Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP
In the days leading up to the conclave that would name the 267th pope, Catholic muckety-mucks from the U.S. descended on Rome for a week of networking, schmoozing, and fundraising. “America Week,” as it’s called, had been planned long before the death of Pope Francis, but the timing couldn’t have been better. For the past 12 years, the archconservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church had found itself out of power, frustrated by a pontiff who had restricted use of the Latin Mass and allowed priests to bless same-sex couples. Now, the wealthiest among them would be on hand to socialize and gossip and, just maybe, if they prayed their rosaries right, tilt the College of Cardinals toward their choice as the next leader of the world’s 1.4 billion members of the faith.
When, on the second day of voting, the former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost emerged on the loggia of Saint Peter’s as Pope Leo XIV, it became pretty clear the conservative Establishment had lost again. The traditionalists, for all their political and financial muscle, found their influence slipping still. The only question was, What next? The visiting MAGA delegation had a few ideas. In a borrowed Airbnb far from historic Roman palazzi, they were stirring a familiar brew of conspiratorial dissent. Within days, Stephen K. Bannon claimed to Corriere Della Sera that the conclave had been “rigged.”
“The only smoke that worked out in their favor was the cigar smoke they had at their receptions,” said Christopher White, the Vatican correspondent for National Catholic Reporter, a liberal outlet, who is writing a book on Leo ordered by Loyola Press.
America Week is like Comic Con for Catholic supernerds, and this year being a Jubilee, which takes place every 25 years, there were special perks for the pilgrims, including the option to earn indulgences to knock time off purgatory. “We toured the four major basilicas, the four holy doors,” said Edward Fitzgerald III, president of the board at the Papal Foundation, where benefactors who donate $1million are referred to as “Stewards of Saint Peter. “It was exceptionally exciting to see the cardinals out and about.” The organization’s chairman, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, gave remarks at an event in the St. Regis Rome. At another function, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis — “Princess TNT” in her ’80s party days and now an ultraright-wing salonnière and friend of Justice Samuel Alito — broke bread with Brian Burch, the president of conservative advocacy group CatholicVote and President Trump’s ambassadorial nominee to the Holy See.
Fringe members of the American Catholic diaspora were also bumming around, though in far-less-opulent quarters. Jack Posobiec, a MAGA influencer linked to the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, had rolled into town and got Vatican press credentials. He’d been traveling with a producer of his podcast Human Events Daily, Russ Spacy, who works with Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative-youth nonprofit.
Before the conclave, right-wing media published a “College of Cardinals Report”: detailed dossiers intended to cast their favorite candidates in a better light — among them Cardinal Raymond Burke, Cardinal Robert Sarah from Guinea, and Hungarian Cardinal Peter Erdo, who was seen as having Viktor Orbán’s support.
Francis enjoyed high approval ratings among American Catholics — around 80 percent expressed a favorable opinion in surveys by the Pew Research Center — but the traditionalists despised him, even if they found in him a useful enemy. Like Martin Luther before them, the trads defied the orthodoxy that instructed them to obey the pontiff and claimed to be better keepers of the faith than the pope himself. “Francis liberated MAGA Catholics,” said David Gibson, the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “They don’t agree with the pope, so they accuse the pope of heresy.”
Over a late lunch in a tourist café near the Vatican, I asked Benjamin Harnwell, Bannon’s man in Rome and the international editor of the War Room podcast, to walk me through the grievances with Francis. He called him the “fake pope” and expressed dismay over the 2018 arrangement with the People’s Republic of China that allows the pope the power to appoint or veto Catholic bishops chosen by the Chinese government. If China can pick bishops, why not the laity? Harnwell said. His endgame, he told me, was to use the War Room “to give practicing Catholics back their sense of agency.” He made it seem like Brexit for Catholics.
Harnwell is 50, and his hair is shaved behind the ears, longer on top. He converted to Catholicism in his 20s in London and worked for a Conservative member of the European Parliament before turning to the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a project Steve Bannon later joined, to start an “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West” in a Carthusian monastery outside Rome. A decision by an Italian court blocked access to the site, but it was reversed last year. “We’ll get it back,” Harnwell told me. Von Thurn und Taxis has volunteered her castle in Germany as a campus.
When white smoke emerged from the Sistine Chapel chimney, I stood on Via Della Conciliazione. No one around me could believe an American had been elected. But it was clear to longtime observers the trads never had the numbers and were likely to splinter the vote. Francis had named the majority of voting cardinals, after all. By Friday, Posobiec was on his way to Bucharest to interview Romanian presidential candidate George Simion, a right-wing nationalist who’s pledged to “Make Romania Great Again.” Spacy was behind the camera getting ready to film an episode of the War Room with Harnwell, who sat on a white sofa practicing the Latin formulation that was used to announce the pope. “I could do that job, right?” Harnwell said. The taping began. “This guy has been massively embraced by the liberals and by the progressives, those groups in the church which we’re constantly fighting against,” Harnwell said. There was a long plug for Patriot Mobile, “America’s Christian Conservative Wireless Provider,” and Bannon’s voice appeared in a spot for “the Rio reset,” offering an info kit on how to buy gold. Then Prevost’s political affiliation came up. “This is the first time that the Catholic Church has had someone at the top of the apex, the successor to Saint Peter himself, who is a registered Republican,” Harnwell said. Though it doesn’t necessarily make Leo MAGA. “That means that we’ll be seeing more of a Mitt Romney thing.”
Afterward, I walked with Harnwell down the hill to the Vatican. “Leo may be even more dangerous than Bergoglio” — the late pope’s given name — “he has every indication to be just like Francis on the agenda but is far more subtle,” he said. I asked if he thought Leo was an “anti-pope” the way he described Francis. “We don’t know yet. It depends on whether he does un-Catholic things,” he said. Like what? I asked. “We’ll know it when we see it.”
We parted ways. Harnwell went toward Rome, and I walked through the colonnade into St. Peter’s Square now that the crowds had subsided. The MAGA saber-rattling will continue. Leo runs an institution that’s about 2,000 years old. In his first audience with the media May 12, he said, “The way we communicate is of fundamental importance. We must say ‘no’ to the war of words and images.”
Bannon and the “America First” crowd may want to delegitimize the newbie pontifex maximus, but many faithful seem to like him already, especially after Leo appeared on the loggia in a red mozzetta cape over his white cassock with an elegant white stole embroidered in gold, not a simple white cassock as Francis wore. On the first Sunday of the new papacy, I chatted with parishioners as they left Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, a traditionalist outpost in central Rome where they celebrate the Latin Mass. I asked a Roman named Attilio Grieco what he made of Leo: “He looks like a pope.”
