US President will be at the Vatican for Pope Francis’s funeral on Saturday, reflecting the growing importance of the Catholic vote to Maga
On social media, Donald Trump exclaimed excitedly, “Melania and I will be going to the funeral of the Pope. We’re looking forward to being there!” The giddiness was borderline inappropriate for the occasion. But Trump loves a good show of pomp and circumstance and so does the Catholic Church.
Trump could be forgiven for feeling some papal envy in the Basilica, where Pope Francis is lying in state. Pontiffs, unlike presidents, enjoy a job for life in more ornate surroundings than Mar-a-Lago or the blingy, revamped White House. But the days when popes built fortunes, excommunicated their foes and flaunted their mistresses are over – and Trump thinks the future belongs to him.
In Rome with Melania, who was raised a Catholic, Trump will enjoy receiving the homage of world leaders desperate to stave off a trade war with the US over tariffs. All eyes will be on him during the global funeral telethon. Trump has no patience with the soft power exercised by Francis and will expect the papacy, like every institution, to bend to his will.
The Maga movement in the USA wants a conservative pontiff (Photo: Jalaa Marey/Getty)
The Maga movement will be cock-a-hoop if the conclave selects a conservative pope. The anti-woke Robert Sarah, 79, a Cardinal from Guinea, has won whoops of admiration on X for criticising Islamist fundamentalism, opposing Western declinism and describing gender reassignment surgery as “Luciferian”.
According to Sarah: “The Church is not a club of activists – she is the Ark of Salvation.” But the wily Francis is said to have stocked the college of cardinals with liberals in his image. If a traditionalist wins, it is more likely to be Hungary’s Cardinal Peter Erdo, 72, who has been touted by US Catholics as “a man of unity”.
Erdo said the Church shouldn’t offer refuge to immigrants at the height of the Hungarian influx in 2015, likening it to “human trafficking”. But he has been careful to build links with progressive clerics as well as with Viktor Orban, the Hungarian premier and Maga fan favourite.
Choosing a successor is “an intensely political process”, according to Robert Harris, the author of Conclave. “There’s this pretence that it’s the Holy Spirit but the Holy Spirit is what we call momentum in secular terms.”
Trump has the satisfaction of knowing the Church in America is moving fast to the right. “The US clergy are certainly becoming more conservative as the Boomers die off,” says Rod Dreher, a conservative Christian commentator and friend of Vice President JD Vance.
JD Vance met Pope Francis on Easter Sunday – Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 at the age of 35 (Photo: Divisione Produzione Fotografica/Reuters)
A survey in 2022 of 3,500 priests by the Catholic Project in Washington revealed that 80 per cent of those ordained since 2020 regarded themselves as “conservative/orthodox”. While the Catholic vote used to be split fairly evenly between Republicans and Democrats, Trump won their support in 2024 by an 11 per cent margin with help from the Hispanic community.
Dreher thinks “an Erdo papacy might provide the quiet stability that the Vatican needs after the messy papacy of Francis” – or that the choice might go to an Italian. “But in the decades to come, we can expect a pope from Africa or elsewhere in what was once missionary territory of the Catholic Church.”
Younger American Catholics trend liberal, but have stopped going to Mass, leaving church-going Republicans in charge. “On current trends, the US is headed for a smaller Church in the near term, and a smaller, more conservative Church in the long run,” Dreher told me.
Vance, who used to admire Christopher Hitchens’s uncompromising atheism, converted to Catholicism in 2019 at the age of 35. As one of the last people to see the Pope on Easter Sunday, he has been mercilessly trolled for hastening his journey to the next world.
After clashing over the meaning of Ordo Amoris – Vance infuriated Francis by claiming Thomas Aquinas’s concept put love of family first – the Pope’s final Easter message of support for “the vulnerable, the marginalised and migrants” felt like a calculated rebuke.
Yet, Vance is more respectful towards Rome than some of his Maga brethren. Writing in The Lamp about his conversion, he argued: “Too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the Pope as a political figure to be criticised or praised according to their whims.”
Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, is a culture warrior with the Chicago-based organisation CatholicVote. He has blasted Francis in the past for “a pattern of vindictiveness” against conservative prelates and took offence at his comments that “good Catholics” didn’t have to breed “like rabbits”.
The new pope will have to deal with Maga megamouths who don’t care about diplomatic niceties. Amy Coney Barrett, the Catholic Supreme Court Justice who voted to end nationwide legal abortion in 2022, has not received much thanks from Trump supporters lately.
Sir Keir Starmer and Donald Trump at the White House in February – Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Holy See is Brian Burch. He has attacked Pope Francis in the past for ‘a pattern of vindictiveness’ against conservative prelates (Photo: Carl Court /Getty)
She is considered a traitor for having sided with liberal judges against the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. The Pope would probably have described her views as Christian.
Support for Trump is at its strongest among charismatic Christians and evangelicals. According to Dreher: “Conservative Catholics generally support Trump, but they generally don’t share the enthusiasm of evangelical Trump supporters, some of whom act like they are worshippers of a cult of personality.”
Paula White-Cain, a televangelist who speaks in tongues and has been married three times, runs the White House Office of Faith. She has claimed that: “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”
But spurred on by a shared opposition to abortion, the lines between the churches are being blurred. There is a new strain of “Make Catholicism Great Again” among America’s 62 million faithful, according to Massimo Fraggioli, a conservative theologian at Villanova University.
“Catholicism has become more American in this country, meaning it’s become more Protestant, more evangelical, more libertarian and more focused on individual freedom,” he told USA Today.
Within Trump’s circle are a number of prominent Catholics, including Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, who wears a prominent gold cross pendant in the media briefing room.
“I certainly believe in spiritual warfare,” she told the Christian Broadcasting Network in March. “And I think I saw it first hand, especially throughout the campaign trail with President Trump.”
Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, the blueprint for slashing the federal government and US foreign aid, is another leading Catholic.
Vance penned a foreword to Roberts’ book, The Dawn of Light, which sounded eerily close to the evangelical prosperity gospel. “Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics, recognising that virtue and material progress go hand in hand,” he wrote.
The Renaissance popes would have shared that sentiment. Trumpworld thinks it is time to Make the Vatican Great Again.