I’m traveling this week, but in the meantime here’s Tabs Senior Papist Correspondent Liz Lopatto to explain Donald Trump’s beef with Pope Leo XIV and how it threatens to unravel the American political right and possibly kick off the Butlerian jihad. In her spare time Liz writes for The Verge, where she recently made a case that Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want. —Rusty
If your pope looks like this, you are gonna die in that pit.
Rusty is off parenting or something, and so while the arch-WASP is out, we’re doing Popery!
“My growing view,” wrote now-vice president JD Vance in 2020, “is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims.” The pope is quite literally a sovereign (though his territory is diminished from its peak) so he is by definition “a political figure.” Like many people who know any history whatsoever, I got a pretty good laugh out of this headline.
But all that “proper deference” stuff was before we got a Chicago pope, I guess!
Pope Leo XIV, when he is not being gifted assorted sports jerseys as a running bit, has spent his papacy firmly telling everyone to quit killing each other. He condemned Russia’s actions against Ukraine, called for peace in Gaza, decried violence in Sudan, and called for peace when Iran cracked down on protestors earlier this year. Leo also said that while countries have a right to control their borders, immigrants should be treated with basic human dignity, which is pretty normal Catholic pro-life stuff. If Leo has gotten up to anything unusual so far, it’s condemning violence against women.
Then, a little more than a month after U.S. President Donald Trump started an illegal and, separately, unconstitutional war against Iran, the pope once again called for peace in very vague and general terms:
“Religious leader calls for peace” is not surprising or controversial, even if you know he might be doing it wearing a White Sox jersey. But this time Donald Trump took it personally. It’s already funny when a major religious leader endorses peace in general and the U.S. president decides that the pope is specifically shit-talking him. But what will live in my brain for the rest of my natural life is Trump announcing to the world that “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime.” Trump then followed that up with some light blasphemy, which he later deleted.1
It’s trendy to go to Mass these days, on the far right. The Catholic conversion movement is tied up with right-wing politics largely because of the conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei, which originally blossomed in Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain. In Opus, his absolute banger of a book about the group, Gareth Gore documented how Opus Dei targeted the powerful in Washington D.C. under its leader Father C. John McCloskey, who was eventually removed from his post after a sexual abuse scandal that the group carefully described as involving “an adult woman.” Ok! Gore wrote that:
McCloskey had developed his own theory about a particular malaise that seemed to affect American men of a certain age — a condition he called Friendship Deficit Syndrome — and developed techniques to cure them through what he called “apostolic friendship.”
The cure for the male loneliness epidemic is Opus Dei, according to Opus Dei, which is apparently how it sank its hooks into the Republican party. Leonard Leo—a longtime kingmaker in the Federalist Society who helped block Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court under Barack Obama—sat on the board of Opus Dei’s Washington recruiting center and sent his children to Opus Dei schools. And in the first Trump administration, Leonard Leo played a role in installing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court.
At this point, you begin to wonder if certain ambitious people converted to Catholicism just to get close to power, and if Mass was actually just a way to get access to a better career. I believe I have an answer: Yes.
NEW DEVELOPMENTS
If Ross Douthat, professional public Catholic, can both-sides Donald Trump’s blasphemy, we know where his real loyalties lie. Sean Hannity has broken with the Catholic Church to support Trump. Peter Thiel—close with Opus Dei’s Father Arne Panula, according to Gore—has gone to Rome to preach his heretical views on the Anti-Christ, prompting the Vatican’s main AI advisor to ask in the headline of an essay whether Thiel should be burned at the stake. For the record: if the Church actually goes through with this, I’ll repent of my apostasy.
Vance, a Thiel protégé, has taken it upon himself to lecture Pope Leo about Augustine, even warning him to “be careful.” Leo is the first pope from the Order of Augustine and was literally in Hippo when Vance decided to Augustine-splain at him, thereby creating unimaginable new levels of pontification. The pope didn’t even have to rebuke Vance himself—the U.S. bishops’ doctrinal chairman did that.
So now I’m over here tapping my watch like Judge Judy: excommunication when? The funniest time to do it would be right before Vance’s upcoming book on his Catholic faith comes out in June. You know, the book with a random Methodist church on its cover?
It remains to be seen if we’re going to get a second, dumber Reformation, this time because the woke pope doesn’t like war and thinks all human beings should be treated with dignity or whatever. Members of the Trump administration have threatened the Pope by invoking the Avignon papacy, a series of popes installed by France that led to a Church schism, which apparently alarmed the Chicago Pope so much that he canceled plans to visit the US. Pope Leo has also met with Gareth Gore, which suggests that he may finish what Francis started and order a full independent investigation into Opus Dei, which is accused of labor exploitation, human trafficking, and other crimes. If this does happen, I am very curious about what we’ll discover by examining the American wing of Opus Dei and the D.C.-based Catholic Information Center.
One last thing: the pope is promoting friendship between Catholicism and Islam—that’s part of why he was in Hippo in the first place—and his main AI advisor seems to hate Silicon Valley. Apparently this is part of the plot of Dune, so we may also have the Butlerian jihad to look forward to. And you know who else died in the pit? That’s right: God-Emperor Leto Atreides II.
Today’s Song: “St. Loser,” by Slayyyter (Live at Coachella)
Tabs thinks about you. Do you think about Tabs?
Thank you Liz for that troubling information! I really missed having guest posters—did you know there wasn’t a single guest post in 2025? I’m changing that this year, starting right now.
If you’d like to help fund this and future guest posts (and normal non-guest posts too I suppose) please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It also comes with an invite to the smart and cool Tabs Subscriber Discord and the inalienable right to post comments on the Tabs website.
1 Trump would eventually claim the image showed him as a doctor, which I’m suspicious is his addled misunderstanding of an aide telling him the image was doctored. I feel bad for our country, etc.
