Al Smith, from Italian and Irish families, was in 1928 the first Catholic to be a presidential candidate for one of the major American parties. Democrat, he lost to Republican Herbert Hoover, and the campaign was marked by attacks on faith, including the absurd idea that he would build a tunnel connecting the White House to the Vatican. It was necessary to wait until 1960 for a new Catholic presidential candidate, a new Democrat, but this time the winner: John Kennedy. Even so, the Catholicism of Richard Nixon’s rival was still a campaign theme (that tunnel?), after all, America was founded and established itself as a country with a Protestant Christian background and distrust of the Catholic Church. Many of the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic, like the famous Mayflower Pilgrims, fled an Anglican Church that still seemed too similar to that of Rome.
In 2020, a second Catholic, Democrat Joe Biden, was elected president. During the campaign against Donald Trump, the Republican president then serving his first term, questions of faith were not dominant, perhaps because there were no longer those who thought there was a contradiction between Catholicism and Americanism, perhaps because the Catholic electorate voted almost equally for candidates from both parties. If in 2016, against Hillary Clinton, Trump had received the most votes among Catholics, four years later he lost in that electorate very narrowly. Then, in 2024, the Republican clearly beat Democrat Kamala Harris in the Catholic vote, in the elections that took him back to the White House. The growth in support for the Republicans among Hispanics, generally Catholics, explains Trump’s good result.
Now, if the relationship between Catholicism and politics has become normalized in the United States in recent years, the fact that there is an American pope for the first time brings new elements, especially if this pope, without saying names, talks about wars and condemns those who wage war. And if the American president then criticizes and the pope responds, as happened now, the much feared clash between the two has already happened, and in a not pretty tone. Trump, aggressively, stated that Leo XIV does a bad job, and the pope responded, as calmly as possible, that he is not afraid of the American Administration.
Will this wild exchange of words be enough, if it is not repeated, to once again make Catholicism an issue of political cleavage in the United States? Probably not, but you never know in a country where religion is in the public sphere with a different intensity than in Europe.
Trump, prohibited by the Constitution from running for a third term in 2028, in theory would not have to be very worried, apart from the popularity statistics and the image projected inside and outside the country. But the success of his second presidency, in terms of ideological objectives, depends on maintaining a Congress with a Republican majority after the mid-term elections in November this year. The polls indicate a complicated situation in the Chamber of Representatives, which is being completely renewed, but more calmly in the Senate, in which only a third of the seats are up for vote. Currently, for around 20% of Catholic Americans in the population, there are 28% Catholic representatives and 24% Catholic senators, in both situations with a slight advantage for the Democrats in terms of the number of elected officials. Will there be an impact on Catholic voters from the exchange of words between Trump and Leo XIV, born Robert Prevost?
Without a doubt, the American president is not happy with what happened, especially because criticizing war, any war, and calling for peace, is part of this pope’s speech, like that of his predecessors. And there will be Catholics uncomfortable with the situation, Catholics who have been voting Republican and who may within months hesitate to go to the polls or even change their vote. As the elections for Congress are in reality a multiplicity of small local elections (435 in the case of the Chamber of Deputies), the final result will depend on topics as diverse as the economy or immigration, seen in the light of each electoral district, but that the issue of Catholic faith may have some influence on some of them, shows how this clash between the president and the pope comes in a clear counter-cycle of American history, at a time when there is even a vice-president, JD Vance, a former Protestant who converted to Catholicism. In addition, the first lady, Melanie Trump, is Catholic and has a rosary blessed by Francis, the pope she met alongside her husband, on a trip to the Vatican.
The most revealing thing, apart from an electoral impact that is difficult to predict seven months away, in this entire episode with Leo Perhaps the woman and her deputy can remind him of this, and how absolutely historic it is that for the first time an American is in charge of the Holy See.
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