from this intellectual, theological and spiritual drift towards ethno-nationalist extremism,” Mr. Faggioli explains. “This is a bigger problem than a schism because this slow descent into ethno-nationalism can happen even without a formal schism.”Some on the right responded with skepticism that went beyond doctrinal dispute. Mr. Bannon told the Financial Times that “the conclave for the pope was more rigged than the 2020 election.” Tech billionaire Peter Thiel traveled to Rome in March to deliver closed-door lectures on the Antichrist, branding Leo “a woke American pope.” A Vatican-adjacent publication responded by calling Mr. Thiel an “agent of chaos.”The distinguished professor of American history at Messiah University, Professor John Fea, sees the longer reckoning as unavoidable.“MAGA certainly has its Catholic supporters, but in this presidency, the religious leaders most aligned with Trump are conservative evangelicals,” he said. “Catholics have always been part of the Trump constituency, but Trump does not seem to turn to them as much as he does the MAGA evangelicals.”Mr. Millies, who wrote before the 2024 election that the result would mark the end of the “Catholic vote” as a meaningful political category, sees a coalition beginning to fracture from within.Mr. White agrees the numbers bear watching, but stressed that the sizable Catholic vote will determine election outcomes because “the condition of the United States economy, the long-term consequences of the Iran War, and concerns about democracy will dominate in 2028.”With a two-week ceasefire announced and Islamabad talks expected, His Holiness already called a peace vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica for Saturday — a sign that whatever emerges from the negotiations, he has no intention of stepping back from the pulpit.“Regardless of what happens in Iran, MAGA Catholics are going to have to come to grips with the moral consequences of their loyalty to Trump,” adds Mr. Fea. “Only time will tell how much the Catholic spiritual witness in the world will be damaged as a result of their support of this president’s policies.”

Immigration, Iran War Test MAGA Catholics’ Tolerance of Papal Authority

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