CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Pope They Didn’t Want You to Notice: Race, Moral Authority, and the Audacity of JD Vance

Photograph Source: JD Vance – Public Domain

On April 14, 2026, Vice President JD Vance stood before a half-empty arena at the University of Georgia, courtesy of Turning Point USA, and decided to lecture the Pope about Augustine. Specifically, Vance — who has publicly named St. Augustine as his patron saint, the intellectual godfather of his Catholic conversion — invoked the great North African bishop to push back against Pope Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday declaration that God turns away from the prayers of those who make war. The Pope, Vance said, was oversimplifying. There was, after all, “more than a 1,000-year tradition of just war theory” to consider.

What Vance apparently had neglected to check — or had checked and dismissed — was that at the very moment he was delivering this theological correction, Pope Leo XIV was standing in Annaba, Algeria — the city the Romans called Hippo Regius — at the tomb of St. Augustine himself. The Pope had traveled there to pay homage to the man who did more than anyone to shape Catholic moral theology, including the just war doctrine Vance was now wielding against him. Vance used Augustine to rebuke a pope who was, at that precise hour, kneeling before Augustine’s bones.

Call it farce — the genre where people talk loudly and confidently about things they are simultaneously, visibly getting wrong. Irony at least carries an element of surprise. This was something more brazen: a man invoking his patron saint against the very person who had just gone to pray at that saint’s grave.

The farce runs deeper than one embarrassing afternoon in Georgia, though. To understand why, you have to go back further than Vance, further than Leo, further even than the Church’s long entanglement with the politics of empire. You have to go back to a single drop of blood, and what it has meant on this continent for four hundred years.

One Drop and the Throne of Peter

America built a legal and literary tradition, particularly in the South, around a concept so brutal in its simplicity that it found no real equivalent in other societies: the one-drop rule. One drop of African blood — one ancestor, one grandparent, one great-grandparent removed from the plantation — and you were Black. Fully, legally, consequentially Black, with all the social and mortal weight that word carried.

Kate Chopin understood this. Her Louisiana stories — Désirée’s Baby most famously — turn precisely on the moment that drop surfaces: when the hidden inheritance announces itself in a child’s skin, in a feature, in a particular shade of afternoon light. The revelation destroys families. It ends marriages. It ends lives. The drop was a sentence, handed down without trial.

Pope Leo XIV — born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, of Creole descent, with roots in New Orleans and the Caribbean — stands, by that same American logic, as a Black man. His lineage runs through the African diaspora, through the mixing and the migration and the survival that produced the Creole culture of Louisiana and the islands. His great-grandparents were listed as “colored” on census records. The one-drop rule, that instrument American society used for centuries to strip people of their humanity, their property, their freedom, and their lives, applies here without ambiguity.

When Leo XIV was elected in May 2025 — the first American-born pope in the history of the Catholic Church — the mainstream coverage was careful, almost clinical, in its management of this fact. There were references to his “multicultural background.” His “diverse heritage.” His years serving in Peru. The word that would have appeared in a census record a century ago, the word that would have determined where he sat on a bus, whether he could vote, whether his marriage was recognized by law — that word stayed largely off the page. The institution that elected him, and the media that covered the election, achieved something remarkable: they made history while carefully appearing to overlook the history being made.

The silence is the story.

The Conclave and the Coincidence

In 2024, Edward Berger’s film Conclave arrived in cinemas and proceeded, somewhat improbably, to become an awards-season phenomenon, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film follows the secret election of a new pope — the maneuvering of cardinals, the buried secrets and doctrinal anxieties of an institution choosing its next vessel of God’s authority on earth. The pope ultimately elected is the dark horse, the outsider, the one who had been quietly serving in Afghanistan while the others accumulated Vatican real estate and influence. He carries a secret: he was born intersex. The distinction from transgender matters here, because an intersex body refuses the binary categories the Church has spent centuries enforcing — from within, by biology, without choice or agenda.

The institution elected him anyway. Without knowing. The Church keeps accidentally choosing the people its official doctrine was designed to exclude.

The film was still in theaters when the real conclave of 2025 produced Leo XIV. Life, apparently, had been watching the screener.

The parallel is instructive rather than exact. In Conclave, the institution’s discomfort with its own choice is palpable — the film ends on a held breath, a........

© CounterPunch