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Mario Puzo is best known for The Godfather – one of those rare instances where the movies are almost as sublime as the book – but it’s not the only book he wrote on the Mafia. There is The Sicilian, which is part of The Godfather universe and even has a cameo by Micheal Corleone, and is about the real-life bandit Salvatore Giuliano. There’s The Last Don. But perhaps, the true sequel to The Godfather – not those money-grabbing attempts – is The Family, which was published two years after his death and covers the high intrigues and conspiracies in the Vatican.The Vatican and the Holy Pontifex might be in the news for their tete-a-tetes with Donald Trump, but the Vatican has always been an institution that – while claiming spiritual authority – spent much of its history negotiating, exercising, and wielding political power, to the sense that pre–World War II, the group controlling the Catholic Church decided the moral vocabulary of Western civilisation.Pope Leo I stopped Attila the Hun in his tracks. Pope Gregory VII forced Henry IV into submission at Canossa. Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade and started Europe’s long legacy of passing off war as a civilisational movement. Pope Innocent III excommunicated kings and placed entire kingdoms under interdict, effectively shutting down their legitimacy overnight.Pope Boniface VIII tried to assert supremacy over monarchs, only to be dragged into a violent confrontation with Philip IV of France. Pope Julius II led armies into battle himself, turning the Papacy into just another player in Italy’s endless wars.But perhaps the Pope that the POTUS would have felt a true kinship to was Pope Alexander VI, the protagonist of Mario Puzo’s The Family, who ran the Vatican like some folks run Bollywood. His foreign policy was rather catholic as opposed to being Catholic and was largely centred around self-aggrandization and consolidating power for his nepo babies (illegitimate children), to the extent that in modern Italian lexicon, his Valencian birth name (Borgia) is a synonym for libertinism and nepotism.Now a foreign policy based on gaining the most advantageous terms for one’s family, to improve one’s relationship with Mammon, and get the best deal might sound familiar in this day and age, but is no longer the operating procedure of the Vatican. In time, the Church and state have separated not by virtue of morality but due to waning influence, and post–World War II, the Pope is largely a spiritual figurehead who is paid lip service by ostensibly Christian-leaning secular nations, which treat the Pontifex like an avuncular figurehead rather than a paterfamilias of the Catholic world.However, like all other well-held conventions, pretence for the rules-based international order, paying quite lip service to post-colonial structures, and not mocking Europe for its increasing irrelevance, the convention of respecting the Pope flew out of the Overton Window when Trump posted on Truth Social: “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do…” Trump’s post seemed to suggest that he believed the Pope’s current role was that of a RoboCop meeting Terminator, whose job was to physically bring Judgement Day.A little later, Trump set the cat among the pigeons after posting an AI-generated image of himself as a messianic, Jesus-like figure. Now the Washington commentariat has always said with bated breath that Trump has no red line, but we seem to have finally found one: depicting himself as Jesus and taking on the Pope.In a rare volte-face, Trump, while collecting cheeseburgers and fries – the apples from his preferred Eden (McDonald’s) – claimed that he had posted the picture by mistake because he thought it was a doctor, because who among us hasn’t confused a carpenter for a doctor. After all, they are both surgeons operating on inanimate objects.But why did Trump go full TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out?)
Now some believers in MAGA – as they are wont to do – have gone so far as to say “Not my Pope,” which in Catholicism isn’t an option and leads to one being labelled a schismatic. So, for those keeping count, heresy is the denial of faith in the divine and Catholic faith, apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith, and schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff. And “Not my Pope” isn’t optional for believing Catholics.Trump has devout Catholics in his administration, including both men who are seen as his most realistic successors: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance. Vance’s elevation to the Trump ticket had quite a story about how the atheist discovered his Christian roots again and got baptised, though critics like to point out that the previous Pope shuffled off his mortal coil after one rendezvous with Vance.Earlier, according to a report in The Free Press, the Pentagon had summoned a Vatican official and invoked the era of the Avignon papacy, when Pope Clement, amid conflict with the French crown, moved the papacy from the Vatican to Avignon between 1309 and 1376.Now the opposition to Pope Leo XIV started even when he was announced, with some wondering if he was too ‘woke’.As SNL’s Weekend Update co-host Colin Jost observed, there is no such thing as a ‘woke’ Catholic, and if you are a ‘woke’ Catholic, then one simply ceases to be Catholic, but Trump posting an image of himself as Jesus was too blasphemous even for hardcore supporters.
Rod Dreher said Trump was “radiating the spirit of the Antichrist”. Pastor Douglas Wilson called the image “blasphemous”. John Yep admitted they were “a little bit beside ourselves”.Among the vacillating reasons offered for the strike on Iran is one which claims that it’s a Holy War in which ‘Trump has been anointed by Jesus to fight’ Iran.Now for a while, MAGA’s band of merry evangelists have positioned Trump as God’s Chosen Warrior, an idea that reached fever pitch when he survived an assassination attempt, and Jack Posobiec claimed the timing of the bullets fired at 6:11 PM was foretold in Ephesians 6:11, suggesting that God operates on Eastern Daylight Time.Trump has often been shown by non-denominational evangelists who see him as messiah – albeit one ill-versed in the Bible – who will fulfil a modern prophecy. Now the Johnson Amendment, named after Lyndon B Johnson, once prevented churches from backing candidates, though Trump’s executive order blurred that line.The reason why this is a line in the sand is simple.Read: ‘Anointed by Jesus’: Who MAGA claims Iran War is ‘holy’?In Catholicism, Jesus isn’t someone one can imitate; he is the Son of God, and depicting oneself as such violates the First Commandment. It also draws parallels to the Antichrist, a figure defined by elevating himself to divine status and demanding a loyalty that belongs to God.American evangelicals will tolerate a great deal – sin, scandal, foreign wars, even ignorance of scripture – but Christ is not negotiable. One can be compared to a Biblical king, one can be anointed, one can be a chosen warrior, but one cannot become Jesus.Catholics aren’t another constituency; they are a bloc that operates in a hierarchy older than the republic. Trump has done fabulously with that group, winning 55% of the Catholic vote in 2024, and roughly 22% of his voters are Catholic. Despite his distance from the Church, he found favour with conservative Christians after delivering on Roe v Wade.
Despite having only two Catholic presidents, the community has long held disproportionate influence in American politics. The Al Smith Dinner in New York remains one of the last rituals where politics briefly bows before faith. Harris skipping it in 2024 and the electoral consequences that followed only reinforced that point.And like all theological problems, it goes into the political realm.Given that Pope Leo was one of the most vocal critics of wars both against Palestine and then Israel, there was no surprise that Trump would eventually turn on the Pontifex. The Pope, for his part, said he had no fear of the Trump administration, showing he was indeed from Chicago, and delivered a quiet jab at Truth Social: “It’s ironic—the name of the site itself.” Leo has also made it clear that the name of Jesus cannot be used to sell war.Trump has spent a decade bending institutions, but this was the first time he ran into one that does not bend.
At the very least, in a political culture where most American institutions have either accommodated Trump or adjusted to him, there is still one American willing to stand up to him, and to do so not through force or office, but through something far older — the assertion that power has limits.If anything, this moment feels like a rare theological pullback, a reminder that the Church, for all its history of intrigue and compromise, still retains its oldest function: to define the boundaries of right and wrong when politics refuses to.In a world of moral turpitude, it is still something to see an American Pope stand up to a megalomaniac president — a reminder that the Church, however diminished, is not yet a moral vacuum. Go to Source
