Father Bob Prevost, today known to the world as Pope Leo XIV, says that when he first arrived in Peru as an Augustinian missionary in 1985, thirty years old and three years a priest, he was naïve. “It was all very natural to me,” he recently told his biographer Elise Ann Allen, to see the clergy working “to build up small communities” and treating the parish as a place “where people come to know one another and help one another and support one another.” When you went to “other places of the country,” however, “there was a very different perspective.”¹

He was putting it mildly. Prevost had landed in a country where the Catholic Church was at war with itself—where some theologians were preaching a gospel of class struggle and political liberation, while others were holding the line for a more doctrinaire faith. Over the previous two decades the movement called liberation theology—which depicted Christ as a revolutionary and read the Book of Exodus as a parable for how to escape modern bondage—had spread among the disenfranchised of Latin America. Peru was a stronghold: the liberationist creed was popular in Lima’s shantytowns and on coastal plantations, in the Aymara and Quechua Andes, and in the Amazon lowlands, where priests worked with indigenous communities to fight off loggers and oil companies. The movement’s most well-known theologian was the Peruvian Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, who argued that true Christian faith demands solidarity with the poor and the dismantling of structural causes of their oppression. His 1968 lecture “Hacia una teología de la liberación,” delivered in the impoverished port city of Chimbote, had given the movement its name.  

From Latin America, liberation theology had traveled around the world, to the newly decolonized countries of the Global South and the cities of the industrial heartland, including Prevost’s hometown, Chicago. There Gutiérrez was a frequent visitor to DePaul University and the Catholic Theological Union (from which Prevost had graduated in 1982 with a Master of Divinity degree); both included his writings in their curricula and exchanged students and teachers with his Lima-based Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas. Even the Church of England drew on Gutiérrez’s writings to protest Margaret Thatcher’s gutting of the United Kingdom’s welfare state. Rome and Washington perceived the movement as a threat. In the “old days, you could count on the Catholic Church for many things,” Richard Nixon complained to Henry Kissinger in a March 1971 phone call—including for help in the fight against communism. Not anymore.

But in 1978 the Polish cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła became pope, taking the name John Paul II, and tried to recommit the Church to that fight. When he launched a major campaign to contain liberation theology, Peru was one of his first targets. In 1983 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who headed the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith—an institution charged with safeguarding Catholic doctrine that traced its lineage to the Inquisition—opened what would be a multi-decade investigation into Gutiérrez’s writings in search of doctrinal errors. Prevost had arrived in Peru when this inquest was in full swing, yet it took him some time to get a sense of the stakes. “Little by little,” he says in Allen’s Pope Leo XIV: The Biography, he came to see that there existed different “ecclesial realities within the country”—that many saw Gutiérrez as a saint but others thought him a heretic.

Prevost might have been unaware of Peru’s religious schisms when he arrived in the country, but he wasn’t indifferent to politics. He was already drawn to the Catholic peace movement; a photograph from 1983 shows him attending a protest against Ronald Reagan’s deployment of cruise missiles in Italy, an event organized by, among other groups, the Italian Communist Party.

But Prevost was no liberation theologian. He didn’t share the movement’s rebellious streak: where other young priests began to question the papacy and even looked to Gutiérrez’s Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas as something of a counter-Vatican, an alternative source of doctrinal authority, Prevost remained loyal to Rome, to its theology and its rituals. No “barefoot-among-the-poor” liberationism for him. Despite lowland Peru’s humidity, Prevost dressed impeccably. When some Peruvian priests stopped wearing the customary purple stole to hear confessions, Prevost urged that the practice be restored—insisting that the impoverished, no less than anyone else, deserved the full dignity of the sacrament.

In an era when some priests and nuns in Latin America were going so far as to join the ranks of guerrilla insurgencies—having come to believe, according to one CIA report, that “no solution” to poverty existed outside the “destruction of the prevailing order”—Prevost was far more circumspect. Those missionaries, he has said, were “perhaps too friendly with Marxist ideas, including using violence to fight for the rights of the poor.” By contrast, he explained, “I was neither extreme.” When Prevost became pope, his older brother Louis said he believed that his leadership would be “down the middle.” Still, it is clear that, at an early point in his Catholic faith, Prevost was indelibly stamped by the ethical imperative of liberation theology’s commitment to the poor.

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Prevost’s first posting put him in Chulucanas, a large, thinly populated territory of scattered parishes running from the Pacific coastal desert to the foothills of the Andes, near the border of Ecuador. Rural worker militancy in the region, one of the most impoverished in Peru, stretched back to the 1930s, with laborers contesting exploitation on sugar cane, cotton, and rice plantations. Chulucanas had also been the setting for an experiment in engaged pastoralism. The Vatican, in the aftermath of its Second Council in the early 1960s, had called on priests and nuns to go out into the world—especially into rural, destitute parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia—and knit remote villages into integrated communities of faith. They were tasked with creating networks of lay Catholics to tend to the everyday needs of the marginalized, including by running schools, health clinics, soup kitchens, and pharmacies. The goal was, as Pope Pius XII had put it shortly after World War II, to “rebuild the world from the ground up.”

Augustinian missionaries committed to this project, many of them from Chicago and other places in the midwestern United States, arrived in Chulucanas in the early 1960s. A good number of these missionaries understood themselves as anticommunists; their objective in establishing a stronger Church presence in remote areas dovetailed with Washington’s cold war aim to dampen the appeal of Marxism. But they often found it difficult to imagine how they might “rebuild the world” without confronting the structures that kept the poor poor, and many were radicalized by the experience of living amid extreme poverty. Maryknoll priests and nuns who started missions in Aymara and Quechua indigenous villages around Lake Titicaca in the highlands of southern Peru, for example, became vocal critics of the United States and supporters of the gospel of liberation, as the historian Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens writes.² In Guatemala, Maryknoll missionaries went further, leaving their order to join a Cuba-backed left-wing armed insurgency.

By the 1970s liberationist Catholics were active in Chulucanas and the surrounding Piura region, building on the work done by the first wave of Augustinian missionaries. By the time Prevost showed up, the Church was running literacy, philosophy, and consciousness-raising workshops—helping people to see the structural causes of their oppression so they could act collectively to change them. Marist nuns worked with artisans to revive the region’s pottery tradition and incorporate liberation-theology iconography into their craft. Chulucanas became known for one especially striking image: Cristo Campesino, or Peasant Christ, crucified on a broad hoe and a machete.

Prevost arrived in Chulucanas just after an historic El Niño dumped a biblical amount of rain on parched soil, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, washing away roads and homes, and killing hundreds. Much of his early work in Peru focused on reconstruction. It was a hard introduction to the country, made worse by a case of typhoid fever that put Prevost in the hospital. The crises would only continue. These were years of overlapping catastrophes in Peru: the spread of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency, the military’s brutal counterinsurgency, and Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, which enacted a punishing austerity program. Augusto Pinochet’s famous economic “shock therapy” in Chile was painful, but the “Fujishock” was perhaps worse, since it targeted a more fragile, already immiserated population. Child malnutrition spiked, as did infant mortality. “There was a part of me that was looking around and saying, ‘Lord, where have you brought me?’” Prevost told Allen.

Prevost’s time in the country also overlapped almost exactly with a reversal in the balance of power within the Peruvian church. In 1985 Peru’s bishops were sharply divided, with roughly a third supporting Gutiérrez, a conservative minority aligned with Rome, and the remainder composing an uncertain center. When Ratzinger moved to censor Gutiérrez, this split meant he couldn’t find enough support to punish him the way he had, say, another well-known liberation theologian, the Brazilian Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff, on whom the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith imposed a penalty of “obsequious silence” that banned him from teaching, publishing, and public speaking. Gutiérrez had too many allies, both in Peru and in Rome. But Ratzinger and John Paul continued to press Peruvian bishops to question the priest, forcing him to exhaust himself defending and revising his writings. The inquisition against Gutiérrez didn’t officially end until 2004.

Yet even as Gutiérrez remained beyond censorship, John Paul began to transform Peru’s episcopate, appointing a series of archconservatives to the highest religious offices. By the 1990s Peru, according to the historian Carlos Piccone Camere, had transformed from the cradle of liberation theology to one of the world’s most entrenched bastions of Opus Dei, the secretive, conservative Catholic order founded in Spain in 1928. The organization recruited heavily among the educated, urban upper-middle class and the powerful, and its traditionalist vision of the Church aligned with John Paul and Ratzinger’s. In 1999 Juan Luis Cipriani, an orthodox member of Opus Dei, was named Metropolitan Archbishop of Lima and Primate of Peru—the most powerful ecclesiastical position in the country.

For Ratzinger, who led the charge against Gutiérrez, the problem was not the liberationist’s critique of capitalism—many popes had ventured one, at least since the 1891 publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which condemned the corrosiveness of the free market and the suffering produced by the industrial revolution. But the cardinal inquisitor believed that liberation theologians had gone too far in arguing that the destitute were more than merely objects of charity—that they were, rather, the presence of God himself on earth. Divinity, as Gutiérrez put it, “smelled of the stable,” and the face of Christ was to be found in every emaciated, tortured, and terrified body in the world.

In Ratzinger’s view, this amounted to an indictment of the Church itself, of its pomp and wealth. To assign Christ’s crucifixion a primarily worldly meaning—as Gutiérrez did in his 1971 book Teología de la liberación, interpreting it as a sign of God’s solidarity with the afflicted—was to privilege the sociological over the salvational, the temporal over the transcendent. The same could be said of the liberationists’ definition of sin as a “structural” problem embedded in unjust economic arrangements, and their insistence that it was a Christian’s duty to dismantle these sinful social structures. The concept of “class struggle” was a special heresy for Ratzinger, since it cleaved humanity into irreconcilable economic antagonisms. Ratzinger did accept as legitimate the liberationist insistence that the Church should demonstrate a “preferential option for the poor” and strive to improve their lives. But that didn’t mean that God took sides in class wars. The community of Christ, like the body of Christ, was whole.

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Beyond Opus Dei, Peru incubated even more extreme forms of the Catholic right. The vanguardist Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana, or Society of Christian Life, founded in 1971 by the schoolteacher Luis Fernando Figari, conceived of itself as a crusader organization; its recruits understood themselves to be “soldiers for Christ.” (Figari, who admired Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, had also established the Peruvian branch of Brazil’s Sociedade de Defesa da Tradição, Família e Propriedade, a far-right organization whose goal was to reestablish the kind of social order that existed prior to the French Revolution.)

In December 1985, a few months after Prevost’s arrival, Figari organized a conference attended by hundreds of people, including priests and bishops, and effectively issued a declaration of war against Marxist priests, especially Gutiérrez, for the hearts, minds, and souls of Peru’s peasants. The Sodalicio directly challenged liberation theology in the countryside, creating communities that mimicked the left-wing movement’s horizontal pastoral structure, running clinics and staffing schools. But where liberation theologians sought to encourage people to question the world and to fight for earthly justice, sodalites, as Figari’s cadres were called, educated the faithful in submission to Peru’s status hierarchy and to the Vatican. Where liberation theology had stirred a quiet Catholic feminism, drawing nuns and lay women into positions of leadership and authority, the Sodalicio recruited only men, bound by vows of celibacy in defense of patriarchy. In 1997 John Paul elevated the Sodalicio from a diocesan organization, accountable to the local bishop, to a society that answered only to Rome. By the 2000s the Sodalicio had established a presence in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, becoming one of the most powerful Catholic lay associations in Latin America.

Prevost, meanwhile, moved on from Chulucanas to Trujillo, a Pacific coastal town closer to Lima and more integrated into national politics. The area was also more afflicted by labor strife, concentrated on the large sugar plantations, and roiled by refugees escaping the war in the highlands. There Prevost taught canon law, trained Augustinian missionaries, and worked on replicating the lay networks he had found so central to Catholic life in Chulucanas.

Trujillo in the early 1990s, like much of Peru, was a perilous place, with the Shining Path bombing churches and the military running death squads. As conservative bishops, many aligned with the Fujimori government, gained power, they pressured priests and nuns to stay quiet in the face of abuses committed by the military and government-backed paramilitaries. Where the Chilean Church famously defended the victims of that country’s right-wing regime—founding human rights organizations, sheltering the disappeared, documenting abuses—Peru’s bishops looked away. The Peruvian Truth Commission’s final report, released in 2003, was harshly critical of Peru’s conservative clergy, especially of Lima’s Archbishop Cipriani, who dismissed human-rights organizations as fronts for Marxist and Maoist movements—effectively siding with the military at precisely the moment when it was killing thousands of civilians.

The report did praise liberationist priests who turned their parishes into sanctuaries. As the conflict consumed the countryside, entire indigenous communities fled massacres committed by the army and the insurgents, transforming church naves, parish halls, and convent courtyards into makeshift refugee camps and soup kitchens. Prevost, however circumspect he was concerning doctrinal disputes, was among those clerics who spoke out forcefully against the violence. At some point in the mid-1990s he confronted a detachment of soldiers, preventing them from forcibly conscripting a group of young Peruvian seminarians. Prevost and his fellow Augustinian missionaries also rejected their order’s suggestion to evacuate the country. Instead he helped organize a public concert in Trujillo to honor victims of both the Shining Path and Fujimori’s security forces, and even began, with other Augustinians, to attend protests carrying placards that said, “If you want peace, work for justice.” In 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Prevost and other Augustinians gathered signatures affirming the declaration, in defiance of Fujimori’s authoritarian crackdown.

Still, by the time Prevost left Peru in 1998 for the US—to lead the midwestern chapter of the Augustinians—it seemed that the battle against liberation theology had been won. The Church in Peru was nearly completely controlled by Opus Dei and the Sodalicio. Throughout Latin America, many of the movement’s leading figures and activists had been silenced, censured, or excommunicated. Many had been killed by US-trained assassins, including El Salvador’s archbishop, Óscar Romero, who was shot at the altar in March 1980; three Maryknoll nuns and a lay missionary who were raped and murdered by the roadside that same December; and six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter, who were massacred on the campus of San Salvador’s Universidad Centroamericana in 1989.

Ratzinger’s theological argument appeared to have triumphed. The church was undergoing a broader conservative turn, not only silencing radicals but also chilling liberals who wanted to reform Catholic doctrine on issues related to birth control, women’s ordination, celibacy, and divorce. In 2005 Prevost, by then in Rome as the head of the entire Augustinian order, observed up close what seemed like the right’s final victory: the enthronement of Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

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Yet liberation theology survived. In Argentina especially a kind of bottom-up revision of the movement’s philosophy had taken place, led by, among others, Juan Carlos Scannone, a Jesuit philosopher and theologian at the Colegio Máximo de San Miguel in Buenos Aires. Scannone preferred the term teología del pueblo (the theology of the people). Where Gutiérrez’s liberation theology tended to see the downtrodden through a socioeconomic lens—as a class defined by its exploitation— Scannone’s teología del pueblo spoke of a living culture, a people shaped by centuries of Catholic and indigenous faith. The poor were not only victims of an economic system; they were the custodians of a spiritual tradition that the wealthy and the educated had largely lost. In the intense, mysterious rites of popular devotion that fused, for example, Quechua faith and Catholic ritual—the burning of strong copal incense at dawn in some lonely adobe church in Argentina’s Andean northwest—Scannone and his followers perceived an encounter with the divine that neither Rome nor Marx could fully understand.

This, to be sure, was a gentle critique of Gutiérrez, for Gutiérrez too insisted that God was to be found among the poor. Yet even though teología del pueblo retained the liberationist demand for justice, its rejection of Marxist categories meant it couldn’t be accused of promoting class struggle or dismissed as sociology in vestments. During Argentina’s dictatorship (1976–1983), twenty-four priests, dozens of nuns, and two bishops were killed by the junta’s security forces. Yet the Vatican at least left Scannone and other pueblistas, including the labor radical Father Rafael Tello, alone to do their work.

Among Scannone’s students was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would later be known to the world as Pope Francis. Bergoglio’s relationship to the dissident church was complicated. As the head of the Argentine Jesuit order during military rule, he distanced himself from the movement just at the moment when its practitioners were being disappeared and killed. Whether that distance was a matter of prudence, institutional self-preservation, or moral weakness has never been fully resolved: two Jesuit priests under his authority, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, were kidnapped and brutally tortured by the junta in 1976, and Yorio later accused Bergoglio of effectively delivering him to the regime by withdrawing the Jesuit order’s protection. The question shadowed him into his papacy.

After Argentina returned to democracy—and especially during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires, which began in 1998—Bergoglio found in teología del pueblo a language that made sense to him. He had grown up in a Peronist household, and Peronism too had emphasized an integral vision of “the people” bound together by faith and suffering. Scannone’s great innovation was, in essence, to fuse Peronism and liberation theology, allowing Catholics like Bergoglio to insist that “social justice” was not an abstraction derived from political theory but something alive in the faith of the worker, the outcast, and the pariah. The future pope often invoked a vague mística popular, a people’s mysticism, which he used to refer not just to a yearning for salvation but a desire for solidarity—a shared humanity, common among the poor but rare for the rich, that insists on “mingling, encountering, embracing, and supporting one another” as we step together “into the flood tide.”

With Bergoglio’s unexpected election as Pope Francis in March 2013, teología del pueblo became the organizing principle of his papacy, an idea capacious enough to hold together a polarized congregation. Liberals who wanted him to change doctrine on matters related to sexuality appreciated his use of liberationist language to imagine a humanist Church. Radicals, meanwhile, liked his description of the Church as a “field hospital” tending to a broken world’s casualties—and his frankness in naming who and what broke the world: “the powerful,” who “feed upon the powerless,” as he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium, his first major papal statement. Yet even traditionalists who feared Francis’s reformism found something to hold onto in his populist theology: a reverence for popular piety that reassured at least some of them that he was honoring the Church’s devotional tradition. The people’s faith, in this reading, was a conserving force as much as a liberating one.

Rome’s attitude toward liberation theology shifted almost immediately upon Francis’s ascension. In September 2013, just months after his election, L’Osservatore Romano—the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, which the Holy See has long used to signal shifts in thinking—published an essay declaring that liberation theology could no longer “remain in the shadows to which it has been relegated for some years.” That same month, Francis hosted the eighty-five-year-old Gutiérrez at the Vatican. Not only did the two men say a public mass together, the pope later apologized to Gutiérrez on behalf of the Catholic Church for “the sufferings he endured in life.”

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Bergoglio and Prevost first met in Buenos Aires in the early 2000s, when the former was archbishop and the latter the head of the worldwide Augustinian order. Both men had been shaped by the intensity of Latin American politics and religion, especially the upheavals of Vatican II and liberation theology. And both had witnessed the backlash firsthand.

By the time Bergoglio became pope in 2013, conservatives held the crucial positions in the Vatican bureaucracy and had spent decades seeding the global episcopate with allies. Beyond the curial officials and cardinals who wanted to restore the Latin Mass and Vatican centralism, something darker was stirring, aligning with other currents in an ascendent New Right. A new generation of Catholic thinkers and activists, concentrated especially in the United States, had moved beyond mere traditionalism to embrace what the US’s current Catholic vice president, J.D. Vance, calls “post-liberalism,” a capacious term that includes Christian intellectuals who want to dismantle the separation of church and state, culture warriors who leverage the Church’s positions on abortion and sexuality as instruments of political power, and, at the furthest extreme, a fringe whose Catholic reaction slides into white nationalism and antisemitism, and who believe the papacy itself has been captured by the enemies of the true faith.

Francis’s effort to turn back this tide began in Latin America, and in Prevost he found the perfect priest to help. The new pope bypassed normal procedures and rushed to appoint Prevost first as apostolic administrator for Chiclayo, a small city on Peru’s northern Pacific coast, in 2014, and then, a year later, as the city’s bishop. This was a signal that change was coming: Opus Dei had controlled the bishopric of Chiclayo for forty-six years. If Prevost’s first term in Peru had aligned with the consolidation of conservative rule over the national Catholic Church, his second, from 2014 to 2023, marked its unraveling.

The defining moment came when a scandal surrounding the Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana hit Peru. The Sodalicio was by this point more a cult than a religious order; its founder, Luis Figari, had maintained his absolute authority through psychological terror and violence—through what an investigation later found to be “pain, discomfort, and fear.” Recruits, including minors, were forced to perform sodomy and other sexual acts. Figari’s crimes were an open secret in Catholic Peru, yet his ties to the country’s elite gave him near-complete immunity. In 2018 Sodalicio supporters began attacking two journalists, Paola Ugaz and Pedro Salinas, who had been investigating the organization—filing defamation suits against them, orchestrating smear campaigns that linked them without evidence to money laundering and criminal networks, hacking Ugaz’s communications, and eventually sending death threats.

Prevost stepped in. He organized a bishops’ statement defending the reporters and met with those abused by Figari and other sodalites. “I will continue working so that there is justice for all those who suffered at the hands of Sodalitium,” Prevost wrote to one survivor in December 2018. “I ask forgiveness for the errors of the church.” For many survivors, after years of being ignored or actively suppressed by a Church that had protected their abusers, the mere fact of being heard was transformative. “What can I say about him? That he listened to me,” said José Rey de Castro, a Sodalicio victim who had worked as Figari’s personal cook for eighteen years. Listening was the least a priest could do, Castro went on to say, but in Peru most didn’t “because the Sodalitium was very powerful.”

Prevost arranged for Ugaz to present her findings directly to Francis. This finally moved the Vatican to act. A papal investigation corroborated the survivors’ accounts of sexual abuse and ritualized humiliation. When Vatican lawyers hesitated, unsure if canon law granted them jurisdiction over founders of religious communities who weren’t priests, Francis himself interceded, expelling Figari from the Church and dissolving the Sodalicio entirely.

The balance of power within the Peruvian Church began to shift. Nearly all priests allied with the Sodalicio were removed from office. Lima’s archbishopric was taken away from Opus Dei and given to Father Carlos Castillo, a liberationist priest. The last and perhaps most symbolic removal came in April 2020, when Francis dismissed José Luis del Palacio, a Spanish-born bishop from yet another conservative ecclesial movement, El Camino Neocatecumenal, and one of the pope’s most visible opponents in the country. Francis removed him without explanation, and appointed Prevost as apostolic administrator to clean up the wreckage of his divisive tenure.

Peru had become a beachhead, as Ratzinger hoped it would—only not for the defeat of liberationism but the revival of the church of the poor. Across Latin America, Francis used his decade in power to systematically realign the episcopate, appointing bishops shaped by the liberationist tradition, lifting sanctions on priests his predecessors had silenced, and signaling that the Church had shifted back toward tending to what Francis called “the existential peripheries”—by which he meant the excluded, the discarded, those the world had deemed of no account. Today traditionalists and conservatives retain a presence in the Peruvian clergy, but most of the major positions are held by priests in the mold of Francis and Prevost.

In January 2023 Francis appointed Prevost as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops—among the most powerful positions in the Roman Curia. Prevost was now in charge of overseeing the selection of bishops worldwide, allowing him to shape the pool from which cardinals are drawn and by extension from which popes are elected. Prevost brought to the role the same temperament he had shown in Peru: consensus-minded and disinclined to provoke unnecessary confrontations, he avoided triggering open warfare with conservatives but nonetheless nudged the process toward candidates who supported Francis’s agenda.

Francis could at times get caught up in Jesuitical metaphysics when discussing the divinity of the poor. Leo, the son of a Chicago schoolteacher, generally uses simpler language to convey his commitment to the vulnerable and his opposition to militarism—and to make his own contribution to the de-Marxification of liberation theology. “The way that people look back on what we label as ‘liberation theology,’ I think is oftentimes erroneous and incomplete,” he told Allen. “Because the gospel preaches liberation; the gospel calls us all to freedom. Liberation theology from the perspective of Gustavo Gutiérrez, for example, is beginning to look through the eyes of the poor and with the poor to understand how God is in and among us.” It is as if, by invoking the “poor” and the “people” rather than Marx, you can say the most radical things.

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Leo has wasted little time, as pope, doing so. His first major papal document, Dilexi Te, issued in October 2025, dismissed as “pseudo-scientific” the claim that free markets would eventually lift people out of poverty, and warned against a Church that cozied up to elites in exchange for privilege and security. He has decried the treatment of migrants “as if they were garbage and not human beings,” called the US war on Iran “unjust,” condemned “neocolonial tendencies” in Africa, and denounced Israel’s bombing of Gaza, especially its slaughter of children. His Holy Thursday sermon preached that “the imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within; the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. The poor, imprisoned, and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death, yet in so doing He brings a new creation to light.” This is classic liberation theology: the idea that Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection expose the lies undergirding the machinery of worldly conquest and terror.

His appointments have been equally pointed. Cautious during his tenure as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, as pope he has moved faster and with less pretense of neutrality. Two new Washington, D.C., auxiliary bishops, Gary Studniewski and Robert Boxie III, are vocal critics of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and its retreat from civil rights. More striking still is the fact that of the twenty-six bishops Leo has appointed in the US, eleven were born outside of the country, including two Vietnamese refugees, Michael Pham and Peter Dai Bui, and the Salvadoran Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, who fled his country’s civil war as a teenager, crossing into the US in the trunk of a car. Leo seems to be building an episcopate at least partially made up of castaways from US wars. Pham, appointed to San Diego, and Menjivar-Ayala, serving in West Virginia, a state that voted for Donald Trump by forty-two points, are also outspoken critics of the administration’s policies. The new bishop of Palm Beach, which includes Mar-a-Lago, is Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez, an outspoken defender of vulnerable groups—including undocumented migrants and LGBTQ+ children—who was born in the Dominican Republic. 

Leo appears to be continuing Francis’s effort to, without changing doctrine, pull the Church away from culture-war preoccupations with sex and abortion and toward the defense of the poor, the prisoner, the migrant, the executed, the abused and battered, the sick. It’s no wonder that Steve Bannon has identified Leo as the “anti-Trump pope.” He stands opposed to nearly every form that US power has taken under the current president: aggressive war, mass deportations, punishing rates of incarceration, intense wealth concentration, and unfettered capitalism—which has now produced the scourge of unregulated artificial intelligence, as Leo writes in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

That message has found an audience. In a national survey conducted in April, 48 percent of US Catholics said it was appropriate for Leo to criticize Trump’s policies, compared with 21 percent who felt it was appropriate for Trump to criticize the pope—a sign that, whatever his conflicts with the White House, Leo retains a moral authority among US Catholics that outweighs that of any politician. One of the greatest ironies of the last century is that the institution the philosopher Sidney Hook once called the “oldest and greatest totalitarian movement in history”—the Catholic Church—supplied the oppressed with tools for critical thinking and advanced a humanism that is now everywhere under threat. Today the irony is amplified. The Church, led by Leo, has become perhaps the only global force capable of mounting a moral challenge to a rogue United States, and it is in no small part because of Latin America.