[On July 7, 1946, Frances Xavier “Mother” Cabrini became (posthumously) the first American to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. So this week for the 80th anniversary of that occasion I’ve AmericanStudied Cabrini and four other American saints, leading up to this weekend post on Catholics in 2026 America!]
On one continuing frustration, and two interconnected reasons for hope.
Back in August 2022, I focused one of my Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns on both the contested history and contemporary misrepresentations of the concept of “religious liberty.” The inspiration for that column was a recent speech by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in which he claimed that there’s “growing hostility to religion” in “our increasingly secular society.” I think that was and remains nonsense, for multiple reasons that I detailed in that column; and one clear reflection of the actual reality, of/ how much religious extremists still dominate much of our government and society (along with Pete Hegseth and J.D. Vance, among many other examples), is how fully and destructively the current Supreme Court is dominated by a quartet of Catholic extremists, or at least extremists who use their religion as an excuse for their ideologies: Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas.
That’s an aspect of Catholicism in 2026 America that embodies some of the worst of religion in our politics and society. But interestingly and importantly, at the exact opposite end of that spectrum is none other than the current Pope, Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost). One of the most consistent things Leo has done since he was named Pope in May 2025 has been to call out the abuses and horrors of the Trump administration: in direct and pointed critique of ostensibly Catholic figures like Vance, but also in more overarching terms of what religion and humanity should and shouldn’t include, and more exactly of how the administration’s policies on immigration, Iran, and more have to be seen as unreligious and immoral. And on broader questions of issues confronting humanity in 2026, I particularly appreciate his first Papal Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published in late May 2026, which among its many topics featured an extended, thoughtful argument for why we have to resist AI and advocate for all that makes us human.
Pope Leo also gives me hope for the meanings of American Catholicism for reasons that go beyond our current politics, however. For one thing, he’s the first American Pope, and not only in the sense of having been born and raised in Chicago, going to college in Philadelphia, and other such biographical details. I’m even more struck by his profoundly American heritage: his father the child of a pair of immigrants to Chicago, who himself became a WWII vet and public school administrator; his mother the descendant of a mixed-race Black Creole family from Louisiana, who herself became a high school librarian. And for another thing, after completing his education in the U.S. Prevost spent the next four decades in Peru, doing work that was both importantly local (such as critiquing the authoritarian President Alberto Fujimori) and also models the kinds of hemispheric connections that I’ve written about many times in this space. Leo is the first American Pope in every sense, and that’s one of the more hopeful things to come out of the last couple years.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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