Leo, the affable smiling pope, is now a bona fide hero of the secular left and legacy media.
Not only has he captured the minds and hearts of progressive cafeteria Catholics, pro-choice women, and weak men who voted for Kamala Harris, but various open border groups, like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The USCCB loves him because he speaks less about Catholicism than he does about the new world order while using “peace” as a buzzword to get more and more people to love him.
This first “American” pope who identifies as Latin American, also appeals to atheists and secularists but not to traditional Catholics, many of whom don’t view him as a “holy” pope at all, at least when compared to Saint Pius X, Pius XII, or Leo XIII. Leo is very much a political pope who should be working for the UN and not the Catholic Church.
Like his predecessor Francis, Leo loves giving interviews at 30,000 feet on the papal jet.
He also clearly loves being a celebrity, though this was the case since his days as a seminarian. His pre-ordination years included dressing up as John Belushi with slicked-back black hair, black hooligan hat, sculpted sideburns that conjure up sleazy nightclubs, and sunglasses. In another photograph from the same period – which has never been officially published but somehow wound up in the hands of a distant family member of mine – he’s dressed as Groucho Marx, taken when he was a student at Villanova University.
Villanova, it should be noted, is a Main Line Philadelphia suburban party school where sports is king.
Fast forward several decades after Leo’s time in Latin America as a missionary-liberation theology advocate and communist sympathizer, to the day he was elected on the fourth ballot by progressive cardinals in Rome to put a dent in the Trump presidency. Many were fooled when he greeted the world dressed in traditional vestments, unlike Francis who would go on to make a show of his ostentatious “humility.” Leo smiled, waved, then prayed in Latin, but the intuitively-sensitive picked up a vibe.
A vibe that was not good.
A little confession here. Immediately after his election I checked out a tarot card reader on You Tube who asked the cards (or “spirit”) what kind of pope Leo would be. I expected to have a good laugh but was taken aback when the reader said the new pope would almost be a pacifist obsessed with peace at any cost and that he would initiate some of the most revolutionary changes in the Catholic Church since its founding. The changes would start off slowly, the reader emphasized, but then accelerate in a manner that would shock many Catholics.
I think of that card reader a lot these days as Leo not only turns the Catholic Church on its head but has come forward – as that popular meme so accurately states – like a typical Democrat from Chicago. Leo is more of a secular leader than a spiritual father: blessing a block of ice, honoring Pachamama and Pope Francis’s agenda more than the teachings of Christ, essentially telling Our Lady of Fatima that she was wrong when she told the three shepherds in 1917 that more people go to Hell because of sins of the flesh than any other sin.
“That’s not true,” Leo seems to be firing back at the Mother of God. “You concentrate too much on sex, being uncharitable to migrants is the greatest sin, so take your negativity and stop telling children lies.”
This is the arrogance of Francis’s Synodal Church.
Since his installation (they used to call it a coronation), Leo has appointed radically-liberal clergy to head dioceses throughout the country: easy on abortion-James Martin acolytes who also hate ICE, and the president’s immigration policies.
He refuses to meet with leaders of the SSPX – the voice of the true Catholic Church as opposed to the diabolical Synodal Church invented by Francis – while meeting with the Obama administration’s David Axelrod and feuding with President Trump, and before that with White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, Tom Homan, who has said of Pope Leo and the Vatican, “I wish they’d stay out of immigration.”
Homan was correct when he said the pope and the Vatican do not understand the immigration problem the United States is dealing with.
“They’re looking at this from an ivory tower perspective while American families are being destroyed by fentanyl, human trafficking, and criminal cartels,” he said.
Progressive American Catholics and atheistic leftists don’t care about immigration nuance. The latter camp is happy Leo dislikes Trump and fights the administration when it comes to immigration. Both groups think Homan’s concern is made up or exaggerated, an excuse to “hate” the pope. They also brush off allegations brought by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and other advocacy organizations that have expressed deep concern over Pope Leo XIV’s past handling of abuse cases.
What happens in Peru, stays in Peru.
The Daily Mail reported on a man named Lopez de Casas, a victim of clergy abuse who happens to be the national vice president of SNAP, who accused Leo of failing to address abuse allegations when he was a bishop in Peru.
“Staying silent is a sin. It’s not what God wants us to do. Jesus wants us to stop these things, not to make a heathy garden for secular abuse to grow,” he told the publication.
This week I read that the National Constitution Center (NCC) in Philadelphia will award Pope Leo its 38th Annual Liberty Medal at a public ceremony to be held July 3, 2026 on Independence Mall.
The Center’s website states: “The award recognizes The Holy Father’s lifelong work promoting religious liberty and freedom of conscience and expression around the world, ideals enshrined by America’s founders in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
The NCC’s logic defies common sense.
Every pope in recent times has supported “religious liberty and freedom of conscience and expression.”
What the NCC is really awarding Leo for is his standing up to Trump when it comes to immigration and ICE. For years the NCC has walked a haphazard line between conservative and leftwing politics. Former Liberty Medal winners include Bill Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Muhammad Ali, and Ken Burns, so you know where this institution is coming from.
The NCC is also located in one of the most leftwing cities in the nation, where public schools are encouraged and even rewarded for the promotion of Islam and issues related to Palestine. Much like in Chicago public schools, students in middle and high schools are not penalized when they attend anti-ICE protests. In the Philly public school system, no references are made to Easter while every effort is made to promote Ramadan and other Muslim holidays.
The NCC’s announcement came on the heels of Pope Leo’s appointment of a former illegal alien to the bishopric of West Virginia, Evelio Menjivar- Ayala, born in El Salvador in 1970. In an interview with (the liberal) U.S. Catholic, Menjivar-Ayala recalls that his impoverished childhood included dreams of one day leaving El Salvador.
“I always dreamed of crossing the border to see what lay beyond,” he said. Menjivar-Ayala’s dream was almost realized when he came to the U.S. in 1990 as an illegal alien when he was smuggled unsuccessfully into the country in the trunk of a car.
Menjivar-Ayala tried three more times to enter the country. As Monica Showalter writes in American Thinker,
“He tried to enter the U.S. three times, getting thrown out each time until he paid a cartel human smuggler to illegally get him in.
“After that, he filed a what looks like a typical asylum claim, as many do, an economic migrant claiming to be escaping persecution and being deathly afraid of returning to his home country. “
Menjivar-Ayala was not escaping persecution. That was a lie. In the U.S. he worked a number of menial jobs before becoming acquainted with Chicago’s leftwing clerical cabal. In due time, he was appointed a Deacon by the defrocked sexual predator, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., accused of molesting handsome seminarians.
Showalter questions in her article if Menjivar-Ayala was ever “courted” by McCarrick and then showered with favors (the Deaconate) from the sugar daddy.
The appointment of Menjivar-Ayala to West Virginia, a Protestant majority state with only 60,000 Catholics, 90% white and that voted for Trump by 42 points, is also very queer. Obviously, there is a Vatican agenda here to do everything possible to help transform the state politically. Leo’s move is much like the EU’s forced immigration policies that have gone a long way to destroy much of Europe, especially France, the UK, and Ireland.
Menjivar-Ayala also told U.S. Catholic:
“The church was very instrumental in helping people organize themselves after the watershed 1968 meeting of Latin American Bishops in Medellín, Colombia. That awakened a sense of social awareness and a closeness, a conscious awakening.
“People began to join different organizations and to read the Bible from that perspective. Seeing faith from that perspective brings liberation, not only salvation in heaven but liberation from what oppresses you here on Earth.”
The last paragraph can be used to justify both the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Most of the devastation from this pontificate is yet to come. True Catholics are in for a real heartbreak.