The Caesaropapist turn

Everyone knows that on Friday, after expressing his conviction that he would make a great “holy father,” Donald Trump posted an AI-generated portrait of himself in papal regalia and regalia on the official White House account on X. But it has gone almost unnoticed that, two days earlier, it was Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, who was among the candidates to fill the vacant seat proposed, in a media simulation of the conclave, in the online edition of First Things , the historic magazine of American religious conservatism.

His champion, columnist Virginia Abram, a young hopeful of the coolest conservative Catholicism, humorously defended his suitability by alluding to the suspicions that identified him as the alleged assassin of the last pontiff. She argued, more or less, as follows: Not long ago, Vance and Francis clashed over the theological concept of ordo amoris , and the Pope died shortly after their first meeting. If what is suspected is true—and everything seems to indicate that it is because things don't just happen—it's only fair that the victor should take the office as spoils. Therefore, Vance should be the heir of Peter.

To top it all off, Aabram suggested that Pope Vance might take the name Sergius in honor of Sergius III, a 10th-century Roman bishop who was said to have murdered his two predecessors, and fantasized that Sergius IV, who shouldn't give up the vice presidency because the American Constitution doesn't consider them incompatible positions, might end up combining the papacy with the presidency of the United States, returning temporal power to the papacy. Due to lack of space or an excess of Catholic conservatism, the columnist refrained from recalling that Protestant historiography called that period of papal history "pornocracy" because of the influence of Marozia, the alleged concubine of Sergius III and mother of his successor, on the corruption of the papal government.

Neither Trump nor Vance will be popes, but both believe that religion and politics should go together.

Since the 1980s, when the holy alliance between Reagan and John Paul II against communism turned the Vatican into an indirect US proxy in Europe, conservative American Catholicism, which also enjoyed a close strategic communion with Benedict XVI, has developed a patrimonialist sentiment toward the papacy.

For decades, First Things , which still counts among its contributors George Weigel, the acclaimed neocon biographer of John Paul II who five years ago published The Next Pope , has been the most formidable interpreter of this sentiment, which, with the imperial presidency of Trump, has taken the Caesaropapist turn that is metaphorically projected in the carnivalesque portrait of the president and the joke of Abram.

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Neither Trump nor Vance will be popes, but both believe that religion and politics must go hand in hand and that, unlike during the reign of Antipope Francis, the power of the Church must be Byzantinely subservient to that of the empire.