Cristina Di Silvio & Antonio Dina
“Now, a man of righteous and holy life is one who does not love what ought not to be loved, nor fails to love what ought to be loved; who does not love more what should be loved less, nor love equally what should be loved more or less, nor love more or less what should be loved equally.” So wrote Augustine of Hippo, one of the thinkers who most profoundly shaped the moral conscience of the West. In those words, which move across centuries with the austere calm of Christian philosophy, lies an idea destined to resurface again and again in the political and spiritual history of Europe: the order of love is not merely an inner matter; it is also a principle that guides communities, nations, and even institutions.
Cristina Di Silvio & Antonio Dina
When a pope is born in Chicago, has an account on X, and leaves behind a digital archive full of critical retweets about the White House, the Vatican inevitably enters a territory that manuals of ecclesiastical geopolitics describe with a polite euphemism: a turbulent zone. The election of Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, does not merely represent a historic event for the Catholic Church. It introduces a new actor onto the global political stage, where faith, ideology, and power intertwine with a complexity that would make even the most cynical analysts in Washington uneasy.
The election of an American pontiff is, in itself, a historical anomaly. For centuries the Vatican carefully avoided entrusting the leadership of the Church to figures from dominant geopolitical powers. The logic was simple: when the spiritual leader of more than a billion faithful comes from the same nation that dominates the world order, the risk of confusion between moral authority and political power becomes unavoidable. With Leo XIV, that taboo has been broken.
Scrolling through the new pontiff’s digital timeline reveals a profile surprisingly explicit for a man of the Church: shared articles critical of the immigration policies of the administration of Donald Trump, indirect interventions in the American political debate, and even a return to X after nearly two years of silence to challenge a theological position expressed by Vice President J. D. Vance. The point of friction concerns an ancient concept in Catholic theology: the Ordo Amoris, the order of love.
Vance had invoked it during a television interview to justify a moral hierarchy in political responsibilities: first the family, then the community, then the nation, and only afterward the rest of the world. A position that, in the language of American politics, sounds perfectly compatible with the doctrine of America First. Leo XIV, then a cardinal, shared an article with an unequivocal headline: “J. D. Vance is wrong: Jesus does not ask us to rank our love.” The sentence, in itself, reads almost like a treatise in moral geopolitics condensed into a few words. The universalist Gospel confronting ethical nationalism. Social theology challenging sovereignist populism. The global Church against the logic of borders.
Yet the tension is not only external. The Catholic world itself is highly fractured, with progressive and conservative factions often at odds over doctrine, culture, and the Church’s role in public life. Internal rivalries can be fierce, and navigating them is one of the pope’s primary tasks. In this sense, Leo XIV will not only confront geopolitics; he must also mediate, seeking a delicate balance that holds together a global Church stretching from Latin American social Catholicism to North American conservative theology, from European secularized communities to Africa’s rapidly growing faithful.
The final post published by Prevost before his papal election implicitly criticized an episode involving Trump and the Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. The case concerned the mistaken deportation of a migrant and the decision of the American administration not to immediately facilitate his return, despite a ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States. Prevost amplified a comment from a Salvadoran bishop who posed a simple, almost brutal question: “Do you not see the suffering?” Within the Catholic tradition, that question carries a long moral genealogy. It is the question posed in the Gospels whenever Jesus pauses before those excluded from history. It is also the question that returned forcefully in recent years in the homilies and speeches of Pope Francis, when he denounced what he called “the globalization of indifference,” a moral condition in which contemporary societies gradually learn not to see the pain of others.
Trump responded diplomatically. He called the election of the American pope “an honor for our country.” On the surface, the comment sounds almost patriotic. Read with the cynical eye of someone who has observed politics for decades, it resembles a preventive move: symbolically neutralizing a moral authority before it can become a political antagonist. The situation was not helped by the fact that only days earlier Trump had posted an image generated with artificial intelligence portraying himself dressed as a pope during the official mourning period for Pope Francis. The reaction in the Vatican was glacial. In European diplomatic circles, the episode was interpreted as a symbolic gesture signaling the growing tension between the populist language of American politics and the institutional tradition of the Catholic Church. Former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi described the gesture as a form of political interference in religious matters. The judgment reflects a very European sensitivity: in the continent’s history, the boundary between throne and altar has always been a minefield.
In the corridors of the Curia, off the record, someone observes with a certain irony that the first American pope may find himself in the singular position of being both the pontiff closest to American culture and the one most capable of criticizing its political reflexes. The history of the Vatican, after all, is full of such paradoxes.
Yet the true hidden variable in this story is neither Trump nor Vance. It is a name that has hovered for years in the corridors of Catholic power and that resurfaces periodically whenever American politics intersects with the Vatican: Opus Dei. Founded in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá, Opus Dei is one of the most enigmatic organizations in modern Catholicism. Its supporters describe it as a spiritual network devoted to sanctifying everyday work. Its critics view it as a disciplined power structure capable of influencing universities, banks, and governments. The truth, as often happens in the history of the Church, is probably more complicated.
Over recent decades Opus Dei has developed a strong presence within professional elites, particularly in legal and financial circles. That does not mean it controls the Vatican. It does imply, however, that many actors in global politics share a certain conservative Catholic culture whose roots lie precisely in that environment. In the American world, this network has intersected with key figures in Silicon Valley and the emerging technological right. One name frequently appears in political analysis: Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and investor in the data analytics company Palantir Technologies. Thiel is known for his fascination with the philosophy of René Girard and for a worldview in which technology, apocalypse, and religion intertwine in a manner almost medieval in tone.
The convergence between Silicon Valley and traditional Catholicism may seem bizarre. In reality, it reflects a deeper cultural shift. After decades of libertarian techno-utopianism, part of the American technological elite is rediscovering more rigid moral structures. In other words, some technology billionaires have begun reading Thomas Aquinas and Augustine with the same enthusiasm they once reserved for Ayn Rand. Off the record, in San Francisco, small private discussion circles have multiplied in recent years among technology entrepreneurs, philosophers, and theologians. They are not organized movements but informal conversations where people debate the ethics of artificial intelligence, Christian anthropology, and the moral limits of digital capitalism. It is a curious yet meaningful signal: the city symbolizing the technological revolution is rediscovering moral questions belonging to the oldest philosophical tradition.
Within this landscape, the arrival of an American pope introduces an unpredictable variable. On the one hand, Leo XIV represents continuity with the social line of Pope Francis, particularly on the issue of migration. Francis repeatedly reminded the world that “the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep,” and that “politics is one of the highest forms of charity, because it seeks the common good.” On the other hand, the new pontiff comes from a North American ecclesial culture deeply familiar with the language of politics and media. The Vatican is an institution that thinks in centuries, yet it now operates within an information ecosystem dominated by algorithms and digital platforms. A pope with a documented digital past inevitably carries with him a new form of transparency, or if one prefers, a new vulnerability.
Church historians often remind us that the papacy has always had a political dimension. The pope is not only a spiritual leader; he is also the sovereign of Vatican City and a global diplomatic actor. During the twentieth century this role became evident when John Paul II indirectly supported the movement Solidarity, contributing to the crisis of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe. The Church has always done politics. It has simply preferred not to say so too loudly. Leo XIV enters this system with a characteristic no pope before him possessed: a digital past readable in real time by billions of people. Theology has always spoken of eternity. The internet, with almost metaphysical irony, has introduced something surprisingly similar: permanent memory.
For a pontiff in the twenty-first century, the challenge will not merely be guiding the Church. It will be doing so while knowing that every word from the past can return to life at any moment. Meanwhile, in the Apostolic palaces diplomats discuss doctrine and strategy. In Rome, in political corridors, in newsroom conversations, and at the discreet restaurant tables of the historic center, a question is already circulating, whispered with a hint of irony: How long will the honeymoon last between the first American pope and American politics?
If there is one lesson the history of the Vatican teaches with almost mathematical regularity, it is this: pontificates change the world. But the world, sooner or later, always tries to change the pontificates. The Vatican has learned over centuries to survive empires. The subtler question of the twenty-first century is whether it can survive algorithms as well.