by Sandro Magister
Wit
h the appointment of Gabriele Caccia as apostolic nuncio to the United States, Pope Leo has made another key selection in this first year of his pontificate.
Caccia, 68, Milanese, has a history parallel to that of cardinal secretary of state Pietro Parolin, and both belong to the Vatican’s diplomatic current called “Ostpolitik,” which had its framers in cardinals Agostino Casaroli and Achille Silvestrini. Benedict XVI consecrated them archbishops on September 12, 2009, and sent Parolin to Venezuela and Caccia to Lebanon as nuncios, in compliance with the wishes of then-secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, who was hostile to them, in order to vacate the important offices held in Rome by both : Parolin as undersecretary for relations with states and Caccia as assessor for general affairs.
Parolin then returned to Rome as secretary of state, replacing Bertone, at the beginning of Francis’s pontificate, while Caccia was sent first for a couple of years as nuncio to the Philippines and then, from 2019, to New York as the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations. There, each of his speeches was republished by the official Vatican media, and above all he developed a rare expertise on the Catholic Church in the United States and its complicated relations with recent presidents, and even more so with the current one, Donald Trump.
With Trump, in effect, relations within the United States hierarchy have also become complicated and confused. And restoring unity among the American bishops is certainly a goal Leo associated with Caccia’s appointment as nuncio.
Among the primary duties of the nuncio is in fact that of selecting the future new bishops of the United States, in the wake of the selection made by the pope with the assignment of the archdiocese of New York to Ronald A. Hicks, for the sake of greater unity among the American bishops not on one political option or another, but on the essentials of the faith and of Christian evangelization.
Because it’s now clear. Leo does not intend in any way to side with just one current. He has repeatedly shown that he also puts trust in leading figures of the “liberal” wing of the episcopate, from Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of his hometown of Chicago, to Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, D.C. But he puts just as much trust in the conservative wing that still governs the episcopal conference.
And also the appointment of Caccia, an exponent of that Vatican “Ostpolitik” so criticized both by Benedict XVI and before him by John Paul II, corresponds to this push for unity by Leo.
Leo too, in fact, agrees to practice a nonetheless circuscribed “Ostpolitik” at this beginning of his pontificate. He does so with his deafening silence on China and Nicaragua. On the appointments of bishops in China, decided unilaterally by the communist regime in defiance of Rome, he bears it and remains silent. And when journalists questioned him about the high-handed sentence inflicted on Jimmy Lai, the Catholic hero of Hong Kong, he cut it short : “I can’t comment.” Leaving in place what he said about China last summer : “In the long term, I don’t pretend to say this is what I will and will not do.”
But even John Paul II, the living antithesis of “Ostpolitik,” wanted as his first secretary of state the very inventor and primary architect of this policy of “appeasement” with communist governments, Casaroli. So that he could do, where and when necessary, what pope Karol Wojtyla would never have wanted to do personally.
“The martyrdom of patience” was what the Vatican’s own proponents of “Ostpolitik” associated with their diplomatic activity. A “patience” from which Leo, too, knows he cannot escape.
Indeed, there is great disorder under the skies of the United States, also for the Catholic Church, and it will take a lot to resolve it.
A stir was made on March 6 with the benedictory crowding around Trump, as if in a liturgical rite (see photo), of the Evangelical pastors who are part of the White House Faith Office, with the consequent, severe protest of Pope Leo against those who “presume even to drag the name of God into these choices of death, but God cannot be enlisted by the darkness.”
But there’s also ferment on the Catholic right, in the segment closest to the American president.
Brian Burch, the United States ambassador to the Holy See, a fervent Catholic and former president of Catholic Vote, said in an interview with Elise Ann Allen at the end of February that there is now “momentum,” a vital explosion, among Catholics in the United States.
Testimony to this, he said, are the two all-round Catholics now at Trump’s side, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, exponents of a new type of conservatism that Rubio himself called “of the common good” in a recent talk at the Catholic University of America.
Vance is also close to the widow of Charlie Kirk, the Christian activist who polarized masses of young people at universities, and to the movement that arose after he was killed last September. But room and influence in this movement has also been found by such a figure as Nick Fuentes, a rampant anti-Semite with numerous followers known as the “Groypers,” which in turn has infuriated Rod Dreher, a witness to Vance’s Catholic baptism and author of the bestselling book "The Benedict Option," who warned Vance himself against this pro-Nazi and racist drift. Added to this is the unknown element represented by Peter Thiel, the wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur who engineered Vance’s political rise and the theorist of a “transhumanist” vision, reportedly coming to Rome for a conference at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelicum,” whose rector is the American Dominican Thomas J. White, a claim quickly denied by the university itself.
There’s also turbulence among the bishops. There is unanimous criticism of the ruthless anti-immigration policy set in motion by Trump, but on many other issues the maneuvering is haphazard.
The most critical and vocal so far have been cardinals Cupich, McElroy, and Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, first with a joint statement against the president’s foreign policy, then with a scathing statement by Cupich against the war on Iran, which the White House has advertised as an action movie filled with video games, and then again with McElroy’s disavowal of this war as “just,” because it cannot be just, as he took care to explain with a wealth of arguments.
But even the conservative camp of the American episcopate can no longer be uncritically assigned to Trump’s following. Timothy Broglio, former military ordinary for the United States and penultimate president of the bishops’ conference, has spoken out with stinging words against Trump’s threat to invade Greenland, going so far as to authorize soldiers to disobey if “they’re being ordered to do something which is morally questionable.”
And as for Trump’s anti-immigration policy, the whole bishops’ conference has gone far beyond simple criticism. At the end of February, it appealed to the Supreme Court – six of whose nine justices are Catholic, beginning with Chief Justice John G. Roberts – filing a six-page brief packed with legal arguments challenging Trump’s decision to deny United States citizenship to the children of undocumented migrants, calling the decision “immoral and contrary to the Catholic Church’s fundamental beliefs and teachings regarding the life and dignity of human persons, the treatment of vulnerable people – particularly migrants and children – and family unity.”
There is in all this ferment a sort of growing expectation that Pope Leo will embody what the American Catholic Church sorely needs : a sure guide in this scattered process.
And indeed, both Leo and his secretary of state Parolin have not been idle on some crucial issues.
On Ukraine, the position of the pope and the Holy See is unequivocal and in no way coincides with that of Trump and Vladimir Putin. It supports the Ukrainian people’s resistance to Russian aggression, a pivotal role for Europe, and a peace that is not an unjustly imposed surrender.
In the case of Venezuela, before everything fell apart with the capture of the dictator Maduro, the Holy See’s diplomacy had been seriously mobilized to find a less traumatic solution, with Maduro’s exile to Moscow, as revealed by the “Washington Post” after the failure of this attempt.
Regarding the Middle East, the Holy See, although invited, refused to join Trump’s “Board of Peace,” not even as an “observer,” seeing in the initiative – according to Cardinal Parolin – too many unresolved “critical matters,” in the first place the positioning of the “Board” as an alternative to the UN and its aversion to the guiding principles of “international law,” which the secretariat of state has consistently asserted as normative – despite the lack of any power to enforce it – most recently by Parolin in a March 4 interview with Vatican media.
As for Iran, Leo resisted the pressure from Tehran to explicitly condemn the United States and Israel. He called the war “deeply disturbing,” expressed solidarity with “the many civilian victims, including many innocent children,” and offered touching words for Father Pierre El Raii, the Lebanese priest killed while assisting the wounded, but did not go further. And like him, Parolin also limited himself to prudent judgments, alien to unilateral condemnations : “In speaking of the causes of a war, it is complex to determine who is right and who is wrong.”
Yet Iran’s pressure on Leo has been intense since the beginning of this war. It has been concretized in repeated requests from Tehran’s ambassador to the Holy See, the learned Mohammed Hossein Mokhtari, with studies in Qom but also in the West, and a specialist in interreligious dialogue, and in a letter from Ayatollah Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, director of Islamic Studies at the Iranian Academy of Sciences, requesting that the pope, among other things, “remind Trump of the teachings of Jesus Christ,” so contrary to the war crimes he has committed.
In early January 2025, in meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, Ambassador Mokhtari had given him a plaque featuring reflections on Jesus written by the then supreme leader of Iran’s theocratic regime, Ali Khamenei. And Francis, according to the report of the official Iranian press agency, agreed that Jesus was the true alternative to those, like Israel, “who use their wealth and power to enslave nations and drag them into the hell of this world and of the hereafter.”
Since the time of Khomeini, the Iranian regime has always carefully cultivated relations with the Church of Rome, with undoubted success, not affected by Pope Francis’s visit to Iraq in 2021, to the Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani, the most authoritative spiritual leader of Shiite Islam in the world but a diehard opponent of Khomeini’s theorem that assigns political as well as religious power to the doctors of Islamic law.
In recent days, Hezbollah’s television network circulated a “fake news” item claiming that al-Sistani had ordered the “holy war” of all Shiite Islam against the United States and Israel. Because war is also made of these communication weapons. But neither Leo nor the secretariat of state are bending to them. More than good neighborliness with tyrants, their focus is the population’s thirst for freedom. In relations between the Holy See and Iran, the course change is clear, with this pope.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry : traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.