You can take the boy out of the Catholic Church but you can’t take the Catholic Church out of the boy.

I was raised as a Catholic and went to parochial elementary and high schools. Some of my high school classmates, including my best friend, went to Villanova University, the alma mater of the newly elected Pope Leo XIV. But I then attended Syracuse University, an institution founded by Methodists and became distant from my church.

I am now heartened that the new pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, has followed the lead of his predecessor, Pope Francis, and taken progressive positions on economic justice and immigration fairness. That’s more than I can say for President Trump.

Robert Francis Prevost was elected pope by the College of Cardinals last week. He is an American who served as a missionary in Peru for two decades and was a member of the Vatican hierarchy and Pope Francis’ inner circle. He punched lots of tickets on his way up to the papacy much like Americans who get elected president.

I have practiced both, and there are many similarities between the Catholic Church and American politics.

America's equivalent to the College of Cardinals is the collection of the subcommittee chairs on the Appropriations Committee in the House of Representatives. They are literally referred to as "cardinals" on Capitol Hill because they are as powerful and mysterious as their counterparts in the Vatican.

Our cardinals are wrestling to make Trump’s draconian budget cuts for working families into law.

The workings of the Vatican's College of Cardinals are nearly as complex and confusing as the Electoral College that selects our president. Both institutions have excluded women from positions of power, now that the Vatican has broken with tradition and anointed an American with

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