On Easter Sunday, hours before his death, an ailing Pope Francis roused himself to share a brief meeting at the Vatican with U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
For Francis, it was to be a final encounter with a conservative wing of American Catholicism that is flourishing and increasingly assertive at a time when the Church, more broadly, is struggling.
The Pope’s passing on Monday morning has thrown open a global succession race to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Yet it has also focused attention on the Vatican’s fraught relationship with an American flock that is undergoing cultural and theological changes that echo the rightward shift in the nation’s politics in the MAGA era.
Personified by Vance, who was baptized in the Catholic Church in 2019, at age 35, adherents to this conservative style are reviving old practices, including the traditional Latin Mass and women wearing veils. While their numbers may still be small among the universe of Americans who identify as Catholic, they are increasingly influential, say observers—in the struggle for the Church’s future and that of the nation.
