On April 9, Pope Leo XIV held a meeting with David Axelrod, a prominent strategist within the Democratic Party known for his pivotal role in Barack Obama’s political success. Just four days later, Pope Leo launched a series of critical public statements targeting President Donald Trump and his administration.

Hal Lambert, founder of Point Bridge Capital and a keen observer of the political landscape and its interplay with institutional power, perceived a deliberate strategy rather than mere happenstance.

“This is entirely political, okay? This is all about trying to undermine President Trump’s Catholic support during the midterms and affect Republicans in the elections,” Lambert remarked on CNN Monday.

Some view a Pope who engages with political strategists and subsequently criticizes a sitting president as stepping beyond spiritual leadership into the realm of political maneuvering. This behavior seems to align with recent trends from the Vatican.

When Hamas launched a deadly attack on October 7th, resulting in the deaths of 1,200 Israelis, Pope Francis was quick to criticize Israel, yet he refrained from directly condemning Hamas for the violence and kidnappings.

Pope Leo has remained notably quiet on the issue of Christian persecution in Muslim-majority countries. Incidents such as the burning of churches, massacres of Christian communities in northern Nigeria, forced conversions in Pakistan, and disappearances in Egypt have not been met with vocal condemnation from the Vatican.

Each of these is a direct expression of a civilizational clash that Pope Leo refuses to name. I have said this for more than twenty years. I have paid for saying it. And I will say it again: the West is losing this war. Not on the battlefield, but in the cathedrals, the chanceries, and the press conferences of men who were elected to be shepherds and have chosen instead to be diplomats.

As I write this, Pope Leo is in Algeria bowing at the Great Mosque of Algiers, shoes removed, pen in hand at the Golden Book. 

I do not begrudge Muslims their mosques. I object to the theology being performed in such gestures — the implicit suggestion, increasingly explicit in Vatican discourse, that the differences between Islam and Christianity are merely cultural and that interfaith harmony can be achieved by erasing doctrinal distinction.

Four days after meeting with Axelrod, Pope Leo (in Algiers on April 13) delivered the first in a series of pointed public critiques of the Republican administration

Last Thursday, Pope Leo XIV met with David Axelrod (above), the architect of Barack Obama’s rise to power

Axelrod with Barack Obama in 2009; he is considered one of the most seasoned operators in the Democratic Party

To mistake this for humility requires a willful generosity of interpretation. The more accurate reading is of a man, like Leo, who long ago chose accommodation over conviction and has since devoted considerable effort to presenting that choice as a form of wisdom.

The Pope’s actual job—the irreplaceable, specific, urgent job for which he was selected—is to proclaim the uniqueness of Christ. The incarnation, the resurrection, the insistence that God entered history at a fixed point and in a human form and that this singularity is the hinge on which all human existence turns. 

Either it is the most consequential fact in the history of the world, or it is nothing. And if it is true, as I believe it to be, then no amount of interfaith warmth can dissolve this truth without dissolving the faith along with it.

The principle, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, is one of Christianity’s great gifts to civilization. Yet it is here that the Pope has been the most misguided.

Pope Leo’s first major conflict with the Trump administration was over immigration enforcement, condemning policies on which that administration was explicitly, democratically elected. 

Ironically, immigration is also the most powerful strategic weapon in the arsenal of those who seek to advance Islamic civilization over the West. This is not my analysis alone. It is the explicit teaching of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Islamist theologian of the modern era, a man who commanded the attention of millions. 

He told his followers not to waste their time with bombs. Conquer Europe through immigration, he said. Through settlement. Through the wombs of Muslim women.

As I write this, Leo is in Algeria, bowing at the Great Mosque of Algiers, shoes removed, pen in hand at the Golden Book

This is a doctrine of demographic conquest, openly articulated and it is working. In response, Western populations have now, in cycle after cycle of elections across Europe and America, voted for restrictive immigration policies. 

Pope Leo has responded to none of it with theological seriousness. Not a word about Qaradawi’s doctrine. Not a word about the theological premises driving this migration strategy. Just the language of humanitarianism, deployed with exquisite timing against the one government in the Western world currently attempting to respond to what its voters demanded. 

If that were the full extent of it, the damage might be contained. It is not.

Now, as the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that recently massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens, races toward a nuclear weapon, Leo’s answer is to lend his moral authority to the opposition. He has provided effective cover for a theocratic regime under which one of the world’s largest underground Christian churches has grown. After all, this is a regime that murders people for converting. 

Those Iranian Christians, worshipping in secret at mortal risk, deserve a Pope who will name their oppressor. They have received instead a Pope who extends gestures of solidarity to the civilization that persecutes them.

Moral leadership — the articulation of what is worth defending, why the foundations of Western civilizations matter, why the Church produced universities and hospitals, and the concept of individual conscience — that is the Pope’s domain. That work is not being done.

When Hamas butchered 1,200 Israelis on October 7th, the condemnation of Israel came readily from the Vatican, under Pope Francis, while the slaughter and kidnappings passed without an explicit condemnation of Hamas itself

Immigration is the most powerful strategic weapon in the arsenal of those who seek to advance Islamic civilization over the West. This is not my analysis alone. It is the explicit teaching of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Islamist theologian of the modern era

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Founder of AHA Foundation and Contributor to the Restoring the West Substack

Scripture itself named this failure long before Leo arrived to repeat it. The men who made this papacy bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the Pharisees of Christ’s own time — guardians so consumed by the maintenance of institutional power that the faith has become incidental.

The appropriate response to this kind of corruption was demonstrated once, in that most sacred of spaces, leaving no room for ambiguity. When Christ found the temple occupied by men who had remade it in their own image, he didn’t seek common ground with them. 

Instead, he drove them out. 

That same refusal to mistake the vessel for what it carries, that same willingness to act on what the faith actually demands, is what ordinary Catholics, and all those who understand what is at stake in the Church’s decline, must now find the courage to insist upon.

None of this forecloses the possibility of coexistence. The world’s civilizations must find ways of living alongside one another and that work is certainly worth doing. But coexistence built on erasure rather than honest reckoning has never outlasted the differences it refused to name.

The clash of civilizations observes no Vatican calendar. It proceeds on its own terms, indifferent to ill-advised pronouncements and diplomatic communiqués and it will reach its conclusion with or without the Church’s participation. 

The only question history will ask is whether the shepherds were tending their flock or signing guest books in foreign mosques when the hour finally came.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Founder of AHA Foundation and Contributor to the Restoring the West Substack.