By Ctrl-Freak
May 9, 2025
In a surprise to absolutely no one who’s been paying attention to the Vatican’s slow drift toward political theater, the College of Cardinals—possibly with help from actual St. Louis Cardinals, if you believe The Beaverton’s reporting—has elected the first American pope in history. Yes, us. We can’t believe it either. But to be honest, we really needed a win—have you seen the news recently? The land of televangelists, strip malls, strip clubs, monster truck rallies, and pickups with plastic testicles has finally laid claim to the papacy. And not with subtlety. Pope Leo XIV, née Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago, arrived at the Sistine Chapel today like a reformulated McRib—briefly available, questionably assembled, and somehow beloved by millions despite all common sense.
Naturally, his first homily—essentially his debut sermon as pope—tried to cast this moment as a beacon of light. He spoke of spiritual hunger in a world of abundance, of the dangers of worshipping pleasure and success, and of the growing “de facto atheism” spreading across the globe like secular athlete’s foot. A lovely message, if you could hear it over the sound of JD Vance cackling in Ohio and Fox News producers cutting together a reel of the new pontiff’s most “woke” moments for use in next week’s culture war hit piece for Fox & Friends.
Which brings us to the not-so-small matter of the previous pope.
Now, no one is saying JD Vance directly assassinated Pope Francis. No one is claiming he leapt over the Vatican walls in a MAGA cape and red hat and strangled the Holy Father with a rosary. But we are saying—and we said it here—that the Ohio senator’s Easter Weekend meltdown on national television, in which he accused Pope Francis of being a Marxist interloper bent on replacing God with solar panels, may have contributed to a certain cardiac discouragement. Francis, reportedly sipping yerba maté and shaking his head in disbelief, did not survive the day that followed.
Enter Leo. A man who spent two decades in Peru trying to salvage souls and dignity in equal measure. As a bishop, he understood Latin America and its people better than most American politicians understand their own lunch orders. This is a man who may still believe the Church can be a moral compass in a confusing world, instead of a rusted-out relic used to prop up dying empires and swing pivotal elections. And yet, the timing, the context, the American-ness of it all—it feels less like divine providence and more like a Vatican Hail Mary pass launched to a country that gave the world both Thomas Merton and Duck Dynasty.
BTW, did you hear they’re rebooting Duck Dynasty? I know… I can’t wait.
This is a church reeling from scandal, bleeding believers, and increasingly treated as background noise in the algorithmic amphitheater of modern life—I mean, is there even a Conclave app? Get with the times, people. And into that arena steps a Chicago-born pope, taking his cues from Leo XIII, the worker’s advocate of the 19th century, while inheriting a job that now includes navigating tech billionaires with Messiah complexes, crypto-Catholics who think Jesus would’ve voted for tariffs, and a global faithful that’s one AI-generated Jesus docudrama away from apostasy.
The Beaverton, never one to miss a sacrilegious opportunity, broke the story that several members of the St. Louis Cardinals’ starting lineup may have been accidentally included in the conclave. Whether this is true or just too true to be false, it feels right. If America’s going to export its holy chaos to the Vatican, why not start with baseball players in red hats casting votes for catcher-turned-saint Yadier Molina? If nothing else, it’s good press.
And maybe that’s why it matters that Pope Leo XIV is not the man American conservatives were praying for. The new pontiff has made no secret of his distaste for the alliance between American evangelicalism and hard-right nationalism. In 2023, he warned that politicized faith was “poisoning the witness of the Gospel”—a quiet rebuke to nationalist movements cloaked in Christian drag.
He has also criticized faith that serves flags before God and profit before people. Just last year, he said bluntly: “When religious language is hijacked for power, it becomes idolatry.” That puts him on a collision course with a significant chunk of the American right, where Catholicism has become less about Christ and more about controlling women, owning libs, and policing communion lines like TSA agents with crucifixes and empty collection trays.
Even his brother Louis, stunned and wide-eyed in a CBS News interview, captured the awe and absurdity of the moment: “Mind blown, what do I do? My little brother was just made pope… I’d better behave now… My brother’s the pope, what do you do?”
Leo’s views could ripple far beyond Rome. It’s not unreasonable to think that the last U.S. presidential election may have turned—at least in part—on the issue of abortion. For millions of American Catholics, that topic is sacrosanct, immovable, and weaponized. Leo, while firmly rooted in Church teachings, is also a man who believes Catholicism means feeding the poor, sheltering the migrant, and healing the sick—not just punishing the impure. That may sound like orthodoxy to some, but to the Breitbartized American faithful, it’s heresy. And heresy, in 2025, gets you crucified on cable news and digitally exorcised from the GOP group chat.
While Leo XIV affirms the Church’s longstanding opposition to abortion, he’s no culture warrior. Shaped by decades in Peru and aligned with Francis’s more merciful tone, he’s shown little interest in using abortion as a political cudgel. His focus has long been on dignity, poverty, and justice—less about punishing women, more about understanding why they’re forced to choose. He won’t rewrite doctrine, but under his watch, the Church may continue shifting away from fire-and-brimstone absolutism toward something quieter, more human—and far more unsettling to the MAGA faithful who think the pulpit belongs to them.
And so we watch. A pope born of the rust belt, tempered in the Peruvian sun, and crowned in the marble crypt of global Catholicism now finds himself facing the impossible task of holding together a faith fractured by nationalism, nativism, and the slow, creeping fog of irrelevance. Whether Leo XIV will be remembered as a reformer, a placeholder, or the last gasp of a Church trying to stay lit in a world full of LED lies, remains to be seen.
But one thing is certain: if he makes it to Advent without being called a groomer by Glenn Beck, it’ll be a miracle bigger than Fatima.
Filed from beneath the smoking thurible of American exceptionalism.
