Bulwark Takes - New American Pope Blasted Trump and JD Vance Before Election

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

A shocking twist in church history: the new pope is American—Pope Leo XIV, a 69-year-old Villanova grad with deep ties to South America and the global South. His final tweet before ascending to the papacy took aim at J.D. Vance, mocking him. Though he didn’t speak English during his first blessing, he’s already sparking pride, back home.

Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark here with my colleague Jonathan V. Last, author of the Triad Newsletter, my co-host on The Next Level. We have lapsed Catholic, an actual Catholic, here to discuss the breaking news with the Pope for those who haven't seen it yet. Cardinal Robert Prevost of the United States has been selected as the first American pontiff in history. An American Pope! We have an American Pope, JVL. USA! USA! I feel like Hacksaw Jim Duggan out here with my 2x4.

Look at that. Lee Greenwood. Cue Lee Greenwood. American Catholic moment. He'll be known as Pope Leo XIV. He is a 69-year-old nice from Chicago. He has global experience. He's served as a bishop in Peru.

He's most recently leading the powerful Vatican office for bishop appointments. And the only other thing that I know about him is that he shit on J.D. Vance on Twitter a couple weeks ago. So that's honestly, he's from America and he hate tweeted J.D. Vance. That's enough for me. But Jonathan, you're a little bit deeper in this, so what's your assessment? We got a resistance pope. No, I'm kidding.

That's a joke. We'll use that as a headline, but it's basically a joke. So this is shocking, I think, to everybody. Not totally shocking because his name had been in the conversation conversation. Uh, my, my, my best sources on this are the people over at the pillar, go to the pillar catholic.com and subscribe to them. Uh, and they did a profile on him like three days ago, which they would not have done if they didn't hear rumblings that there were, there were some talk. I've not read that profile.

So is he, did he ever, Was he ever a bishop in America? Was he ever U.S.? Yes, I believe he was in Chicago for a little bit. But he did all of his ministry was done in South America. And then he's been over in Rome. He's reasonably young. He's 69. The last two popes.

I love that. Well, the last two popes were 76 and 77 upon their elections. So 69 is, you know, he's just a kid. Is he skinny? They say fat pope, skinny pope. He is skinny. He's a skinny pope. Looks a great deal like our good friend, Eric Edelman from Shield of the Republic. And I don't believe anyone has ever seen the two of them in the same room together. He's a Villanova grad. Let me tell you. I should have mentioned that. I did know that my brother went to Villanova.

Our friends at Villanova, a school that Flash is highly interested in, are going to have to rename every fucking building on that campus after him and they are going to be the most You think the Notre Dame Catholics are insufferable? Just the villanova catholics who have their own pope wow wildcat nation gonna run crazy he's an augustinian tell us about that what does that mean he's about the jesuits so i don't know all

that much about the augustinians to be honest um and he is, again, I just want to say how utterly insane it is to have an American pope. Most of us in Catholic world thought that we would get an African pope and an Asian pope before you'd get an American pope like that, you know, because the Europeans control all of this stuff. Basically, most of the votes come from Europeans, heavily Italian in the College of Cardinals. And their views of the Americans are like, you guys have enough. They don't need to be lectured to by Americans. The idea that an American will be sitting on the throne of St. Peter is wild. Since he was the guy that picked the bishops or was the point man for that,

do we think, is this a Dick Cheney situation, do we think, where, you know, a lot of the bishops, you know, they were looking at some other candidates, they settled around the guy that all the bishops knew? So this is, I mean, this is a real thing that Francis really did reshape the College of Cardinals in very significant ways. The Collegehape the College of Cardinals in very significant ways.

This College of Cardinals is Francis's College of Cardinals. This is the electoral college he wanted. And one of the things he did that was interesting is that he kept them apart from each other. Normally, the Cardinals are all very chummy and most of them know each other pretty well. This conclave, these guys are sitting down for the first time together in many cases. And that is interesting. Very, very short, only four ballots, which tells you that he was probably the front runner from the first ballot. Because you got to get to, you got to get to a I forget the full number that you need, but it's a large super majority of the ballots. And typically what happens is, you know, as they do the next vote and you then see basically whether these names have been vetted.

A third vote to see, okay, is there real momentum? And then a fourth vote is like, okay, everybody's decided that this is it. The most interesting thing about this to me is that at his blessing that he gave from the balcony, he spoke in Italian, Latin, and Spanish. Not English. He did not speak in English.

And I find that fascinating and kind of heartening, actually. This is a guy who is not going to rub the rest of the world's nose in the fact that he's American and is clearly in the most basic way possible, just the tongue he uses to speak to them, is saying I am the pope for the whole world. And Timmy, you know, I don't know if you're like me, but often in American politics, after a presidential election, there's this groundswell of, well, you know, anything can happen and I hope it all works out for him.

Yeah. You know, I never feel that. I am almost, well, not never. I guess I've felt that once or twice, but most of the time I'm just like, boy, this, this guy who just got elected is a piece of crap and we're going to get what we deserve. I'm one of those naive suckers with popes whatever we know about them before whatever whatever there is beaten around and inside their hearts new guy gets on the throne of saint peter i'm only gonna get lifetime maybe six popes i mean you know like this is this is a very very rare season and i'm in full

pollyanna like i don't know maybe it'll all work out this time i love maybe it'll be a great poem i want to read his resistance tweets since that is people are here for that but before we do that i want to leave that for everybody for the dessert uh is there anything else from the profile that you read and the pillar from the speech that like jumped out to you? Yeah, I mean, very, very non ideological speech. So his his papal blessing was a, you know, piece. He referenced Francis like three times. And he's really, you know, love, love me, my Francis.

He's Francis's boy in a similar way that Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, had really been John Paul's boy. A lot of people saw Benedict's pontificate as basically closing out the books on JP II. The idea was he was going to be the reform of the reform. JP II basically carried forth

the vatican ii reforms through the church uh in addition to all the other stuff he did and benedict was basically tidying up the books before they they put that aside and maybe that is what leo the 14th will be uh to francis maybe he will be you know i don't quite know. Francis Pontificate, I have complicated feelings about it. You know, it's kind of a mess in many ways. I'm not sure that there is like an ideological project that was happening that needs to be tidied up. And again, Leo's a pretty young guy. He's only 69. And so who knows? I mean, again, it is possible that he could be a significant pope. He's not going to be, though, I guess your point on what the king of the books, he's not going to be like a reaction to Francis. That's like, oh, we need to turn away from even though even though maybe some of the actual, you know, policies of the church didn't change dramatically, but the rhetoric of it, we're not going to reject Francis' turn from a rhetorical

standpoint. Part of the thing of Francis was he really, really leaned into embracing the global South, which is a really big and important, significant part of the church, not being ashamed of it, not viewing them as like, you know, second class Catholics. And Leo is certainly going to continue that.

As you say, it's not a it's not a reaction. Right. You know, and and that's that's good. I don't know. I'm just all like a glow. And I feel it's one of these things where if you're Catholic, you think about, did you ever do the Rome thing, Tim? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so like the white smoke comes up and what happens is people, if you haven't been to Rome, like it's tiny, it's tiny, tiny, tiny.

And the white smoke goes up and people just start running from all over town. Yeah. Like they literally run, they walk to get there you know and the square just starts filling up and filling up and nobody knows what's going on because this stuff is real it is impossible to keep things secret in the modern world but the vatican actually does it and and just standing there waiting and this guy comes out and speaks to you and it's like the same it's been like this for a thousand years yeah they've done it this way for a thousand years and uh you know and maybe this time it'll turn out great let's keep the video one thing we didn't do for a thousand years because we didn't have modern video but the video of the camera like uh close up

where the chimney is and that the bird was there and the bird kind of looks up and then people start cheering and the bird's like what the fuck is happening around here and then the bird flies off it was a cool it was a really cool video okay here's the good stuff for the non-catholics who stuck around this far robert prevost um a few tweets recently i think are worth noting um jd vance is wrong colon jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others this is with regards to jd doing the thing about ordo amortus and how you can be mean to immigrants because there's, you know, he was kind of misinterpreting a, was it Aquinas or Augustine? Either, I think it was, I can't remember. It was either Aquinas or Augustine. He was misinterpreting their doctrine about how like you care, you love

your family more than you love strangers. And then he did another one on it. Pope Francis letter, JD Vance's Ordo Amoris and what the gospel asks of all of us on immigration. And then I missed this one. This is his most recent tweet. The most recent tweet of the new American Pope, the last tweet before he ascended to the throne of Peter. You think, I think he would have maybe had to clean up the tweets before you went in.

You might've had somebody delete them. It's probably the first time that's been a problem or an opportunity, depending on it. This was just a retweet of somebody named Rocco Palmo. Good on you, Rocco. You're at Delogia. anyway as trump and bukele use oval uh to push the illicit deportation of a u.s resident once an undocumented el salvadoran himself now dc uh auxiliary uh avelio asks do you not see the suffering is your conscience not disturbed how can you stay quiet that is his final tweet um it's a retweet but is your conscious not disturbed how you how

can you stay quiet he did retweet chris murphy i gotta say can we i mean again i we're gonna find out all sorts of previously he had retweeted chris previously previously i i do want to ask you very very sincerely yeah so by the time this is posted to YouTube, I assume Donald Trump will have tweeted about this. What do you think he's going to do? Because I could see Trump on the one hand, wanting to warm up and make it like, oh yeah, this is an American Pope.

We're going to give him great deals, great deals. You know, maybe we'll get a, maybe we'll get, you know, over there in the, in the Vatican palace,

maybe at a casino. We could put some beautiful, it's great real estate. On the other hand, I could see it as a persecution complex of these very unfair popes being so mean to us, anti-American, these woke DEI popes. I got the answer for you. It's already happened. It just happened. I'm actually not surprised by this. This is what I was going to go. The U.S. Pope, he does the U.S. thing. Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost. Such an honor to realize he's the first American Pope. What an excitement. What a great honor for our country. I look forward to meeting him. He's wanting to meet Donald, not J.D., probably just for better safety. Sorry. That sounds surprising. If you're Trump,

you're first focused on how can I spin this about the golden age of America? If it's only because I've made this the golden age that the Cardinals would have chosen American Pope. How long is it before he takes credit for this and says that it's because America, because the Cardinals, they respect America now. Because of my leadership, they respect America

and realize that they had to make an American Pope. T-minus 12 minutes, I think, until that happens. I think that is imminent. Don't ruin this for you, JVL. Don't ruin this for yourself. You're happy. You're giddy. I am. Are you going to go to church tonight? What do faithful Catholics do

in the election of the Pope? It's been a while for me. I mean, I don't know. Nothing special. I watch it with my wife and kids, and we were all super happy about it. We stayed for the blessing. We held up our little rosaries and got them blessed. Because, you know, it transfers when the first papal blessing. It's just awesome.

We've got our text chain. Our family text chain is blowing up. Very exciting. My brother went to Villanova. And Villanova alum Pope. I have to guess now. If you're a Villanova alum and you show up in Rome, your chances of getting a papal audience are now pretty good.

A lot of sweatshirts. A lot of Nova sweatshirts in Rome this fall, I think you'll be seeing. A lot of those little V hats. I definitely think you'll be seeing a lot of that. Okay. JVL, thank you. Congratulations. Congratulations to the Catholics. We did it. We got a resistance pope. Everybody's happy. Everybody subscribe to the feed. We'll be seeing you soon. Peace. Make Rome great again.