A key part to the end of communism in Eastern Europe was the late Polish Pope John Paul II’s decisive moral and spiritual role in a peaceful collapse. Pope Leo has now taken up that anti-authoritarian banner and is happy to bring it to MAGA.
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Christopher Hale, who writes a Substack on Pope Leo, argued in his latest column that Pope John Paul II’s resistance to authoritarianism connects with Pope Leo XIV’s defense of immigrants and refusal to bend to President Donald Trump.
The message began when John Paul’s delivered his inaugural message in October 1978, telling those in St. Peter’s Square, “Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic and political systems.”
Top communist leaders knew exactly what he meant, Hale said.
It was less than a year later that John Paul knelt and kissed the tarmac at Warsaw’s airport, Hale recalled. “That afternoon he celebrated Mass in Victory Square, a plaza the communists had renamed, before hundreds of thousands of Poles.” A little over a year later, the Berlin Wall came down.
Pope Leo has taken up that same mantle and instead of confronting communism, he took on “the danger to human dignity wears a red hat and speaks the language of the right. Just as God raised up John Paul II behind the Iron Curtain to stand up to communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas, from inside the walls of MAGA authoritarianism, to stand up to it,” said Hale.
In his first year in office, Leo, the first American pope, is using his position to urge Americans to uphold the value of loving their neighbor.
In a June letter, Leo said defending life includes “welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants.” The writer contrasts that language with Trump’s warning about a communist threat involving newcomers. The pope who opposed communism also welcomed immigrants, wrote Hale, while Trump invokes communism to cast suspicion on them.
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Meanwhile, the Trump administration is sounding the alarm that the communists are coming. The 21st century’s “red scare” has been a huge part of Trump’s 2026 election message. During his speech at Mount Rushmore, Trump claimed there is “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country.”
Hale pointed out how uniquely inverted that statement is from the pope’s.
While the president desperately wanted Pope Leo to attend some of the America 250 events, His Holiness spent the day with the migrants of Lampedusa, a small island off the coast of Sicily. They have been experiencing an influx of migrants fleeing poverty, war and persecution.
Leo recalled the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan: “before any intellectual consideration or ideological conviction, the encounter with those who lie before us, stripped of everything, calls us to be close to them.”
Back home, the Pentagon brought in Cardinal Christophe Pierre to lecture on the pope’s language, which some saw as anti-Trump. Leo hasn’t been deterred, much less intimidated.
Leo has refused to trade moral independence for whatever political access he’s been promised.
Hale closed his column by concluding that Catholics should recognize that resistance to MAGA authoritarianism is also a defense of human dignity, and far from a departure from their faith. While Pope John Paul II offered encouragement, Pope Leo XIV is speaking plainly to power while reminding Americans that welcoming the vulnerable is a responsibility, not a weakness.
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