Yes, You Can Disagree With The Pope And Still Be Catholic.
Before we jump into the fraught battle of words between Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump, do me a favor.
Non Catholics, please, Google the term “ex cathedra.”
Heck, I’ll do it for you:
Ex cathedra is a Latin phrase meaning “from the chair.” Referring to infallible, binding teachings pronounced by the Pope regarding the faith and morals and delivered in his role as supreme teacher to the entire church. Proclaimed in 1870, these rare, official declarations are considered infallible dogma, while other papal teachings require "due respect.”
This is important, especially to those who mistakenly believe that Catholics are required to agree with everything that emanates from the Pope’s pen or mouth.
(The last time a pope spoke ex cathedra was in 1950, when Pope Pius XII declared the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.)
When Pope Leo denounces the war in Iran, when he calls for an end to deportations, Catholics are free to agree or disagree.
When he goes after President Trump, who is not Catholic, the president, of course, is free to react. Frankly, some of us wish Trump was less pugnacious and more respectful to the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, but that’s Trump.
Like his predecessors, Pope Leo is conservative in matters of morality. He opposes abortion, homosexual marriage, female clergy, contraception, IVF, surrogacy and transgenderism. Like Francis before him, Leo is a progressive globalist on social issues, defending illegal immigration, criticizing capitalism and cozying up to the Muslim world.
Like most Catholics, I respect the pope, but I disagree with his increasingly judgmental decrees concerning the U.S.
Look, it’s one thing to advocate for peace and non-violence. It’s quite another to take a position that no war is justified and that American Catholics should be lobbying their lawmakers for an end to the attacks on Iran.
The Church’s greatest scholars - St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas come to mind - wrote lengthy treatises about just wars. Surely the war to end the nazi extermination of the Jews in World War II was just. And many of us believe that a war to ensure that the insane Islamic radicals in Iran never possess a nuclear weapon is also justified.
We can debate the issue, the pope can weigh in, but we are all free to arrive at our own positions while remaining faithful Catholics.
What is disturbing has been the pope’s increasingly pointed criticism of the Trump administration.
Last week Barack Obama’s strategist, David Axelrod, had a private meeting with the pope. It set in motion a troubling series of events.
A post on X summarized the sequence of events:
So the Pope met with David Axelrod last week. David Axelrod. Obama's campaign architect. A man who is not Catholic, has never met a pope before, and whose entire career has been engineering political narratives for the American left.
And then, by pure coincidence, the Pope immediately started lobbing shots at the Trump administration, and three US Cardinals popped up on 60 Minutes doing the same thing
All organically, I'm sure…
Pope Francis was bad. Leo has turned out to be worse. Francis at least was vague about his politics. Leo went and hired the consulting firm.
The man has ignored the slaughter of Christians across Nigeria, the Sahel, India, Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan. Hundreds of believers murdered, churches burned, pastors kidnapped. His response? Platitudes about dialogue.
OF COURSE he won't even name who's doing the killing.
But he'll fly across continents to make interfaith gestures the week after his people coordinated a media hit on a sitting US president.
The weaponization of belief is obvious. You get the Pope to pick a fight with Trump, and suddenly millions of conservative Catholics have to choose between their faith and their vote.
Um, no. Catholics who support Trump do not have to chose between our faith and our vote.
We can cringe at the president’s nasty response to the pope. We can also condemn the meme Trump posted of himself posing as Jesus.
Does that mean we’re switching to the party that celebrates abortion, euthanasia, antisemitism, transgenderism, illegal immigration and lawlessness?
Not a chance.
We’ll stick with the party of common sense.
Reacting to the dust-up between Washington and the Vatican, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan had this to say yesterday:
"I'm a lifelong Catholic. I wish they'd STAY OUT of immigration, they don't know what they're talking about."
"Because if they wore my shoes for 40 years, and talked to a 9-year-old girl that got r*ped multiple times, or stood in the back of a tractor trailer with 19 dead aliens at my feet, including a 5-year-old boy that baked to death, if they understood the atrocities that happened on the open border, I think their opinion would change!"
"And I welcome discussion with any of them, because they don't understand illegal immigration is not a victimless crime."
"Where President Trump had the most secure border in the lifetime of this nation, right now, lives are being saved. He's saving thousands of lives a year because he has a secure border!"
"Human traffickers are out of business, right? The cartels are going bankrupt because of that secure border. I wish they'd understand that."
The Vatican does understand that.
The cynical among us also understand that Catholic charities were literally raking in billions for the resettlement of illegals that the Biden administration allowed to invade the country.
Trump turned off the money spigot. And suddenly the American bishops are getting prickly.
As with the Axelrod visit, there are no coincidences.
