So the world’s got a new pope. 

Because Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in the United States – and perhaps the world – and because Catholics live in almost every nation, and certainly on every continent, the world can claim Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, as “the world’s pope,” as I’ve already heard on the news. 

From what I can tell, so far, he’s a lot like the old pope, Pope Francis.

This is frightening.  

The new pope is billed in the press as a U.S. American, but he’s legally a citizen of Peru, where he spent most of his ministerial life. 

In his long ministry, Pope Leo served as a priest in Peru, frequently dealing with social issues and challenging national leaders.  From what I can tell – you may notice me saying this a lot, as the jury’s still out on our new Pope Leo – he is, politically, a lot like Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope. 

Why?  Because both men seem to advocate for a kind of revolutionary theology.  For instance, Pope Francis said, fairly late in his life: “If I see the Gospel in a sociological way only, yes, I am a communist, and so too is Jesus.”  

I doubt that more than a vanishingly small number of America’s sixty-two million Catholic adult believers – twenty percent of our entire adult population – like to think of Jesus as a communist.  As a believer in Christ, but not so much the pope, I admit to having taken umbrage at the notion that a pope – or, for that matter, any Christian – chooses to see Christ as a communist.

As an aside, only three other nations have more Catholics than the U.S.:  Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines. 

None of them are inclined toward communism, and I doubt if many of their Catholics choose to see Jesus as a communist.

But what does that mean?  What would it mean to America and the world if Jesus were a communist?

To put it in context, I’ve based my analysis on a book I’m now reading: The Dictators:  Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, by the superb 20th-century British historian Richard Overy. 

Stalin was the ultimate in Soviet communist dictators, the person even more responsible than Marx, Engels, or Lenin for defining what it meant to be a communist.  Among other things, Stalin – who’d early in life attended a seminary – was a devout atheist, as well as someone who welcomed the opportunity to suppress Christianity when it suited him. 

However, he also blatantly used the Russian Orthodox Church – especially during World War II, when the Nazis looked like they were winning.  He knew that most Russians were secretly Christian, so he restored the priesthood to help him hold the country together.

Setting aside faith – or lack thereof – in the Soviet Union, Stalin was a monster. 

As the communist dictator of the USSR in the 1920s, '30s, '40s and early '50s, Stalin the Communist was at least twice as effective in killing tens of millions of people as was Hitler the Nazi. 

Because so many records were “disappeared” during Stalin’s regime, Stalin's death toll is believed to be somewhere between roughly 20 million people and – as some historians cite – a death count that may have been as high as 60 million people, most of them citizens of the Soviet Union. 

Part of this variance is due to Stalin’s horrific purges, both pre-war and post-war.  In the early 1930s, Stalin imposed a famine on the Ukrainians, nearly a decade before Hitler attacked Soviet Russia.  In just two years, Stalin’s manufactured famine killed seven-point-five million Ukrainians. 

Another big addition to Stalin’s death toll was the millions of Soviet soldiers who’d been Nazi-held prisoners of war.  As soon as the war was over, Stalin apparently feared that Western values might have corrupted millions of prisoners who survived Hitler’s death camps.  These men, instead of being liberated, had to be purged.

Hitler, usually thought to be the ne plus ultra of twentieth-century genocidal warlords, accounted for “just” 17 million people, vs. Stalin’s as many as 60 million adult victims, including:  

•    Six million Jews
•    Five-point-seven million Soviet civilians
•    Two-point-nine-five million Soviet prisoners of war
•    One point eight million non-Jewish Poles
•    Three hundred seventy-five thousand Gypsies (Roma)
•    Three hundred twelve thousand Serb civilians
•    Two hundred fifty thousand physically or mentally disabled persons – mostly Germans
•    Seventy thousand repeat criminal defenders
•    Nineteen hundred Jehovah’s Witnesses, because they were conscientious objectors

Was Francis saying that he and Jesus were, as communists, also mass murderers?  Probably not, but this quote suggests that he didn’t know jack about how many tens of millions of people – many of them Christians – Stalin was responsible for murdering in a variety of horrific fashions.  Why? Because that’s what communist warlords do – in the USSR, Red China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and of course, Castro’s Cuba.

I’m sorry, but as a Christian myself – the son of a lapsed Catholic who came back to her faith late in life – I cannot accept that Jesus is or was a communist.  Francis, I’m not so sure about, but if he says he’s a communist, I’m inclined to accept his reasoning.

This does not automatically mean that Pope Leo is a communist, but we should watch carefully to see if he waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck.

One thing we can be certain of.  Pope Francis did not approve of Donald Trump.  He often spoke out against him while he was our 45th and 47th president.  It says something about how American Catholics don’t follow the pope in lockstep.  They voted in overwhelming numbers for Trump in 2024, despite Francis’s open opposition to Trump. 

This suggests, if nothing else, that that particular Catholic pontiff should have stayed out of politics, rather than diluting his influence with the huge and potentially powerful body of Catholic adult Americans. 

We don’t yet know how Leo will come down, politically, but it’s already clear that the man who’d become Leo had spent years tweeting and retweeting against Donald Trump on X – formerly “Twitter,” and other social media.

The New York Post reported that: “his final X post before being elected by the Conclave in the Sistine Chapel was a retweet of a message from Philadelphia-based Catholic commentator Rocco Palmo, who on April 14th, slammed Trump’s partnership with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on deportation of illegal migrants.”  

That tweet read: “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to [laugh emoji] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident… once an undoc-ed Salvadorean himself, now-DC auxiliary bishop Evelio Menjivar asks, ‘Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?’”  

This, apparently, reflects the new Pope’s deeply-held view about Trump, terrorists and the sanctity of our national border. 

Somehow, Leo seems to think that the secular United States has a moral and Christian obligation to erase our Southern border and welcome a tidal wave of undocumented immigrants to flood into America.  

Where, I wonder, is that found in the Bible?

Apparently, Leo – like Francis before him – doesn’t believe that nations, or at least the United States, should have, let alone enforce, national boundaries. 

Since the immigration issue arguably elected Trump, and since so many Hispanic U.S. citizens supported Trump on this issue, such a stand – when taken by an overtly political Pope – could hurt the Catholic Church in America. 

As someone with strong family ties to the Catholic Church, I found one liberal, political pope to be troubling.  Two in a row selected quickly by the College of Cardinals is way beyond troubling. 

The Roman Catholic Church seems committed to being led by a string of far-left popes, causing me – and millions of others – to begin, or continue, questioning if the Catholic Church is right for me, or for America.  So far, the trends do not look good for a resurgence of the Catholic faith among those who either stepped away from – or who, like me, were led away from traditional Catholic beliefs.

One final note.  The late Rush Limbaugh is famous for claiming that he didn’t offer his views on any given issue until everyone else had expressed their own opinions. 

Why?  Because he was always right! 

Of course, Rush was joking.   He made no legitimate claim for infallibility.  Not so much with the Catholic popes – not just Leo, or Francis – but all of them [when speaking ex cathedra, or from the papal chair, which is rare -ed.] 

Back when there was no mass media, when “news” about a papal pronouncement took months to reach the far corners of Christendom, the impact of whatever a pope might say was muted, diluted, and not particularly impactful.

Today is different.  When popes can post on X, their impact – for good or ill – can be instantaneous.  Perhaps it makes sense for today’s new pope to temper his political beliefs until he gets the lay of the land, so to speak. 

Well, Leo didn’t wait, though perhaps he should have.  While Trump welcomed him with open arms, our president’s not known for reacting positively to those whose first inclination is to attack, attack, attack.  

When it comes to America’s national border, Leo seems ready to pick a fight.  He may believe he’s infallible, but I think he’ll discover that Trump knows different.

We’ll see.

Ned Barnett was born into a family that the Catholic Church tried to prevent from happening.  In 1945, the Church required any believer marrying a non-believer to force the non-believer to sign what was then a legally-binding document that any children had to be raised Catholic.  It was never wise to try to impose dictates on my father, so he and my mother were married outside of the church.  When my sister and I came along, my mother raised us as Episcopalians until we were old enough to make our own choices.  Ned chose an evangelical, non-denominational megachurch in Las Vegas.  

However, when his mother died at 92, he learned from friends that she had begun attending the Catholic Church, which caused Ned to reconsider whether Catholicism was right for him.  Francis’s secular “faith” caused him not to return to the faith of his mother’s family, and Leo’s seeming lock-step with Francis confirmed this choice.

As a ghostwriter, Ned has worked with a number of authors who’ve written faith-based non-fiction books whose books have since been published.  He also ghostwrites political books, novels and graphic novels, and has helped dozens of authors to successfully publish, market, promote and sell their works.  He can be reached at 702-561-1167 or nedbarnett51@gmail.com.

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