There is a natural desire for a unifying theory of all the disturbances in Western institutions, a way to make all the conflicts into one so that an unstable situation can be distilled and understood. Which is why, over the last week, there's been an attempt to unite American politics and Vatican intrigue into a single melodrama, in which the same populist forces that elevated Donald Trump are supposedly trying to pull Pope Francis down.
The key to this interpretation is the connection, reported last week by my colleague Jason Horowitz, between Steve Bannon, Trump's chief ideologist, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, the American traditionalist who has been the Jesuit pope's most vocal critic within the College of Cardinals. The Bannon-Burke link consists of a friendly 2014 meeting, a few secondary connections and some broad commonalities between their respective worldviews — both in their way reactionary, nostalgic for the civilizational confidence of the Western or Catholic past.
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