One of my readers, Michael Fox, has started a Substack called Catholics for the Common Good, which I strongly recommend.
He recently wrote a piece arguing the Pope Leo is ideally (I might even add providentially) positioned to offer the Church’s teaching from the gravest threat it faces in the present hour: the MAGA Catholic heresy. Here is a taste of what he has to say, but do go read the whole thing:
On May 8, 2025, the College of Cardinals elected Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago as the 267th Bishop of Rome. He took the name Leo XIV. The choice was widely read as a signal about Catholic Social Teaching – Leo XIII had given the Church Rerum Novarum, the founding encyclical of modern Catholic social engagement, and the new pope was announcing his intention to carry that tradition forward. That reading is correct as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.
In 1899 Leo XIII condemned a heresy he called Americanism – a tendency in the United States to fashion a pseudo-Catholicism divorced from social responsibility by accommodation to American individualism. The current form of this heretical pseudo-Catholicism is the MAGA Catholicism now being advanced and passed off as authentic by Bishop Robert Barron and others in the Trump political orbit. Leo XIV is now fighting it.
Leo XIII Condemned the Heresy in 1899
In 1899 Leo XIII addressed Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, condemning a heresy he called Americanism. The letter was occasioned by a circle of American Catholics convinced that the Church should accommodate itself to American life — softening doctrine to attract converts, privileging individual conscience over institutional authority, treating the separation of Church and state as a universal model rather than a local arrangement. Historians have sometimes called it a phantom heresy — an error no one could actually be found to profess. But what was not a phantom was the Vatican’s definition of the heretical idea that Catholicism could embrace the American cultural privileging of individualism and so to divorce the Catholic faith from commitment to deep social responsibility.
Leo XIII’s letter condemned five related errors. First, that the Church should adapt her teachings to the spirit of the age. Second, that natural virtues — initiative, self-reliance, enterprise — are to be preferred over supernatural ones, with the specifically Catholic demands of grace pushed to the margins. Third, that active virtues suited to public life are superior to passive ones — that humility, obedience, and contemplation rank below engagement, confidence, and strength. Fourth, that religious vows and the institutional religious life are ill-suited to modern conditions. Fifth, and most fundamentally, that the Holy Spirit works more abundantly in individuals who follow their own interior guidance than in those who submit to external authority — whether of the hierarchy or the magisterium itself.
Beneath all five propositions lay a single root: the individualist assumption that the self, properly disposed and interiorly motivated, stands above institutional mediation and communal obligation. That assumption, Leo XIII insisted, was incompatible with Catholic faith.
The Same Five Errors, a Century Later
Each of those five condemned propositions describes MAGA Catholicism with precision. On the first: MAGA Catholicism adapts Catholic teaching to the spirit not of progressive modernity but of nationalist populism, accepting papal authority on abortion and sexual ethics while declining it on immigration, economic justice, capital punishment, and war. The criterion is not doctrinal but cultural — does this teaching confirm American nationalist instincts?
On the second: the operative virtues of MAGA Catholic culture are enterprise, national sovereignty, market initiative, and military strength — while the supernatural demands of Catholic Social Teaching, what grace requires of the prosperous toward the poor and the stranger, disappear. Michael Novak’s theological sanctification of capitalism made this explicit: the natural virtues of market enterprise are declared expressions of the imago Dei, while the preferential option for the poor vanishes from the account.
On the third: the Francis and Leo XIV emphasis on mercy, solidarity, and the reception of the stranger is read by MAGA Catholics as weakness — as the passive virtue of a Church that has lost its nerve. Civilizational confidence and the willingness to enforce borders are the active virtues a serious Christianity requires.
On the fourth: religious orders that carry out the Church’s social mission — Jesuits running refugee services, Franciscans operating food banks — are consistent targets of MAGA Catholic contempt, framed as having traded authentic Catholic identity for left-wing activism.
On the fifth, and most revealingly: the individual MAGA Catholic claims authority to judge the pope’s teaching and find it wanting — not on carefully argued doctrinal grounds but because his own discernment, filtered through American cultural assumptions, is treated as more reliable than the living magisterium. Leonard Leo does not need the pope to confirm that American conservatism and Catholic teaching are identical. Robert Barron does not need Leo XIV to tell him that wokeism is the primary threat to religion. J.D. Vance does not need the Catechism’s teaching on migrants. In each case, interior conviction shaped by American individualist culture takes precedence over the external guidance of the magisterium. Leo XIII could not have described the error more precisely if he had written the letter in 2025.
Again, do go read the whole thing.
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