Jesse Romero, a Catholic podcaster based in Phoenix, Arizona, says the time has come for a “Trump-like pope” who will restore traditional Christian values in the wake of Pope Francis’s death.
“Anyone who’s soft on abortion, who has Marxist tendencies, who’s pro-homosexual – we’ve got to get rid of them,” the conservative influencer and author said. “There are bishops who have marched on Pride parades ... they’ve got to be fired.”
Romero is one of a growing cohort of conservative Catholics in the US who hope that Francis’s death will mark a decisive shift away from the reformism he personified, towards a more doctrinaire, traditionalist approach to the faith.
“They will definitely be hoping to see a rejection of the Francis pontificate at the next conclave,” said David Deane, who teaches Christian doctrine at the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax, Canada. “A lot of them were fundamentally opposed to Francis.”
The mood in the hardline camp was summed up by Roger Stone, a Catholic and long-time ally of President Donald Trump, who denounced on X the posthumous paeans to Francis on US network TV as “nauseating”.
“His papacy was never legitimate and his teachings regularly violated both the Bible and church dogma,” he wrote. “I rather think it’s warm where he is right now.”
In a further X post on Wednesday, claiming that Pope Francis gave the Chinese Communist Party a veto over the appointments of Catholic Church bishops in China, Stone said: “Because God’s judgment is perfect Pope Francis burns in hell for his accommodation with evil.”
Stone’s posts reflect an animosity towards Francis among US traditionalists that emerged early in his papacy and has only grown stronger. The mood has spread throughout the clergy and energised conservatives who have been empowered since Trump returned to the White House.
“There is a significant range of American Catholic opinion that would have preferred someone who was a little less doctrinally adventurous, a little more traditional and – as they would see it – someone who was a little less anti-American,” said John Allen Jr, editor of Crux, a Catholic news website, and author of several books on the church and the papacy.
Distrust of Francis was particularly widespread among the “Maga” Catholics, a group that combines support for Trump’s populist, nationalist agenda with an embrace of Christian orthodoxy and deep suspicion of liberal trends in the church.
“There’s a symbiotic relationship between Maga and the Catholic post-liberals in which each fuels and encourages the other,” Deane said.
“Trump has boosted Catholicism by reaffirming some essential things, such as border protection, the defence of human life and the fact there are only two genders,” said John Yep, leader of Catholics for Catholics, a political campaign group. “That was good for Catholics and that’s why 58 per cent of Catholics voted Republican in November.”
The most celebrated Maga Catholics are Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, and vice-president JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and was one of the last world leaders to meet Francis during a brief encounter at the Vatican on Easter Sunday.
Vance caused an outcry in January by accusing the US Conference of Catholic Bishops of only supporting illegal immigrants because of the substantial federal funding American dioceses received to help resettle them. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, called the remark “scurrilous” and “very nasty”.
Trump himself has worked hard to align Maga with the church. In February he created a taskforce to “eradicate anti-Christian bias”. He also appointed Brian Burch as US ambassador to the Vatican, an outspoken critic of Francis and head of a group that mobilised Catholic voters for the Republicans last year.
But if anything, the movement is broader than Trump and Vance and is the result of long-term trends in a church that is shifting right.
“The clergy that has graduated from seminaries in the last 10-20 years [in the US] tends to be more conservative,” said Janna Bennett, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton, Ohio.
She noted the role played by institutions such as the Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Ohio and Ave Maria University in Florida, both of which have a conservative reputation and have provided a pipeline of aspirant priests and lay ministers with a traditionalist mindset.
According to a survey published in 2023 by the Catholic Project, a research group at the Catholic University of America, more than 80 per cent of priests ordained since 2020 described themselves as theologically “conservative/orthodox” or “very conservative/orthodox”.
The researchers said that while theologically “progressive” and “very progressive” priests made up 68 per cent of new ordinands in the 1965-69 cohort, that number had today “dwindled almost to zero”.
It is no surprise, then, that Pope Francis became such an irritant to many American Catholics. Traditionalists were particularly angered by Amoris Laetitia, his 2016 apostolic exhortation, which raised the possibility of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments.
They also denounced his 2023 decision to approve blessings for same-sex couples, his advocacy of action against climate change and his welcoming approach to migrants. For conservative Catholics who had always been uncomfortable with the reforms of Vatican II, his hostility to the Latin mass was particularly hard to accept.
Experts say the orthodox, anti-Francis camp never constituted a majority of Catholics in the US. “Their noisiness is out of proportion with their number,” said Steven Millies, professor of public theology at the Catholic Theological Union.
But they have become increasingly influential in recent years, thanks in part to institutions such as EWTN, the world’s largest Catholic media network, which has amplified hardline views. Based in Alabama, EWTN has raised millions of dollars in donations, with the money going in part towards “creat[ing] more programming and content that gives glory to God”, the network’s website says.
“Francis was a great gift to them, because it’s an industry that thrives on a spirit of opposition,” said Millies. “One must have an enemy in order to outrage people into opening their wallets.”
The late pope did not take the criticism of his US antagonists lying down. After the conservative cardinal Raymond Burke attacked him over Amoris Laetitia, Francis threatened to evict him from his Vatican apartment.
He also dismissed the Texan bishop Joseph Strickland, another vocal critic in the US church, from his diocese.
Francis had made clear his distaste for the policies Trump has enacted during his second term, writing in a letter to American bishops in February that deportations of migrants violated the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families”.
Romero said he hoped the next pope would usher in a change of direction. “We’re looking to someone who can heal the fractures within the church and eradicate some of the modernist tendencies that have crept in,” he said.
But that view may not necessarily be shared by the senior American clerics taking part in the upcoming papal conclave.
Of the 10 US cardinals under the age of 80 who are eligible to cast ballots in the selection process, six were elevated to their current rank by Francis and are generally sympathetic to his vision of the church.
“There’s a much better chance that we’ll have someone in the image of the late pope – a Pope Francis the second,” Yep said. − Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
