Bulwark Takes - They Hate the Pope?!

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Andrew Egger and Will Sommer dig into the MAGA reaction to Pope Leo XIV, whose recent comments on immigration have triggered the usual suspects despite his otherwise conservative credentials.

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Great taste, great nutrition, great mission. Total no-brainer. Go to IQBar.com today and enter promo code KELLER20 to get 20% off all IQBar products plus free shipping. That's IQBar.com, promo code KELLER20. Hi, this is Andrew Egger with The Bulwark. We got a new pope. Some people are calling him, more and more people are calling him the Bulwark Pope. Some other people are calling him the Woke Pope. And it's a different crowd, as you might imagine.

A lot of people on the MAGA right are not super pleased with the selection of the first American Pope, the first Chicago Pope, the first Pope Bobby, Leo XIV. And the reason for that is because, as we've hit on a couple other videos now, he has had some not so nice things to say, some moderately hostile takes on the Trump administration's immigration policy in particular. Not all that surprising, not all that out of keeping with the way Pope Francis has responded to these things in the past, but because he was formerly not the Pope, he was just a cardinal, he was letting it rip a little more than we've seen out of Francis recently. So here to talk about all that and the MAGA reaction,

Will Sommer, our right-wing media reporter. thanks for coming on to Hash It Out, Will. Hey, of course. I'm a confirmed Catholic myself, so I dabble in multiple worlds here, so I'm ready to offer my wisdom from Catholic school. See, I didn't even know that. I am Lutheran, but I have been kind of forgetting a little bit that I'm not Catholic amid all of the bulwark Pope discourse. We've got this kind of sense of ownership over the guy, even though I'm not at the party at all. So that's that's cool. You get you get both you get both barrels of the bulwark pope as a as a bulwark Catholic yourself. So talk to me about this. Obviously, immigration, very near and dear, you know, mass deportation, immigration, hawkishness, very near and dear to the MAGA movement. How have they been processing the missives of the woke pope?

It's not going well. Overall overall is what I'd say. I mean, they were really looking forward to, I think, a very conservative, politically conservative pope. I mean, they really wanted Cardinal Seurat, who was seen as sort of like a real reaction to Francis had he been selected. Instead, they got a guy who, as you said, I mean, once the white smoke went out, this Newsmax anchor, but before they knew who the Pope was, he said, it better not be a woke Pope. So, I mean, really like they, they were watching this very intently. Steve Bannon said that the Cardinal ultimately became, uh, Leo the 14th here.

He was in advance. He said, you know, I think one of the guys who might win this is this cardinal. And I'm concerned about that because he's so progressive. So, you know, they're not taking it very well, I guess is how I would sum it up. And again, just to kind of sum up, it's not like this guy was like posting bulwark articles or like retweeting up, not to diminish his standing as the bulwark pope. But it was just a very measured and Catholic sort of, he was critiquing J.D. Vance's own kind of layman flights of Catholic speak about why actually mass deportations are very Catholic. He had a post sort of denouncing that. He had just kind of some rhetoric about the mass deportation program, the immigration program of the Trump administration in general being problematic, greatly problematic. And I think

the big thing about all this is just that it's also recent. I mean, these are like weeks old posts rather than, it's not like in a past life, 15 years ago, this guy, it's not like this guy had Trump critiques when Trump came down the escalator and said, they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people. He wasn't tweeting like, you know, there's a Cheeto in the White House or something. I mean, these are all on like Catholic issues. Yeah, but I mean, you're right that it is. I think it went a bit worse for the American right than they expected. You know, these things you're hitting on, though, this idea that they're like, oh, this Pope is in favor of accepting refugees, in favor of immigration.

It's kind of like, yeah, that's kind of the pope's deal. You know, like he's not really going to say, you know, like, yeah, don't help poor people, stuff like that. So I think there's this there was kind of this expectation that, you know, the pope would be like another kind of American political figure. And obviously that's kind of operating in a different realm. You know, a couple of more reactions. I mean, Laura Loomer called him the woke Marxist Pope in all caps. You know, Jack Posobiec, who is sort of a right wing commentator with some influence in the Trump administration, who's Catholic.

He, I believe, said like, you know, this went pretty badly for us. But he was just saying, you know, the Pope is not infallible on political issues, you know, so don't let the pope boss you around, you know. And so he said the American Catholics really delivered the Trump, Trump, the presidency. So I certainly hope the pope will listen to that. Yeah, yeah. It is kind of fun to see. I mean, like Laura Loomer is just going to just going to go off, you know, full board no matter what.

It is always kind of funny to see these figures who are, you know, hardcore mega Trump people like Posobiec, I mean, like just the hardest core of the hardest core in a lot of ways, but who are also Catholic and are also kind of like bound to a certain amount of like filial piety and respect, not piety exactly, respect directed toward, you know, the Bishop of Rome and watching them kind of have to do the little two step there from outside is a little bit funny. It might be kind of difficult for them. I guess the other, the other kind of strength that's going on here is that this is coming after 10 years, eight years or so of like increased interest in particularly the American far right in Catholicism.

And this idea of, you know, what we went to call the trad cats or traditional Catholics, sort of a fervor for Catholic conversion. I mean, JD Vance is obviously a Catholic convert of just a few years at this point. And so I think there's been, you know, I mean, even like, you know, these kind of like Manhattan hipsterites in the right wing have become Catholic and they, you know, they go to mass and all this. And I think there was this sense of like, oh, we really don't like Pope Francis. We want a reactionary pope who's just going to let it rip. And instead you get this guy who's kind of just popping his tweets off. So there's definitely some disappointment there. I guess I was a little surprised to see the extent of the denunciations, just because,

at least in my mind, you know, this immigration type stuff has always been sort of a point of stress and friction between the Catholic Church and the, and, you know, the, the currently constituted American right. But, but ordinarily when you get these kind of like right-wing, you know, papacy watchers, at least during the time of Francis, one big controversy, and certainly in mainstream media as well was, was, okay, is, is, is Pope Francis, you know, the former Pope gonna, gonna start getting fuzzier and fuzzier and softer and softer on a different set of issues. It tended to be like gender and sexuality issues, LGBT stuff, or women's ordination, or gay marriage in the church, those sorts of things, divorce, the possibility of legal divorce in the Catholic church. And it does seem as though, I mean, Francis was never quite as squishy on that as,

I guess, kind of the popular imagination would have suggested he was. But the new guy, Leo, is pretty rock-ribbed on some of that stuff from the Catholic point of view, right? So have you been at all surprised that the discourse surrounding this on the right has not at least been kind of cheery about that part of things? Yeah, it's interesting. You would think that they would take some comfort in that, but I think for them right now, the main issues are things like immigration, asylum. You know, they want, you know, at the moment, I think they've kind of cooled it on certainly like gay issues. Now, trans issues are another thing. But I think in terms of like the issues that they're really exercised about now, I mean, they want a pope.

And, you know, it's hard to imagine how this ever would have happened, but a Pope was just gonna be like, let it rip, deport him, you know, send him to El Salvador. And I think the reality is that, you know, in some ways I think there's this frustration that they're bumping up against sort of a paradigm

that really has nothing to do with American politics. And so, you know, and that's why we're seeing this reaction of like, ooh, I want the Marxist, you know, I'm mad that there's a woke Pope. No, that's, I think you're exactly right about the totally different paradigm. Like these guys are hitting him for being the woke, the woke Marxist Pope now. Pope could just as easily be hitting, you know, all these guys for having gone totally woke on the idea that divorce exists, you know, and that's like the main one for for you guys over there and for us in the Lutheran church? We don't have we don't we don't have, you know, no fault divorce either.

Stay married to your spouse, people. Now, you know, have fun with that one in the in the comments or whatever. OK, I wanted to dwell on one other thing, which is that that I was over at the White House just a minute ago. And Caroline Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, was asked about this. She was asked about to comment on the woke pope. They didn't actually, I wanted to ask her to comment on the woke pope, but I didn't get a chance to use that framing exactly. And she steered clear of it. The president made his reaction to Pope Leo's announcement yesterday very clear. He is very proud to have an American pope. I think it was a surprise to everyone. I saw the news media

was surprised to report on that yesterday. But it's a great thing for the United States of America and for the world. And we are praying for him. So yeah, and again, this is this has kind of been in keeping with the the way that certainly the Trump White House has approached Francis, you know, who also, you know, not simpatico with them on a lot of things. But I guess I guess some people were just sort of wondering, will it still be the same thing with this brand new guy who's an American who was basically just like a rhino squish cardinal just a couple of weeks ago? Right. But there but they do seem to be pursuing the same policy of of steering clear of taking any haymakers at the pope. Yeah, I mean, you know, we'll have to say I think this is I mean, so many so many of these issues are not really American ones.

You know, if you pull up woke Pope's background in the church, a lot of it is just like, where does he stand on ordaining female deacons? I mean, these are things that like the MAGA movement doesn't really care about. But I do think they just really wanted, they wanted like, you know, some, I mean, these are also people who love like the traditional Latin mass. I mean, if you want to talk about like actual like Catholic issues interacting with their politics and we're mad that France has kind of cracked down on that. And so like there's a lot of like, well, he speaks, he knows some Latin, you know, maybe he'll be the not woke pope. So they're really looking for clues. And I mean, the reality is like a lot of us don't have much to go on here in terms of what this will look like. And ultimately, like they are still in control of the entire American government. Right. So maybe they could focus on that instead. Right, right, right. Yeah. It's a little consolation prize. You didn't get the pope

you wanted. You still control Congress, 6-3 majority at the Supreme Court, the White House for three and a half more years. You know, it's a lot to hang your hat on to. All right. Well, we can stop it there. Thanks for coming on to talk about this. Thanks to you all out there for watching. Hope you'll subscribe. Hope you'll head to thebullwork.com and check out our stuff. And we'll see you next time.