Pope Leo XIV waves to the faithful as he arrives for his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, on November 12, 2025. | Riccardo de Luca/Anadolu via Getty Images

For the first time in history, the pope is an American — from Chicago, no less. And like many Americans, Pope Leo XIV seems to love a good yap. Whether it concerns President Donald Trump’s immigration policies or the use of artificial intelligence in popular entertainment, Leo has not been shy about expressing his views (he recently said he uses a different starting word every day when playing the New York Times’s Wordle game.)

An American pope speaking about American issues, and in a manner that at least seems to be an implicit criticism of the American president, would be big news in any era. But at a moment when “tradcath” converts to Catholicism are increasingly influential — and increasingly angry about what they see as the Vatican’s turn to “wokeness” — I thought there would be particular value in speaking with someone who covers not only the pope and the Vatican full-time, but also Catholics in American politics.

What is Catholic social teaching?

Catholic social teaching is the collection of traditions, principles, and beliefs, based in the Bible, natural law, and papal writings, that outline how people should be treated and how societies should be organized. Usually, these principles are condensed into seven themes:

Human life is sacred, has innate dignity, and that should be the starting point for society.People are called to build families, create community, and participate in society.Humans have rights and responsibilities to each other.The needs of the poor and vulnerable should come first.Economies must serve the people, there is dignity in work, and workers must have rights.Solidarity between people demands justice and peace.Humanity is called to be stewards of creation, so must care for the environment.

So I reached out to Michael Sean Winters, a longtime columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, to discuss all things Pope Leo and to get a better sense of whether there really is tension between the freshman pontiff and the US president (and that president’s supporters), learn more about why Pope Leo seems so focused on immigration, and get a better sense of why Leo also seems deeply worried about the role AI will play in the future. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I’ve noticed lately that people on both sides of the political divide are interpreting Pope Leo’s comments as unusually political or unusually focused on domestic concerns in the US. Some people go so far as to suggest he’s pushing back on the Trump administration. Are they onto something?

I would frame it differently. It’s not uncommon for popes to speak about ethics that have political consequences. But what’s quite different here is that he can speak and answer in Midwestern English. We are hearing directly from the pope, not through an interpreter or based on a translation.

With Francis, we heard an interpreter saying what he had said in Spanish or Italian and translating it into English. With Leo, when he speaks in English, it lands differently. It breaks through secular media differently and it’s becoming a different kind of challenge for conservative Catholics who used to say, “Oh, well, poor Pope Francis, the benighted Argentine, he doesn’t understand the United States.” That dog doesn’t hunt. So it’s not so much that this pope is saying more, it’s that it’s landing in the American church and the wider American culture differently from previous popes.

There’s one other thing, too: Popes don’t usually talk to the press with any regularity. They have those press conferences on the airplane when they’re going on a trip, and that’s about it. Leo has gotten into the habit of taking a few questions every Tuesday when he’s leaving Castel Gandolfo [the papal palace] after his day off, and so that’s the other just kind of practical thing, that it’s breaking through for that reason.

Now how much of Pope-Leo-as-anti-MAGA is real versus liberal wish-casting?

I wouldn’t frame it that way. It’s not a pastor’s job to pick sides in political fights. There are people in the pews who are baptized Catholics who belong to MAGA. Certainly as a Catholic, we believe our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ can come to birth in the heart of a conservative or a liberal or anyone.

And I say to liberals: If you had an aggressively pro-choice Democratic Catholic president, the questions would be about that, and you would be getting responses to that from the pope. The Church does not fit neatly into any political party in any country, in any century — because it’s a church. We’re always looking beyond the horizon of human knowledge and human experience. We deal with different frames of reference. Whenever you’re reducing a religious posture in any faith to a kind of political program, you’re missing something.

That said, do I think Leo is anti-MAGA — at least to the degree that MAGA falls far short of the truths that Catholic social teaching puts forward for the organization of society? Yes. By that standard, every pope is going to be anti-MAGA — in the same way that every pope is going to be opposed to war.

Relatedly, is this a fight between the Vatican and MAGA Catholics or is this more a case of MAGA Catholics throwing rocks at the papal throne? In other words, how much — if at all — do you think the pope cares about these people’s criticisms?

So I was at the US bishops’ conference meeting reporting on it for the National Catholic Reporter, and what was very clear is there was a group of conservative bishops in the United States who for a variety of reasons were not enthusiastic about Pope Francis. And they thought, “Well, no pope is pope forever. Francis is in his 80s.” There was this idea that Francis was like bad weather; he was inevitably going to pass. It reminds me of an old Italian saying: “There’s nothing deader than a dead pope.”

You did have some conservative Catholic bishops thinking along the lines of: “Thank God the cardinals are going to get together this time and elect someone completely different [than Francis].” And of course there were a couple candidates who would’ve fulfilled that wish. But Cardinal Prevost — who would ultimately become Pope Leo — was not one of those candidates. He was the candidate of continuity with Francis. And he won.

So now these conservative bishops have to reckon with the fact that they not only cannot say about Leo: “Oh, he’s an Argentine who doesn’t understand our culture,” the way they did about Francis — but, also, that Leo is not an 88-year-old Argentine. He’s a “young” 70-year-old American. He’s their last pope.

How do you think they’re handling that?

They are trying to recalibrate, and I hope some of them will look in the mirror and realize that they’re the ones that have to recalibrate. I would have said this to liberal Catholics frustrated with Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, too.

Let’s get into some details about what he’s actually said that’s garnered attention. Earlier this year, he said: “Someone who says ‘I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.” That got a lot of attention. But was it actually a departure from what you’d expect a pope to say?

No. For almost a hundred years, the Church has been consistent about immigration. The first real magisterial teaching that we get from popes on the issue of migration and refugees is from Pius XII — who was no liberal. He was the pope during World War II, when you had a refugee crisis. You get the start of Catholic social teaching, which always starts with the dignity of the human person. We believe what it says in Genesis, that man was created in the image and likeness of God, and is the only creature that God created for his own sake.

That’s the starting point for all policies. Even somebody who is your enemy, you have to recognize their human dignity. What is interesting and why some of Leo’s stuff is really breaking through is, if you watch Fox News, they don’t use the word immigrant without preceding it with the adjective “criminal.” They don’t talk about “migrants”; they talk about “criminal migrants.”

And what’s become very, very clear is that these [people] aren’t criminals. They may have overstayed their visa, but that’s like getting a parking ticket. The penalty should not be deportation.

Leo also recently endorsed a statement by the US bishops, in which they say they “are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” and that they are “saddened” by the “vilification of immigrants.” Should this statement be understood as an unusually direct attack on a president’s policies?

“Indiscriminate mass deportation” is the phrase they said. Yes, absolutely; it’s an attack.

But this gets to one of my objections: When it’s a Democratic president, or politician, they will name the president by name. They will name the administration. For eight years, they criticized Obama — by name.

This statement, meanwhile, never mentions Trump explicitly.

Right. They will not do that with Trump. I suspect part of that is that Trump is considered so thin-skinned. They probably think: Why antagonize him? But the obligation is on them to be consistent.

What do you make of defenders of the administration who argue that the Church is just mad about losing government grants and funding?

The idea that there’s any kind of financially related payback here is wrong.

The reason the Church cares about this isn’t because of some financial benefit. It’s because the Catholic Church has been involved in helping migrants in this country throughout its entire life; it’s because the Church is a church of migrants.

Apart from the colonial English Catholics, most of whom were quite wealthy in Maryland before the Revolution, if you want to find the roots of American Catholicism, they’re in Kilkenny, they’re in Regensburg, they’re in Sicily. And now you would add Guadalajara or Celaya.

I wanted to switch gears for a moment and ask you about Leo’s love of cinema. Leo recently delivered a speech about Hollywood and AI that Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri described as “one of the most remarkable speeches I’ve ever heard coming from someone not directly involved in the movie industry.” Why do you think Leo is focused on this issue?

The AI thing really is on his radar screen. And I think in explaining his choice of a name, he said, Leo XIII had to deal with the Industrial Revolution. I’m choosing the name Leo because we have to deal with this informational and technological revolution and the implications for how they’ll affect what it means to be a human person.

Is he a full-on opponent of AI?

No, he’s not outright opposed to AI.

He has two concerns. One, AI is like any tool that can be used well or for ill: nuclear power can be used to make a bomb or it can be used to produce clean energy.

But with AI, the problem is not just the possibility of it being used badly. It’s also the question of: How does this specific technology affect our own definition of what it means to be human? How does it affect the way we view ourselves? I think that AI raises these almost anthropological questions in a way that no other organization, other than the Church, is really asking anymore.

And, to return to the context of Hollywood in particular, when Leo talks about the “below-the-line” workers — all the people who contribute to a film or a production but aren’t actors or the director; makeup, props, set design, etc. — is that his way of trying to think about how this new technological revolution is going to impact workers?

Oh absolutely. And again, that’s where you can invoke his predecessor and namesake, Leo XIII.

You know, I like to tell people that the first real modern iteration of Catholic social teaching — which came about because of the need to respond to the crisis of the Industrial Revolution — was Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Some people have criticized the encyclical as “socialist.” But it’s not. In fact, the encyclical actually condemns socialism. But it also does say that workers are entitled to a living wage, and a living wage is defined as: You shouldn’t have to have two jobs to feed your family and save a modest amount. That’s it. Whatever social contract you have is up to your society; but no social contract is just if it requires workers to hold two jobs just to get by and save a little.

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