Jesse Romero, a Catholic producer of podcasts in the city of Phoenix, the capital of the US state of Arizona, says the time has come for a “Trump -style pope” to restore traditional Christian values after Pope Francis's death, reports Financial Times.
“Anyone who is sweetened with abortion, has Marxist tendencies, is pro-homosexual-we have to get rid of them. There are bishops who have participated in Parade Pride … They must be dismissed,” says Jesse Romero, influencer and conservative author.
“Francis's pontificate was never legitimate”
Romero is one of the members of an increasingly large group of conservative Catholics in the US, who hopes that Francis's death will mark a decisive change from the reformism he embodied, to a more doctrinal and traditionalist approach.
“They will definitely hope to see a rejection of Francis's pontificate at the next conclave. Many of them were against Francis at a fundamental level,” he told for Financial Times David Deane, a Christian doctrine teacher at the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax, Canada.
The mood in the radical camp was summarized by Roger Stone, a Catholic and a long -distance supporter of President Donald Trump. Stone denounced Francis on American television on X, saying that they caused him “nausea”.
“Na's pontificate was never legitimate and his teachings regularly violated both the Bible and the dogma of the Church,” he wrote. “I think it's hot where they are now,” added Roger Stone.
Some US Catholics looked at Pope Francis as anti-American
FT notes that Stone's message reflects an animosity towards Francisc that appeared early during its pontificate among American traditionalists and only later accentuated. The mood spread among a part of the US Catholic clergy and energized the conservatives driven by Trump's return to the White House.
“There is a significant range of American Catholic opinions that would have preferred someone less adventurous doctrine, something more traditional and-as they see things-someone less anti-American,” says John Allen Jr., the publisher of the Catholic news site and author of several books on the church and papacy.
The distrust in Francisc was particularly widespread among the “Catholics of Maga”, a group that combines support for Trump's populist and nationalist agenda with an adhesion to Christian Orthodoxy and with a deep suspicion of the liberal tendencies in the church.
“There is a symbiotic relationship between post-liberal stores and Catholics, in which each one feeds and encourages the other,” says Professor Deane from Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax.
“Trump has strengthened Catholicism reaffirming some essentials, such as border protection, defense of human life and the fact that there are only two genres. This was beneficial for Catholics and that is why 58% of Catholics voted with Republicans in November,” says John Yep, the leader of the Catholics Catholics Political Activism Group.
Vice President JD Vance, one of the Catholics Maga
The most famous Catholics are Steve Bannon, a former chief strategist of Trump, and JD Vice Vice President, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and was one of the last people to meet Francis, in a short Vatican meeting on Easter Sunday.
Vance caused indignation in January, accusing the US Catholic Episcopal Conference of supporting illegal immigrants due to substantial federal financing received by American dioceses to relocate them. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, qualified the remark as “slanderous” and “very ugly.”
The Financial Times also writes that Trump himself has made great efforts to align Maga at the church. In February, he created a working group to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” He also named Brian Burch ambassador to the Vatican, a vocal critic of Francisc and leader of a group that mobilized Catholic voters in favor of Republicans last year.
But the movement goes beyond the name of Trump and Vance and is the result of long-lasting trends in a church that moves to the right.
US Catholic priests became increasingly conservative
“The clergy who graduated from the seminars [în SUA] In the last 10-20 years it tends to be more conservative, ”says Janna Bennett, president of the Department of Religious Studies at Dayton University in Ohio.
Bennett emphasizes the role played by institutions such as the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and Ave Maria University in Florida, both with conservative reputation and which provided a constant flow of aspiring priests and Miren workers with a traditionalist mentality.
According to a poll published in 2023 by The Catholic Project, a research group of the Catholic University of America, over 80% of priests ordained after 2020 were described as theological “conservatives/orthodox” or “very conservative/orthodox”.
The researchers say that, while the “progressives” and “very progressive” priests represented 68% of the new ordained in the cohort of 1965-69, that percentage “has reduced almost to zero”.
Pope Francis's decisions that have dissatisfied the traditionalist Catholics
The traditionalist Catholics in the US were particularly revolted by “Amoris Laetitia”, the 2016 apostolic exortic, which opened the possibility that the divorced and remarried persons could receive the sacraments.
They also denounced the decision in 2023 to approve the blessings for same -sex couples, Pope Francis's activism in climate change and his open attitude towards migrants. For conservative Catholics, always disturbed by the reforms of the II Vatican Council in the 1960s, the pope's hostility to the Latin Liturgy was particularly difficult to accept.
Experts say, however, that the anti-French party has never been a majority of US Catholics. “The joke I make is disproportionate to their number,” said FT Steven Millies, a public theology professor at Catholic Theological Union.
But they have become more and more influential in recent years, partly due to institutions such as EWTN, the largest Catholic media network, which has amplified radical opinions. Based in Alabama, EWTN has collected millions of dollars in donations, some of the money being used to “create more programs and content to glorify God,” according to the network website.
“Francis was a precious gift for them, because it is an industry that thrives from a spirit of opposition. You have to have an enemy to revolt people enough to open their wallets,” says Millies.
Catholics are afraid that the next pope could be a “Second Francis”
But Pope Francis did not receive the criticisms of his resigning American opponents. After the Conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke attacked him on the topic “Amoris Laetitia”, Francis threatened to evacuate him from his Vatican apartment. Also, Bishop Texan Joseph Stickland, another vocal critic in the American Catholic Church, resigned.
Francis has clearly expressed disapproval of Trump's policies in his second term, writing in a letter addressed to American bishops that migrant expulsions violate “the dignity of many men and women and all families.”
Romero, the arizon's podcasts producer, says he hopes that the next pope will bring a change of direction: “We are looking for someone who can heal the fractures inside the church and eliminate some of the modernist tendencies that have slipped.”
But this vision is not necessarily shared by the high American prelates who will participate in the future papal conclave. Of the 10 American cardinals under 80 years eligible to vote in the selection process, six have been elevated to the current rank by Francisc and are generally favorable to the vision of the Church.
“There are much higher chances of having someone in the image of the deceased – a second Pope Francis,” says Yep, leader of the Catholics for Catholics group.
