PRINCETON—An apocryphal anecdote from the 1945 Potsdam Conference has it that Josef Stalin asked Winston Churchill, “How many divisions has the pope?” Pope Pius XII supposedly retorted: “My son Joseph will find out when he tries to go to heaven.”
After being largely forgotten, this story resurfaced in the 1980s, when a Polish-born pope, John Paul II, emerged as one of the most significant threats to the ideology that underpinned the Soviet Union and its satellite empire in Central and Eastern Europe. A regime that called itself a “people’s democracy” was nothing of the kind, and when millions turned out for the pope’s visits to communist-ruled Poland, it looked like a refutation of the Kremlin’s big lie.
Rumors then spread that the Soviet secret services were behind a 1981 assassination attempt that targeted the pope in St. Peter’s Square. By the end of the decade, the satellite empire had disintegrated, followed two years later by the Soviet Union itself. The USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, could not reform fast enough.
Although the challenges facing today’s United States are quite different, there are striking parallels, not least the need for radical reforms or a fundamental reconsideration of the country’s political direction.
After all, the current US leadership is clearly lost when it comes to international affairs. In February 2025, President Donald Trump used an Oval Office meeting to berate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, taunting him with the claim that he did not have the cards to beat Russia. Yet exactly one year later, the US started a war with Iran that it could not finish, and Ukraine is the one holding the cards America needs—namely, a deep knowledge of drone technologies and counter-drone tactics.
Like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the US fears that it is being overtaken economically and technologically. Trump speaks constantly of decline and domestic “carnage,” and he likes to quote Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “famous line” that the US had been a “dead country” before he was in the White House. Trump’s MAGA movement promises a national revival, but his administration has been repeatedly reminded how much the US economy depends on Chinese supplies.
Then there is the spiritual crisis. In the Soviet Union, this manifested as spiritual emptiness—the gap that John Paul II’s message could fill—whereas America has plenty of “religion,” but of a kind that has been harnessed to aggressive nationalism. The seeds have been sown for an epic conflict between a universal religion and an aggressively assertive state. Pope Leo XIV’s predecessor, Pope Francis, used his last Easter message to warn against ethnic nationalism, and the same message still resounds clearly from the Vatican in 2026.
Recall this year’s Easter Sunday, when Trump demanded that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz, “or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” He then doubled down by threatening that: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” One week later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself made to look like Jesus, standing in front of military scenes and a strange, horned demon. He later claimed that he thought the image depicted him as a physician, then shared another image of himself being embraced by Jesus.
The ensuing social-media storm was as predictable as it was inevitable. Like John Paul II, Pope Leo avoided any direct denunciations, while leaving little doubt about where he stood: “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” In response to this clear papal condemnation of the Trump administration’s appalling threats, Vice President JD Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, urged Leo to “be careful” when discussing matters of theology.
Of course, Christian nationalism—praying for one’s own side in a “just war,” or thinking that one’s people are God’s people—was very common over long stretches of history. It has always relied on a mistaken view of international conflict as a “clash of civilizations,” and Trump has simply offered an extreme caricature of this framing.
But that does not change the fact that his administration is fundamentally at odds with Christian teaching. When Leo weighed in, he was expressing an ethically grounded version of globalism distinct from the amoral framing that most modern advocates of globalism offer. His vision goes back at least to 1945—the moment of Stalin’s alleged cynical remark about religious power. And just as his Polish predecessor critiqued Communism’s spiritual emptiness, Leo felt a duty to critique Christian nationalism’s glorification of violence and war.
In January 2004, following the US-led invasion of Iraq, John Paul II stressed that peace was not only possible but necessary to uphold the fundamental Christian obligation to fellow humans. Though he was not advocating pacifism, he did ask us to work toward a world ordered by multilateral institutions, where force could be applied only with the sanction of international law. That was the goal in 1945, when humanity embarked on a “profound renewal of the international legal order.”
Is it providential that an Eastern European pope corrected an Eastern European abuse, and that an American pope is now calling out American abuse? For now, only God knows.
PRINCETON—An apocryphal anecdote from the 1945 Potsdam Conference has it that Josef Stalin asked Winston Churchill, “How many divisions has the pope?” Pope Pius XII supposedly retorted: “My son Joseph will find out when he tries to go to heaven.”
After being largely forgotten, this story resurfaced in the 1980s, when a Polish-born pope, John Paul II, emerged as one of the most significant threats to the ideology that underpinned the Soviet Union and its satellite empire in Central and Eastern Europe. A regime that called itself a “people’s democracy” was nothing of the kind, and when millions turned out for the pope’s visits to communist-ruled Poland, it looked like a refutation of the Kremlin’s big lie.
Rumors then spread that the Soviet secret services were behind a 1981 assassination attempt that targeted the pope in St. Peter’s Square. By the end of the decade, the satellite empire had disintegrated, followed two years later by the Soviet Union itself. The USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, could not reform fast enough.
Although the challenges facing today’s United States are quite different, there are striking parallels, not least the need for radical reforms or a fundamental reconsideration of the country’s political direction.
After all, the current US leadership is clearly lost when it comes to international affairs. In February 2025, President Donald Trump used an Oval Office meeting to berate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, taunting him with the claim that he did not have the cards to beat Russia. Yet exactly one year later, the US started a war with Iran that it could not finish, and Ukraine is the one holding the cards America needs—namely, a deep knowledge of drone technologies and counter-drone tactics.
Like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the US fears that it is being overtaken economically and technologically. Trump speaks constantly of decline and domestic “carnage,” and he likes to quote Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “famous line” that the US had been a “dead country” before he was in the White House. Trump’s MAGA movement promises a national revival, but his administration has been repeatedly reminded how much the US economy depends on Chinese supplies.
Then there is the spiritual crisis. In the Soviet Union, this manifested as spiritual emptiness—the gap that John Paul II’s message could fill—whereas America has plenty of “religion,” but of a kind that has been harnessed to aggressive nationalism. The seeds have been sown for an epic conflict between a universal religion and an aggressively assertive state. Pope Leo XIV’s predecessor, Pope Francis, used his last Easter message to warn against ethnic nationalism, and the same message still resounds clearly from the Vatican in 2026.
Recall this year’s Easter Sunday, when Trump demanded that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz, “or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” He then doubled down by threatening that: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” One week later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself made to look like Jesus, standing in front of military scenes and a strange, horned demon. He later claimed that he thought the image depicted him as a physician, then shared another image of himself being embraced by Jesus.
The ensuing social-media storm was as predictable as it was inevitable. Like John Paul II, Pope Leo avoided any direct denunciations, while leaving little doubt about where he stood: “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” In response to this clear papal condemnation of the Trump administration’s appalling threats, Vice President JD Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, urged Leo to “be careful” when discussing matters of theology.
Of course, Christian nationalism—praying for one’s own side in a “just war,” or thinking that one’s people are God’s people—was very common over long stretches of history. It has always relied on a mistaken view of international conflict as a “clash of civilizations,” and Trump has simply offered an extreme caricature of this framing.
But that does not change the fact that his administration is fundamentally at odds with Christian teaching. When Leo weighed in, he was expressing an ethically grounded version of globalism distinct from the amoral framing that most modern advocates of globalism offer. His vision goes back at least to 1945—the moment of Stalin’s alleged cynical remark about religious power. And just as his Polish predecessor critiqued Communism’s spiritual emptiness, Leo felt a duty to critique Christian nationalism’s glorification of violence and war.
In January 2004, following the US-led invasion of Iraq, John Paul II stressed that peace was not only possible but necessary to uphold the fundamental Christian obligation to fellow humans. Though he was not advocating pacifism, he did ask us to work toward a world ordered by multilateral institutions, where force could be applied only with the sanction of international law. That was the goal in 1945, when humanity embarked on a “profound renewal of the international legal order.”
Is it providential that an Eastern European pope corrected an Eastern European abuse, and that an American pope is now calling out American abuse? For now, only God knows.