In Pope Leo XIV, the world gains an American leader to counterbalance Trump’s cruelty | Editorial

In many ways, the first American pope is the opposite of Donald Trump — which is exactly what the world needs at this moment.

Newly elected Pope Leo XIV’s social media feed indicates he supports immigrants, gun safety, and believes in the need to combat climate change. Before being elevated to pope, Cardinal Robert F. Prevost worked as a missionary, so he actually cares for the poor and the working class.

The last pope named Leo supported workers’ rights, a living wage, and affirmed the value of science. But that doesn’t mean the new pope is a flaming liberal, as some of Trump’s far-right MAGA supporters believe.

In fact, Prevost has been an active voter in Republican primaries over the past dozen years, and is widely considered a moderate on social issues. Perhaps he could unify a divided church and country.

In his first remarks as pontiff, he pledged to “build bridges.” Not walls.

Let’s hope he uses his new position as the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics to call out wrongdoing and speak up for truth and justice. That could help the church regain the moral leadership lost in the priest abuse scandal, and possibly help save the world’s oldest democracy.

Before being elevated to pope, Prevost, a Villanova University graduate who was born in Chicago, shared and retweeted a number of social media posts and criticisms of Trump and JD Vance.

Just before the conclave, Prevost shared a message that criticized the disgusting Oval Office meeting in which Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele celebrated the deportation of migrants to a harsh prison in the Central American country.

“Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?” read the post from Rocco Palmo, a Philadelphia-based Catholic commentator known as “the Vatican whisperer.”

Those are good questions for Trump’s supporters, as well, including the Republicans who have sworn an oath to the Constitution.

In January, Vance used squirrelly logic to defend the Trump administration’s mass immigration efforts: “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.”

But Prevost responded by sharing a link to an article in the National Catholic Reporter with a headline that read, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

Prevost did not add Jesus’ famous golden rule to “do to others what you would have them do to you.” But in his initial blessing after being elected pope, he said the Catholic Church should welcome “everyone.”

Remember before Trump, when the United States used to also welcome everyone? Diversity and immigration are what made America great. Of course, the immigration system needs fixing, but deporting migrants without due process is not the answer.

Presidents, including Ronald Reagan, used to point to the sonnet on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Now, Trump is sending them to faraway prisons.

Trump has turned many American policies on their head. To be sure, Pope Leo XIV has a different mandate than tangling with Trump, but his words and actions can provide a needed counterweight to the felonious president’s detrimental actions.

For example, Trump has been busy reversing many efforts to combat climate change with the help of Republicans in Congress. But Prevost — again, a recent Republican primary voter — stressed that it is time to move “from words to action” on the climate.

During Trump’s first term, the new pope endorsed other policies that ran counter to Trump’s positions.

In 2017, after a gunman murdered 60 people in Las Vegas, Prevost retweeted a call for stronger gun safety laws from Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.). “To my colleagues: your cowardice to act cannot be whitewashed by thoughts and prayers. None of this ends unless we do something to stop it,” Murphy wrote.

After Trump issued a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, the new pope retweeted a post that detailed comments by Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, who said it was “contrary to both Catholic and American values” and “the world is watching as we abandon our commitment to American values.”

Now the world will be watching Pope Leo XIV and Trump battle for the hearts and minds of the faithful and the faithless. Can the pope help restore the American values that the president is busy dismantling?

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this editorial indicated that Cardinal Robert F. Prevost — the newly elected Pope Leo XIV — is a registered Republican. While Prevost has participated in Republican primaries in Illinois in recent years, he — like all voters in that state — was not required to declare a party affiliation in order to cast a ballot in those contests.