Woke pope: how ‘leftwing’ Leo got his cassock caught in America’s culture wars

The glacier-blessing, migrant-defending pontiff already has Maga up in arms. And he's only just begun

- Hannah Roberts

Pope Leo in Beirut at the beginning of December. He is making political waves with his views on migration and climate change. Giuseppe Cacace/ Getty

(Giuseppe Cacace Getty)

Hours after Leo XIV became pope in May, Trump confidant and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted a brief message on social media. It said: “WOKE MARXIST POPE.”

She was not the only member of the American right to immediately cast Leo as a culture war villain. Steve Bannon, a Catholic and former altar boy, called him the “worst pick for Maga Catholics” and described his election as a victory for “the globalists that run the Curia”.

You might expect Donald Trump’s Maga base to embrace the first American pope. His administration is stacked with officials who speak proudly of their faith, including vice-president JD Vance. But the criticism of Leo only intensified as he took up the mantle of his predecessor, Pope Francis, on the climate crisis, inequality and migration.

Benjamin Harnwell, Rome correspondent for Bannon’s War Room podcast, told The Observer that Leo is “investing his energy in a radical, secularist, fundamentally globalist, leftwing agenda”. Most grievous, for Harnwell, is the pope’s defence of migrants. “The third-world invasion of the west is an existential crisis for the Judaeo-Christian west,” he said.

Leo is hardly the first pontiff to clash with American conservatives. Francis was critical of Trump's border wall and offered support to caravans of migrants “seeking freedom and wellbeing” in the US. But Leo, who is from Chicago and follows baseball, is a more immediate lightning rod. He cannot easily be dismissed as a distant, culturally foreign figure ensconced in Rome.