A few months before he died on Monday, Pope Francis entered what turned out to be his last high-profile skirmish with his flock in the United States. In a letter in February to American bishops, with whom he had his own complicated relationship over the years, the pope criticized President Trump’s treatment of migrants, claiming that deportations violate the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.”
Though he didn’t name names, he also seemed to to rebut Vice President JD Vance’s recent interpretation of a Catholic theological concept. Mr. Vance, who is Catholic, met briefly with Pope Francis at his home in Rome on Easter Sunday, making the vice president among the last people to see the ailing pontiff alive.
The slap in February, with its intertwining layers of politics and theology, was typical of the often fraught public relationship between Pope Francis and conservative American Catholics. When Pope Francis took office in 2013, many Catholics in the United States were optimistic that his emphasis on inclusivity and ministry to the margins would lead to a “Francis effect” that would enliven the American church for years to come.
Pope Francis did end up energizing American Catholics, but not only in the way his supporters hoped. His papacy galvanized a traditionalist stream that had always existed in the American church, and that strengthened and expanded throughout his papacy as a tide of resistance rose in the American church hierarchy, in Washington and in the pews.
Pope Francis’ critics represent a minority of the American church but a powerful one. They were not only fellow clergy but also elected officials in a newly ascendant wing of the American Catholic political realm, as Catholic power in Washington developed harder edges in the final months of his life. President Trump stocked his cabinet with conservative Catholics, and elevated Mr. Vance as vice president, a Catholic convert whose views on church doctrine are deeply enmeshed with his political priorities. Catholics make up more than a third of Mr. Trump’s cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But Pope Francis’ critics in the American church had objections that ranged far beyond disagreements over public policy. Critics, including some clergy, have accused him of sowing confusion on bedrock church doctrines, and at the same time of wielding an autocratic leadership style behind a facade of humility and informality. He was seen as haphazardly rushing the church into the future, at a time when many American traditionalists were questioning the changes of Vatican II.
“There is a strong sense that the church is like a ship without a rudder,” Cardinal Raymond Burke, who became Pope Francis’ most vocal critic in the American hierarchy, warned early on in his papacy, fueling a sprawling battle between Pope Francis and American traditionalists that would wax and wane over the years.
The unease, and even hostility, flowed in both directions. Not long after Cardinal Burke’s comments in 2014, Pope Francis removed him from his role as prefect of a Vatican court. Pope Francis’ initial ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Viganò, whom he inherited from his predecessor, repeatedly flouted the pope’s leadership, and publicly called him a “false prophet” and a “servant of Satan.” Last year, Pope Francis excommunicated him for rejecting the pope’s authority and the liberal reforms of Vatican II.
In 2023, Pope Francis expressed with unusual frankness his consternation at “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” that was arrayed against him in the American church. Speaking to a group of fellow Jesuits at a gathering during World Youth Day in Lisbon, he lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives and warned about what happens when “ideologies replace faith.”
Months later, he appeared to put that criticism into action. First, he fired Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas, a frequent antagonist who had accused Pope Francis of undermining the faith and questioned whether certain Vatican officials were truly Catholic. Pope Francis then punished Cardinal Burke again by evicting him from his apartment at the Vatican.
Pope Francis’ predecessors were more closely connected to the United States. John Paul II, who took office in 1978 and led the church for 27 years, saw the United States as a partner in the global battle against communism. Benedict XVI found a natural fraternity with the American church’s anti-liberal instincts, a church that, like himself, was more doctrinally oriented.
“Pope Francis changed all that,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University. “He interrupted a long period of an extremely friendly relationship between the popes and the United States.”
Pope Francis was the first Latin-American pope, and was skeptical of the United States as a global actor. He spoke of ministry to the margins and emphasized issues that the wealthy, conservative American church saw as secondary at best: climate change, welcoming migrants. Some conservatives clung to Benedict XVI, who left office in 2013 and died in 2022, as a kind of unofficial figurehead more attuned to their own ideals.
Ken Hackett, the first U.S. ambassador to the Holy See in Pope Francis’ tenure, watched Americans’ discontent with Pope Francis’ priorities grow over the years. By the time he released his climate encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” in 2015, “You had groups coming to Rome to protest it,” he said.
Pope Francis’ popularity among American Catholics declined during his tenure but remains high. Three quarters of U.S. Catholics viewed Pope Francis favorably, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center. That was eight points lower than his popularity just a few years earlier, and 15 points below his peak popularity in early 2015.
As his popularity declined, a partisan gap widened. Almost 90 percent of Catholics who are Democrats or lean Democratic held a positive view of him in the Pew survey, compared with just 63 percent of Catholics who are Republicans or lean Republican. That was the largest gap of his papacy, which began with Republicans viewing him more favorably than Democrats.
A frequent complaint of conservatives in the United States and elsewhere was that Pope Francis sowed confusion to the faithful. Remarking “Who am I to judge?” in a conversation about gay priests in 2013, he made a radical break in tone — although not in doctrine — from his predecessors.
For the minority already hostile to Pope Francis, it was intolerable.
“At some point you have to assume this is intentional weaponized ambiguity,” said John Yep, the chief executive of Catholics for Catholics, a combative Catholic political organization he founded in 2022 and that has received praise from President Trump.
Mr. Yep also mentioned a document Pope Francis signed on a 2019 trip to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, which made him the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula. The document, also signed by the grand imam of an influential Egyptian mosque, declared that “diversity of religions” was “willed by God,” which came as a shock to some, given that the Catholic Church also claims to be the one true church.
“It’s counter to the very notion of the Catholic faith,” Mr. Yep said. “If God doesn’t care what religion you are, there’s no point.”
For a small but energetic group of traditionalists, the disjuncture was liturgical. In 2021, Pope Francis issued the equivalent of an executive order limiting where and when priests could administer the Traditional Latin Mass, the Mass celebrated worldwide for centuries until the reforms of Vatican II. Pope Francis seemed to see supporters of the older Mass as rejecting the church’s modernization more broadly, and dismissed the formal vestments preferred by many traditionalist priests as “Grandma’s lace.”
The crackdown enraged and confused liturgical and theological conservatives, even those who do not celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass. They believed he was going out of his way to isolate and suppress a thriving stream of the church, where Masses are often packed with young families.
“It’s a very small cohort, but the diversity of practice in the church is a good thing,” said Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow at the Catholic Association, a small nonprofit that advocates conservative Catholic causes.
An independent Catholic media ecosystem in the United States was unrelenting, depicting Pope Francis as undermining the church, or even as an apostate. Some questioned whether he was actually the pope because the true pope cannot teach heresy. In February, when Pope Francis was in the hospital for what turned out to be a five-week stay, the right-wing website LifeSiteNews ran an opinion essay suggesting that irregularities in the 2013 conclave may invalidate his papacy altogether. Questioning the integrity of a pope’s election shows how deeply American political dynamics have seeped into some corners of the church.
For many traditionalists, the problem was also what they didn’t hear Pope Francis talking about.
“He never talked about sin, he never talked about conversion,” said Michael Hichborn, president of the Lepanto Institute, an organization based in Virginia that aims to defend the church from “assaults from without as well as from within.” The group is sharply critical of Pope Francis, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and church agencies, including Catholic Charities.
The American church itself seems likely to continue moving rightward into the next papacy. More than three out of four young priests describe themselves as theologically conservative. The Catholics who attend Mass more often are likelier to oppose changes in the church’s restrictions on contraception and female priests.
Soon Catholics in the United States will turn their attention to Rome, and to the question of who will lead the church into its next era, at a moment when both the American political scene and the global order feel fragile to many.
For some in the American church, the answer to instability is certainty.
“We’re looking for clarity and fearlessness in pronouncing the truth,” Ms. McGuire said. “Church unity is going to be really important.”
