It’s been a hell of a week for American Catholics.
It began Sunday night, with the president of the United States calling Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” in a long rant on Truth Social. (The Pontiff had criticized Donald Trump’s threat that, unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die.”) The Pope was not cowed; on Monday, he said he will “continue to speak out loudly against war,” and that he has “no fear” of the administration.
Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance—who has a book coming out in June about his conversion to Catholicism—headed over to Fox News to say that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on with the Catholic Church.” He later said that, when it comes to the Iran war, the Pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
If you’re both a faithful Catholic and a patriotic American, how should you feel about these competing loyalties? I needed someone smart to help me make sense of it, so I asked Professor Luke Burgis if he was free for two drinks.
Luke is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute, a fascinating project within The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Its aim is to “invest in the human person,” at a time when all the things that make us uniquely human are being eroded by technology. Last month, he was invited by Anthropic to be one of 15 Christian leaders to attend a summit to help make its AI chatbot Claude more moral. He declined on principle.
