The pope and the president are at odds with each other, and Sohrab Ahmari isn’t happy about it. In an April 15, 2026, essay for UnHerd, he lamented the president and vice president’s intemperate words about Pope Leo, and suggested a diagnosis some might find startling. This friction, Ahmari thinks, is the bad fruit of Catholic neo-conservatives like Fr. John Richard Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel. They sent American Catholicism down an evil path, and we’re all still living with the consequences.
Some readers might find this theory confusing, given that the three men in question constituted the triumvirate of conservative Catholicism in America from roughly the 1980s until the early 2010s, a period that the new right has always regarded with deep hostility. Readers of Law & Liberty are likely familiar with Ahmari’s own past denunciations of these figures coming primarily from the “postliberal” or “integralist” side of things. In earlier essays, Ahmari’s complaint with Catholic neoconservatism was its defense of religious liberty and pluralism, and its rapprochement with twentieth-century Anglo-American liberalism. In this essay, however, he takes a further step, taking aim not just at the triumvirate but also at America itself. He says of this country that it is “presumptively skeptical (at best) of apostolic or historic Christianity,” raising questions about how Catholics should relate to it.
The problem with the neoconservative Catholics, then, is that they loved their country in a way that Ahmari considers problematic.
What prompted his outrage was the fracas between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV. Their disagreement over the ethics of war, presumably prompted by the standoff in Iran, has created some tension. During the homily at a prayer vigil for peace on April 11, Leo insisted that nations must not fall victim to the “delusion of omnipotence” and said:
Dear brothers and sisters, there are certainly binding responsibilities that fall to the leaders of nations. To them we cry out: Stop! It is time for peace! Sit at the table of dialogue and mediation, not at the table where rearmament is planned and deadly actions are decided!
The pope certainly has a point. While he has spoken in more absolute terms than I would have preferred, it is simply true that war is not good; at best, it is necessary to restore the common good of peace among peoples and nations. The alternative the pope offered was prayer, which encourages:
obedience to God rather than any human authority, especially when the inherent dignity of other human beings is threatened by continuous violations of international law.
Trump responded as one might expect, with an intemperate post to Truth Social in which he upbraided the pope, accusing him of thinking “it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” Trump subsequently posted and then removed an AI painting of him as the Great Physician (or just a physician?) healing an old man, done in the style of Jon McNaughton. The less said about that, the better.
If one refers to the pope’s words, there is nothing there explicitly referring to America, Iran, or Venezuela. Indeed, he speaks of leaders of all nations, which would mean, well, all nations. Trump decided that the homily was specifically about him, and perhaps the pope had him in mind. However, by no means is the current American conflict with Iran the only one transpiring in the world.
When the pope did speak of American attacks in Iran directly, he did so to oppose Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die” in Iran. The pope sensibly responded to the threat of the total annihilation of 90 million people with:
Today, as we all know, there has also been this threat against the entire people of Iran. And this is truly unacceptable! There are certainly issues of international law here, but even more, it is a moral question concerning the good of the people as a whole, in its entirety.
In response, the precise opposite of Ahmari’s lament occurred; the American people sided with the pope over the president. How did Ahmari get this so wrong?
Despair for a Postliberal Order
This represents a noteworthy development in Ahmari’s position on America. The more familiar elements of his postliberal perspective are still there, but they are reconfigured.
Ahmari’s argument is still built around his highly selective history of American Catholicism. He gives us three data points: the 1884 Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, the work of Fr. John Courtney Murray, and the project of the Catholic neo-conservatives. All three, in his view, should be viewed as part of an ongoing effort to make America safe for Catholics and Catholics safe in America. To that end, in his view, Catholics subjected their theological commitments to the American way of life in an uneasy truce, which was never likely to find a secure footing. In the later twentieth century, many Catholics (like Murray and the neoconservatives) grew more optimistic about the possibility of a more complete rapprochement, but this, in Ahmari’s view, could only hold so long as the United States allied with Pope St. John Paul II in their confrontation with an aggressive Soviet Union. That conflict ended, and things changed between America and the Vatican. In 2003, John Paul II declined to endorse the American invasion of Iraq, and the uneasy truce began to fall apart, as popes called for peace and American Catholics called for war, with Ahmari giving an account of Catholic neoconservative arguments against papal criticisms of war and economics.
At this point, Ahmari does something new: he now doubts the possibility of ever internally reforming the American Catholic Church and, hence, the American nation. Looking back on the late 2010s, he says that at that time it still felt as though necessary reform might be possible:
But in those years, they—we—were permitted to question free trade and call ourselves “pro-life New Dealers” or “anti-abortion Catholic socialists” or even “integralists”. We could even admit that George W. Bush’s wars had turned out disastrously.
He laments, however, “with about a decade in the rear-view mirror, it’s doubtful that a true renewal will arise in these quarters” because the Catholic neoconservative “mold” has proved “too rigid to reshape” because of right-wing opposition to Pope Francis. His ultimate evidence of this is that Vice President JD Vance’s “recent admonishment that Pope Leo ‘stick to morals’—as if his boss’s talk of erasing a whole civilization didn’t implicate the gravest moral concerns.” After this, he upbraids First Things for voicing support for the attacks on Iran, and Catholic Republicans for being too concerned about “their relationship to the party, the White House, and the conservative world.” As a result, Ahmari concludes the old uneasy truce no longer has any coherence. Whereas mid-century Catholics were responding to a “highly coherent American order,” today’s America “is far more messy and internally incoherent.” So much for reforming a nation!
The Problems with Ahmarism
There is a deep irony in Ahmari’s position. He is distressed by the American right’s hostility to Pope Leo. But he has aligned himself with the Catholic sub-group that is least able to reconcile itself to the pope’s anti-war position. Modern popes have for some time been deeply critical of militant global powers, and great powers tend to push back against those critiques. But the patriotic, pro-inclusion thinkers Ahmari despises (like Murray, Neuhaus, and Novak) warmly welcomed the Church’s move away from forms of authoritarian nationalism that repeatedly led to state oppression and war. Ahmari and the postliberals are the ones actively trying to reinvigorate those forms of political theology, despite ample empirical evidence that they tend to breed violence and hatred.
Ahmari sees Catholic integration into American culture as the core problem, but this theory is highly implausible. The narrative of American Catholic inclusion is complex, and cannot be triangulated from the three points he notes in the essay, but in general, liberal, patriotic Catholics have been far more averse to raw displays of geopolitical power (and far less of an influence on right-wing populists like Vance).
The notion that there is some political regime, some postliberal order, that will emerge from the internal contradictions of the liberal order was always a fantasy.
As I have shown elsewhere, American Catholics have historically been divided between Americanizers and Separatists. Americanizers sought the constitutional protection of civil rights and liberties under the federal and state constitutions, and tried to reassure compatriots that they were patriotic Americans who would happily serve their country rather than subvert it for a “foreign prince in Rome.” Separatists began as recent migrants with greater attachments to their native homes than their adopted one, and they tended to accept the reactionary posture of right-wing ultramontanists, or those who elevated the pope’s temporal authority over their country’s. These Separatists fell into the clerical fascism of the 1930s. Catholics in Latin America and Europe had sided with authoritarian and fascist governments, and American priests like Fr. Charles Coughlin preached that same gospel. The Allied victory in Europe doomed clerical fascism until efforts by Ahmari and his friends to restore it under the banner of “integralism” or “political Catholicism.”
The European Catholic experience of the years leading up to and during the Second World War was a decisive blow to the nineteenth-century anti-liberalism that generated Catholic support for clerical fascist regimes in Spain, Austria, Croatia, and Slovakia, as well as hard-fought but failed efforts in Brazil, Argentina, and Belgium. Fr. Jozef Tiso in Slovakia sent Jews to camps, as did Ante Pavelić in Croatia, as well as Serbs and Roma to their graves. Spain oversaw the White Terror during and after the Spanish Civil War and had a state program to kidnap children from Republican families. The end of the Second World War saw the Iron Curtain fall and subject millions of central and eastern European Catholics to Soviet persecution. The result for the Church was a dramatic shift away from war as a means for securing spiritual ends. Hence, in his essay, Ahmari’s historical account is cleverly tailored to avoid the implications of his own ideas, which directly contributed to the political crises of the twentieth century, and the pivot the Church subsequently made on war.
The 1930s are especially important in the moral imagination of the Church. In his homily, Leo XIV mentioned John Paul II’s own words on growing up:
I belong to that generation that lived through World War II and, thanks be to God, survived it. I have the duty to say to all young people, to those who are younger than I, who have not had this experience: “No more war” as [Saint] Paul VI said during his first visit to the United Nations.
Once popes had called for crusades, but now the scale of war was too great and the costs morally indefensible. This much was obvious in the brutal civil war that led to the creation of communist China, the Russian suppression of Chechnya, the constant civil strife among African nations, and the upheavals across South America.
Especially important to all of this was, ironically, the dissolution of the Papal States. Without a temporal kingdom to govern—and defend—the Church could focus its spiritual discipline away from balancing the alliances made with France and Austria to hold their territory, instead focusing entirely on war as an evil. That has not sat well with some Americans. And they’re not alone—just late. The Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of France, the Austrian Empire, the Kingdom of Spain—all of them had the same problems with clerics criticizing their pursuit of war.
Ahmari is too provincial in his view, in a way that mirrors Trump himself. Trump imagined that he must be the sole target of Pope Leo XIV’s words, as if it were irrelevant that Nigeria is dealing with Boko Haram, that there is the ongoing Sudanese civil war, or that Russia is waging a pointless stalemate in Ukraine. When the pope spoke, he did not mention particular nations because, in the pope’s view, all nations are bound by the moral limits of the Gospel. Did the pope mean to include Trump’s intervention in Iran? He most certainly did, but he himself is to blame for the pope’s rebuke after he threatened to annihilate the Iranian people. Ahmari, however, wants somehow to blame Weigel for all of this, to avoid drawing attention to Ahmari’s own efforts to legitimize the right-wing populism that got us here. That is no way to assuage a guilty conscience!
Finally, Ahmari’s idea that American Catholics are uniquely bad at living in a culture hostile to their faith is nothing short of ridiculous. The pope offered the view of the Church in a pastoral way, to minister to the leaders of nations and the peoples of nations. It is not unique for someone like Trump to take issue with a papal position that runs contrary to his own. What is amazing is that Trump even thought that the pope was worth responding to, which reveals, despite everything, that he cares what the pope thinks of him and what he is doing. That is more than one can say of many former Catholic nations in Europe these days.
Historically, papal challenges have brought about kidnappings (Boniface VIII and the subsequent papal captivity in Avignon, Pius VI, Pius VII), anti-popes, and even, arguably, the Great Schism of 1054 and the Reformation. Are we to say that Catholicism has no home in Christendom? I once described integralism as an ideology of despair, but this is even worse than I imagined.
To Be Deep in History
Ahmari’s despair is of his own making. He is (was?) a part of a group of Catholic postliberals that imagined they were on the precipice of some new theologico-political dispensation. They were wrong. The notion that there is some political regime, some postliberal order, that will emerge from the internal contradictions of the liberal order was always a fantasy, one easily dispensed with upon learning the complicated past of the “apostolic or historic” Christianity to which he converted.
St. John Henry Newman famously quipped, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” Many Protestants I know would disagree, but one could at least paraphrase, “To be deep in history is to cease to be postliberal.”
