The next moves in chess game between Trump and Pope Francis

ROME – President-elect Donald Trump and Pope Francis are leaders with such vastly different agendas and perspectives that it’s tempting to imagine the two men right now being involved in a high-stakes game of chess, as both prepare for “The Donald” to take the oath of office a second time. Trump opened the chess game The post The next moves in chess game between Trump and Pope Francis first appeared on Catholic Herald. The post The next moves in chess game between Trump and Pope Francis appeared first on Catholic Herald.

Jan 10, 2025 - 04:00

The next moves in chess game between Trump and Pope Francis

ROME – President-elect Donald Trump and Pope Francis are leaders with such vastly different agendas and perspectives that it’s tempting to imagine the two men right now being involved in a high-stakes game of chess, as both prepare for “The Donald” to take the oath of office a second time.

Trump opened the chess game on 20 December by moving his knight – naming Brian Burch his new ambassador to the Holy See. Burch is a veteran political operative and cultural warrior whose advocacy group, CatholicVote, is credited with helping Trump reconquer a majority of Catholics in 2024 after splitting them roughly down the middle with Joe Biden in 2020.

A frequent media commentator, Burch has made no secret of his disagreements with the Francis papacy.

In a post on X last November, Burch asserted that Pope Francis’s treatment of his critics vindicates those who dismiss his rhetoric on synodality as “merely a ruse”. In late 2023, Burch gave an interview to the conservative outlet Newsmax in which he asserted that Fiducia Supplicans, a Vatican document authorising priests to bless people involved in same-sex unions, had created “massive confusion” about Catholic teaching on marriage.

In an interview with the New York Times in October 2024, Burch was equally explicit.

“The pattern of vindictiveness and punishment seems to fly in the face of what [Pope Francis] says about being an instrument of mercy and accompaniment,” he said. He also said Francis’s 2015 comment that Catholics need not “breed like rabbits” had offended traditionally minded believers.

The bottom line is that it seems Trump wanted to dispatch an envoy to Rome who, to use the American argot, will “give as good as he gets”.

In response, Pope Francis on 6 January made a chess play of his own, moving his bishop – in this case, transferring Cardinal Robert McElroy, who’s known as being both pro-immigrant and pro-LGBTQ+ rights, from San Diego to Washington, DC; thereby making him the American bishops’ point person for engaging the new Trump administration.

At a press conference after his appointment, McElroy said he would pray for the Trump administration, but he also channeled his inner Burch by bluntly declaring the sort of mass deportations of illegal immigrants that Trump has vowed to carry out as being “incompatible with Catholic doctrine”.

As if to underscore that McElory was sent to Washington with one eye on Trump, he has a doctorate in political science from Standford and has written on the subject of Christian nationalism, including arguing for a “unitive” form of nationalism as opposed to isolationism.

One might object that the McElroy appointment can’t have been a direct response to either Trump or Burch, since it was almost certainly decided upon on 10 October 2024, when Pope Francis met McElroy along with fellow US cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark, and pointedly without Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington.

In hindsight, it seems obvious they were discussing Gregory’s successor, a full month before the US election. Yet in all likelihood, the subsequent decision was based at least in part on the prospect of Trump’s return, so in that sense it would still be a “response”.

If Francis and Trump are indeed playing chess, what are their next moves?

This is where the metaphor of a chess game breaks down, because in such a game the only variables controlling the action are the decisions of the two players. In real life, however, Trump and Francis don’t get to decide all by themselves the board upon which the game will be played, because other forces and other figures, not to mention history itself, also get a say.

Here are three future scenarios, all reasonably plausible, which might utterly recalibrate the Francis-Trump dynamic.

First, imagine that Trump does launch the mass deportations of illegal immigrants which he vowed to do on the campaign trail. Among other things, such a policy could lead to mounting tensions between the US and the nations of Central and South America – which, coincidentally, happens to be the part of the world where Francis’s political influence is the highest.

Trump might be forced to look for the pontiff’s help to soothe tensions, which in turn would give Francis some leverage to extract compromises, and thereby make the two men de facto partners on immigration policy.

Second, suppose Vladimir Putin meant what he said and is willing to sit down for peace talks with Volodymyr Zelensky for an end to the war in Ukraine, but those talks hit a snag and someone needs to talk Putin off the ledge. Both Trump and Francis have maintained good relations with the Russian leader over the years – both at some personal and political cost – and thus could find themselves making common cause trying to bring the talks on Ukraine to a successful conclusion.

Recall, among other things, that Pope Francis has refused repeatedly to condemn Putin by name since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, at one point even insisting on calling him a “man of culture” with whom he’d had discussions on literature.

Meanwhile, this past December, Francis received New Year’s greetings from Putin along with just three other leaders from the European orbit – President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

Third, what if Iran goes the way of Syria, with a restive civilian population finally meeting a credible resistance movement and bringing down the theocratic system that’s dominated the country since the 1978 revolution? Trump could go overnight from trying to bankrupt Iran to trying to persuade its new leadership to be open to the West, and in that effort he would find Francis a uniquely valuable resource.

Francis has amassed great social and political capital with the Islamic world, including with the Shi’a branch that dominates Iran. His 2021 meeting in the Shi’a holy city of Najaf in Iraq with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was considered a watershed moment, one which led most Shi’a leaders to regard Francis as a friend.

Given all that, Trump and Francis could end up working shoulder-to-shoulder to promote the reconstruction of Iran, a country in which both the United States and the Vatican have long-standing interests.

Of course, one could equally imagine scenarios which would drive the new Trump administration and Francis’s Vatican further apart, but therein lies the point: we just don’t know how things will develop, because history always has the last word, and it’s notoriously fickle.

Thus, to all those assuming the Trump vs. Francis chess match is necessarily destined for hostility, it’s important to point out that both the president and the pontiff have been around long enough to know the great truth:

That in politics, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests. And for presidents, at least, even those interests sometimes may be negotiable.

Photo: Pope Francis meets with US President Donald Trump during a private audience at the Vatican on 24 May 2017. It was the first face-to-face encounter between two world leaders who have clashed repeatedly on various issues. (Photo credit ALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AFP/Getty Images.)