The Pope Who Refuses to Play Our Game

Pope Leo XIV spent this year’s Fourth of July on a windswept island south of Sicily, where he laid flowers at a migrant cemetery. He did not spend it in Washington. That choice reveals more about his papacy than any op-ed written in Chicago, Rome, or New York.

Massimo Faggioli and Christopher Hale, among other public Catholic intellectuals, have spent the past year constructing a case that Leo XIV functions as a kind of ecclesial resistance leader to Donald Trump. Hale’s Substack, Letters from Leo, treats nearly every papal gesture as coded commentary on American politics, describing itself as a chronicle of how the pope’s work intersects with American politics, faith, and the digital age during the Trump presidency. 

During a liturgy celebrated by Cardinal Cupich of Chicago at Rate Field, Leo shared a video message. Hale and others told their audience that they interpreted this message as an endorsement of the “No Kings Day” protests, which occurred on that same day, even though there was no evidence that Leo had the intention to wade into that performative political protest. This was not an analysis; it was a projection of Hale’s partisan agenda over Leo XIV’s pastoral mission.

Leo XIV has explicitly stated that this projection misinterprets him. He has repeatedly refrained from mentioning Trump by name and has unequivocally stated that he does not wish to engage in partisan politics, a point that Hale and his readers tend to overlook rather than comprehend. The refusal is not evasion. It is a theological decision regarding the true center of gravity in his papacy, and that center is not Washington.

This is evident in Leo XIV’s consistent critiques of war and imperialism as they extend beyond the US war in Iran, as it encompasses broader geopolitical conflicts such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli genocide in occupied Palestine. As the first US-born Bishop of Rome, his perspective is global rather than uniquely localized to US-American politics. Within a global economy heavily sustained by war profiteering, these critiques resist reduction to domestic political phenomena attributable to a single administration.

Furthermore, consider Lampedusa. On July 4, 2026, the two-hundred-fifteenth anniversary of the founding of Leo’s own country, the first US-born pope chose to spend American Independence Day on a diminutive island eighty miles from Tunisia, one of the busiest migrant landing points in the Mediterranean, following in the footsteps of Pope Francis, who made the same island his inaugural trip outside Rome in 2013. He blessed a plaque, offered prayers at the grave of a child migrant, and stood at the “Door of Europe” memorial as wind tore the skullcap from his head.

During his visit, Pope Leo XIV refrained from discussing American deportation policy. Instead, he addressed the “enormity of suffering” endured by individuals attempting to cross the sea and called for a concrete and compassionate global response. He condemned the brutal treatment of migrants and refugees and the ongoing loss of life at sea. He characterized migration as a defining challenge for European societies and asserted that the continent possessed the capacity to address it with mercy rather than fear. He urged Europe to take greater measures to protect and integrate migrants.

Only in a letter released alongside the visit did Leo explicitly address the United States, and even there, he transcended partisan politics to evoke national memory. He asserted that immigrants have shaped the character of the nation in every generation, their hopes, sacrifices, and contributions forming an integral part of the history of the United States. This assertion does not constitute a rebuke of a specific president but rather a claim about the essence of a nation formed repeatedly by strangers.

This interpretive perspective is one that Faggioli and Hale overlook. They presume that the pope’s primary audience is American and that his central focus is on President Trump. However, Leo’s itinerary contradicts this assumption: Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lampedusa: a papacy oriented toward the global South and the Mediterranean crossing rather than the Beltway.

In this context, the theological implications become evident. What Leo is doing at Lampedusa transcends opposition politics. It constitutes an act of sacramental recognition: an assertion that the migrant, whether drowned or surviving, bears the Imago Dei—the image of God—no less than the citizen who receives or denies him. This is an ancient claim, predating both Leo and Francis, rooted in a Christian anthropology that predates the modern nation-state and is not susceptible to the constraints of a Substack post, American social media, and even the analysis of so-called experts and public intellectuals.

American Catholic ethics provides its own resources for naming this claim without collapsing it into partisan terms. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops makes the case in Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, which asserts that Catholic social teaching cannot be reduced to a single party’s platform. Immigration, in that document’s logic, is a matter of human dignity prior to being a matter of border policy. Leo’s Lampedusa visit aligns precisely with this framework as he emphasizes dignity first, policy second, and party never.

Hale’s own account of his project makes the reduction explicit rather than incidental. He has stated that his audience is largely non-Catholic and does not typically engage with religious content, and that for many readers, his newsletter is their first real exposure to the pope or anything positive about the Church. This is a meaningful audience to reach. It is also, by Hale’s own description, an audience being introduced to Leo XIV primarily as a figure in an American partisan drama, which is not the same pope the rest of the Church is observing.

Faggioli’s framing operates on the same current, treating the pope’s statements as legible primarily through the question of their implications for Trump’s America. Both writers transform a genuinely universal magisterium into the size of a domestic argument, one where the only intriguing question about a papal gesture is its signal regarding a single American president.

What is lost in that shrinkage is synodality, the global, consultative character Leo has consistently emphasized since his election, and with it the fundamental fact that a pope’s primary audience is the universal Church, not the readers of an American Substack. Leo’s attention to Tenerife, Gran Canaria, and a Mediterranean cemetery of children who never reached shore reflects a papacy oriented toward the crossings that define the entire world’s migration crisis, of which the US southern border is one instance among many, not the defining case.

None of this suggests that Leo’s words hold no implications for American politics. A pope who asserts that welcoming, protecting, and assisting immigrants is intrinsically linked to safeguarding human life will inevitably have something to say to an administration centered around mass deportation. However, implication does not equate to intention, and a pastoral visit is not a press release intended for the White House.

The erroneous assumption shared by Faggioli and Hale is that Rome is solely focused on Washington. This is not the case. Pope Leo XIV chose to spend the Fourth of July an ocean away from his birthplace, standing at a cemetery for individuals his own nation might have turned away, because his papacy serves a broader constituency than any single electorate, let alone any single president.

A thorough understanding of Pope Leo XIV necessitates resisting the temptation inherent in every partisan reader: to portray him as a character in our narrative. He is not narrating American politics; rather, he is narrating the migrant as a neighbor, the stranger as a bearer of the divine image, and the Church as a body whose horizon transcends any one nation’s news cycle. Public intellectuals eager to claim him for the resistance would benefit from broadening their perspective to honestly articulate Leo XIV instead of their own utopian wants.