I was raised Catholic. Mass every Sunday, confession, evening CCD classes, the whole theater of it. I know the smell of incense and the weight of a rosary and exactly how long a priest can hold eye contact with a ten year old girl before it stops feeling like pastoral care. I left that church the same way you leave a bad marriage… slowly, then all at once with an absolute done feeling. Decisive and permanent. Never to look back.
I am not choosing a side in what’s about to follow. I am watching two patriarchal institutions have a slap fight and trying not to pull a muscle from laughing.
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, called for an end to wars, including the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. “Enough of war,” he said. Reasonable, if you’re the head of a global church and people are dying. Apparently unacceptable if you are Donald J Trumplestiltskin and someone just hurt your feel bads by saying something you didn’t like.
Trumplestiltskin responded on Truth Social by calling the Pope “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” Then, the straw that broke MAGA’s back, he posted an AI-generated image of himself in a white robe, placing his hand on a man’s head, who looked suspiciously just like Jon Stewart from the daily show, in a scene that looked exactly like a healing. Jesus stuff.
When reporters asked about it, Trumplestiltskin said he thought it depicted him “as a doctor” and had to do with the Red Cross.
“Only fake news could come up with that one,” he huffed through loose teeth and orange makeup.
Oh god… the gaslighting. You gotta be fucking kidding me with this nonsense.
He then posted a SECOND image of Jesus with his arm around his shoulder in front of an American flag and wrote, “The radical left lunatics might not like this, but I think it’s quite nice.” He also announced the Pope should be “thankful” to him, implying he was personally responsible for Leo’s rise to the papacy.
I CANNOT SATIRIZE SOMETHING ALREADY THIS UNHINGED.
My only job now it to point at it and laugh.
Now. Something about the Catholic Church that nobody raised in it needs explained, and everybody outside it tends to underestimate, is that the Vatican has been outlasting empires since the Roman one collapsed. It has survived plagues, reformations, two World Wars, schisms, and even it’s own spectacular moral catastrophes regarding the child sex abuse scandal.
Emperors who tried to break it are mere footnotes in history books the Vatican STILL OWNS. Every single one of them thought they were the most powerful man in the room. Every single one of then was wrong.
The Catholic Church has over 1.4 billion faithful. That’s more than 17% of the world’s population, spread across every country on Earth. Served by half a million priests and 800,000 nuns through nearly 220,000 parishes. It’s a operating system that has been running on this planet for two thousand fucking years.
The Holy See maintains formal diplomatic relations with over 180 countries — a global reach comparable to any major superpower. Fully accredited diplomats. Legal immunity. In nearly every capital on Earth. In many countries, the papal ambassador is ceremonially the head of the entire diplomatic corps, meaning he outranks every other foreign ambassador in the room before he opens his mouth.
The Vatican is arguably the only diplomatic entity in the world that operates without a commercial or military agenda. Which is precisely what makes it a uniquely neutral moral voice in global affairs. It has brokered peace between countries that wouldn’t speak to each other. It has diplomatic channels no foreign ministry has. It has been the mediator of last resort when everything else failed, because everyone trusts it isn’t angling for oil.
Joseph Nye, the political scientist who literally invented the concept of soft power, used the papacy as his very first example. Catholics follow the Pope’s teaching not because of any threat, but out of respect for it’s moral authority. The Vatican wields enormous power despite having no army, no navy and no nuclear codes.
However, let’s not pretend the Church is something it isn’t. The Church has many flaws despite it’s diplomatic neutrality. I know what the Catholic Church has done to women. I know what it has done to children. I grew up inside of it. The same patriarchal machinery that spent decades protecting abusers, silencing survivors, and teaching little girls that their bodies were the problem. The institution is genuinely powerful AND it has caused real, catastrophic, documented harm. Those are contradictions that live beside each other simultaneously. Two things can be true at the same time.
But, a man posting AI Jesus selfies and telling the Pope he owes him a thank you note?
Jesus Fucking Christ. You can’t make this shit up!
Strip away the mystique and the Vatican’s finances are actually modest — it’s entire annual income is a rounding error on the balance sheet of tech giants. But influence is not a function of size. A single papal appeal after an earthquake can mobilize dioceses and charities to raise sums the Vatican itself could never muster.
That’s the part Dumpy-Pants cannot comprehend. He thinks power is money and real estate and the ability to make people afraid. He has spent his entire life in that framework. Every room he walks into, he’s calculating who has more and who has less, who he can bully and who he needs to flatter. It is the only register he has.
The Vatican’s power isn’t dominated in dollars. It’s dominated in moral authority protected by the loyalty of 1.4 billion people. Strength is in numbers of people, not money. So, when their religious leader says this man does not speak for God, they believe it.
And now, Dumpy’s own people are breaking from him. A former co-chair of the Republican National Committee Youth Advisory Council called his little AI-image stunt, “gross blasphemy.” The bishop who sits on Dumpy’s own religious liberty commission said he owed Leo an apology. Giorgio Meloni, one of Dumpy’s closet international allies, called his remarks, “unacceptable.”
You have lost the plot when the fascists are telling you to calm the fuck down.
I’m spiritual. I believe in something… call it conscience, call it the connective tissue between living things, call it whatever doesn’t require a building with a steeple and a collection plate and a cover-up. What I do NOT believe is that any man gets to appoint himself the earthly representative of the divine and then use that appointment to justify bombing campaigns and deportation flights.
That’s just a con trying to convince you it’s religion.
The tell, the thing that gives it away every single fucking time, is that genuinely powerful people do not need to post AI images of themselves with God. They don’t need the validation. They don’t need the symbolism propped up by software because reality refuses to cooperate. A true king never announces he’s a king. Trump is no king. Shit… he’s barely a human.
Leo said he had “no fear” of the Trump administration. “I am called to do what the church is called to do.”
A man who has spent his entire life demanding to be seen as the most powerful person in every room just got told, calmly, publicly, in front of the entire world, that an old guy in a white hat is not afraid of him.
The Vatican doesn’t need to fight back. It doesn’t need to post. It doesn’t need to threaten. It just has to keep being what it has been for two thousand years while Trump rage-posts like a cocaine addicted toddler on a platform he had to build himself because every other one threw him off.
I don’t love the Catholic Church. I have receipts and scars to prove it.
But watching a pathological narcissist pick a fight with an institution that has been winning these fights since before America was a concept?
As a spectator?
This is the best free entertainment we’ve had in years.
So who wins?
My bet is on the institution that’s still standing when all of us are gone.
It always is.
AAmen to your answer to AndrewAndy5000. I too “don’t love the Catholic Church, and I have receipts and svcars to prove irt” as well. I’d bet we have had a good number of the same issues.
But, I don’t even see why you feel you to weigh in on the Trump-Leo controversy. Trump is crazy and Leo isn’t going to budge. He doesn’t need to.
Hello A. Eevie Bateman, I am glad that you are doing good. And Yes, Chumpy and his chumps believing that they can take on an institution that is over two millenia is just adorable and hilarious.
Chumpy and his chumps will only be ruling the federal government for only four years. Pope Leo XIV and his administration are obviously going to outlast chumpy and his chumps.
I do not know what The Catholic Church has committed against you, or against your family. I pray that you might come back someday. Anyways, thank you for writing about this issue. You have a wonderful and blessed day A. Eevie Bateman!