MAGA vs. Pope Francis

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

During U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s brief meeting with the mortally ailing Pope Francis last week, he said he’d been praying for the pontiff’s recovery. But that wasn’t the case for U.S. lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene and other MAGA luminaries, who had no compunction celebrating the news of the pope’s passing.

“Evil is being defeated by the hand of God,” Greene wrote on X on Easter Monday (of all days). “Good work, JD,” trolled conservative commentator Ann Coulter, mockingly implying that Vance, who was the last foreign leader to see the pope alive, had somehow helped usher Francis out of this world.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Harnwell — sidekick to former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who’s been trying to establish a right-wing “gladiator school” in a Lazio monastery near Rome — lost no time comparing Francis to King Herod, ancient Rome’s satrap in Judea who, according to the Bible, had all male infants in Bethlehem massacred, believing Jesus might be among them. In an exchange with POLITICO about his rhetoric’s belligerence, Harnwell said he’d be a hypocrite to conform to “your norms of compassion,” before adding: “I’m very glad he’s dead.”

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at all the venom. MAGA stalwarts never hesitate to use personal invective and hyperbole to smear and intimidate — it’s their way of grabbing attention while seeking to break opponents and discipline institutions that won’t bend the knee, whether church, university or media outlet. And Francis, who was no friend to populist nationalism, certainly infuriated them.

The irony is that MAGA leaders are now marching in lockstep with a deep state — in this case, the Vatican’s cloistered and rigidly doctrinaire insiders, who would like to turn the clock back not just to before Francis but preferably to before John XXIII’s liberalizing reforms of the 1960s.

Francis began skirmishing with MAGA during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term in 2016, criticizing Trump’s plans to build a “big beautiful wall” along the southern U.S. border. At a Mass in Ciudad Juárez, he said that a “a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”

A furious Trump dubbed the comments “disgraceful.”

Then, in 2017, Francis warned against rising populist movements, cautioning that they could lead to a new Hitler. Noting that Germany in 1933 was the most obvious example of populism in Europe, “in times of crisis, we lack judgement,” he told Spain’s El Pais newspaper. “Hitler didn’t steal the power, his people voted for him, and then he destroyed his people.”

But beyond Francis’ unrelenting advocacy for migrants and insistence on their dignity, his ecological warnings about climate change and condemnation of the “shameful” war in Gaza, MAGA never forgave him for giving former President Joe Biden a pass on his backing abortion rights — nor could they overlook the warm relations he enjoyed with former President Barack Obama.

But Trump himself was careful not to go full tilt at the spiritual leader, who enjoys high poll ratings in the U.S., with around 80 percent of American Catholics regularly expressing favorable opinions of him.

Other MAGA figures put him in their crosshairs, though, seeing Francis as a high priest of global progressivism and a MAGA enemy. Bannon, most notable among them, turned to wealthy U.S. and European allies — mainly disgruntled church traditionalists who bridled at Francis’ reformism and restrictions on the saying of the Latin Mass — in his bid to buy the aforementioned Lazio monastery, Certosa di Trisulti.

Bannon’s plan was to establish a counter-Vatican and turn the former Carthusian monastery into an academy for nationalist populists, aiming to help them wage cultural war and “defend Europe’s Judeo-Christian roots.” And with the support of conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, who Francis had demoted, they made no secret that Francis was their target. The pope was “constantly putting all the faults in the world on the populist nationalist movement,” Bannon complained in a 2019 interview.

That, of course, was an exaggeration. While Bannon and church conservatives pigeonholed Francis as an unmitigated radical, the pontiff also frustrated church progressives who wanted him to engage in substantial change, including modernizing the institution’s teachings on birth control, gay marriage, married clergy and female priests.

However disappointed they were with his reforms, though, progressives were still pleasantly surprised, having expected Francis to govern in the manner of conservatives like John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Instead, they found a pope eager to diminish the power and reduce the privileges of the hidebound Curia, as well as make the church more inclusive, humane and engaged with the temporal world, prioritizing pastoral duty over doctrinal exactitude.

They were also thrilled by his emphasis on mercy ahead of dogma — something frowned upon by traditionalists like MAGA ally Burke and conservative cardinal Gerhard Müller, who has been publicly warning of a schism if next month’s conclave fails to elect a doctrinaire successor.

But no Catholic leader — if they remain faithful and true to their calling and conscience — can fit into an easy left-right dichotomy, no matter how much the polarized politics of the day demand. The fact that MAGA stalwarts don’t see this says more about them than the now-departed pope — as does their casual dispensing with common courtesies and refusal to let this servant of God rest in peace. 

Francis was about reconciliation, which isn’t in the MAGA lexicon. “The pandemic has reminded us that we are all in the same boat,” he had said as Covid-19 upended the world. His words were another red mark for MAGA stalwarts, who are selective about who they want in the boat.