An essay published in American Thinker this week argues that the Vatican has spent two consecutive papacies drifting toward a “60’s-style Latin American liberation theology” that pits the Holy See against the Trump White House — and that Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born Robert Prevost who ascended to the papacy last year, has turned out to be “Francis 2.0.”
The piece, written by Rick Fuentes, is a strongly worded opinion essay rather than a reported news account. Its central claim is that the Vatican under both Pope Francis and his successor has pursued an agenda “unaligned with the West,” pushing borderless global migration, climate activism, and outreach to Islam while directing sharp criticism at American foreign and domestic policy.
The argument against Francis
Fuentes opens with a sweeping indictment of the late Pope Francis, whom he accuses of ruling as “a grumpy and political pope.” The essay ticks through a list of grievances: a pagan ritual hosted at the Vatican, tolerance of unspecified sins, restrictions on traditional church liturgies, slow-moving prosecution of abusive priests, the promotion of figures the author calls heretics, and what Fuentes describes as “a knee to climate activism.”
According to the essay, Francis “thundered as any South-of-the-Border Marxist would about the evils of capitalism,” directing particular hostility at American Catholic prosperity and adherence to traditional doctrine. Fuentes frames this as part of a broader economic agenda tied to globalism and to a “new for-profit morality within the church” centered on unchecked migration.
He points to the Biden administration’s border policies, writing that American bishops “happily wet their beaks at the federal trough” by receiving billions in taxpayer funds to care for unaccompanied minors. In 2025, per the essay, President Donald Trump shut down that funding stream — a move Fuentes says put the Vatican and the Trump administration “at each other’s throats.”
Leo XIV as continuity, not change
The essay’s sharpest turn is reserved for Prevost. Fuentes describes the former Chicago archbishop as emerging quickly from the 2025 conclave — after just four rounds of balloting — and suggests the speed of his election “hints at collusion” to continue Francis’s synodal project through a “low-profile Vatican insider.”
Within months of his first appearance on the Basilica balcony, Fuentes writes, it became clear Prevost was “comfortable with celebrity in a secular world,” combining “acerbic commentary and lobbying for left-wing causes” with what the author calls a Bergoglian distaste for all things Trump. In Fuentes’s telling, this has given America’s foreign adversaries an opening to “hide behind his words and actions.”
A history of friction
The essay traces the Vatican-Trump conflict to Trump’s first meeting with Francis in May 2017, followed by what Fuentes describes as an alliance brokered with the Vatican by Joe Biden on social issues, migration, and the environment. Tensions resumed in force in 2025, continuing until Francis’s death four months into the administration, according to the piece.
Fuentes claims Francis moved aggressively against conservative elements of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “pensioning off the conservative elders and installing bomb-throwing prelates” hostile to Trump and committed to enforcing restrictions on the old Latin rite. He also raises an unanswered question about whether the USCCB assisted the FBI during what he calls a campaign targeting American clergy and parishioners attached to the Traditional Latin Mass.
Under Prevost, the essay asserts, nearly half of all Vatican-appointed American bishops are now foreign-born, which Fuentes presents as part of a strategy to keep immigration and open borders at the center of the church’s political identity.
Midterm politics and the bishops
Perhaps the most concrete claim in the piece is political: that American cardinals acting as “Prevost’s proxies” have been appearing on liberal outlets and podcasts to attack Trump’s positions on Iran, Venezuelan drug boat strikes, ICE enforcement, and gun policy, in what Fuentes describes as a “spiritual salvo” aimed at eroding Republican support before the 2026 midterms.
He singles out America Magazine, the Jesuit publication, for an article he says implied Trump’s actions resembled those of an antichrist, and criticizes bishops from southwest border dioceses for turning homilies into “partisan campaign speeches.”
The inconsistency charge
Fuentes’s broader argument is one of selective moralizing. He notes that the Vatican’s criticism of Trump has not been matched by comparable condemnation of an Iranian nuclear program, of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, or of the arrangement with Beijing in which, as he describes it, the Chinese Communist Party appoints bishops and Sino-Catholicism operates as a state religion. He also faults the Vatican for denouncing Trump’s language toward Cuba while saying little about the island’s support for American insurgent groups.
On abortion, transgender issues, and same-sex predation within the priesthood, he writes, “crickets are heard.” He lists a roster of American political and media figures — David Axelrod, Alex Soros, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newsom, and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson — who he says have secured papal audiences, drawing a line from those meetings to dispensations for abortion-rights legislators and joint strategies against Trump’s policies.
The essay also criticizes Prevost for what it calls lukewarm greetings to the United States on its 250th anniversary, “sprinkled with snide references to immigration and human dignity,” and notes that he spent July 4 on a Mediterranean island that serves as a landing point for migrants rather than marking his native country’s milestone.
What the piece is — and isn’t
It’s worth being clear about the genre here. This is a polemic, written from an explicitly traditionalist Catholic and Trump-aligned vantage point, and much of it is assertion rather than documented fact. Claims like “collusion” in the conclave or Vatican “surrender” to China are presented as interpretation, not evidence. The essay is most useful as a window into how one segment of American Catholic conservatism views the current papacy — and as a preview of arguments likely to surface again as the 2026 midterms approach.
Its conclusion is unambiguous. Fuentes describes the two popes as “Machiavellians in Miters who ruled as sons of humanity rather than Vicars of Christ,” arguing that Prevost has used Peter’s Throne to advance an agenda at odds with the West. Whether or not one shares the premise, the essay captures a real and widening rupture between Rome and a significant bloc of American Catholic voters — one that neither side shows much sign of bridging.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/tds-vatican-style/