The American Catholic Vote Has Veered from the Church. Is the First American Pope Trying to Bring it Back?
Photo Credit: Edgar Beltrán, The Pillar
The Papacy is the most important position in the entire Catholic Church. The Pope represents more than a billion faithful Catholics to the world’s largest religions and most powerful nations, serving as a vital bridge between Catholicism and the powers that shape the world. His words can even be codified as infallible church doctrine that thousands of priests and bishops worldwide will use to shape their actions for centuries to come.
The newest man to hold the office, Pope Leo XIV, has received significant attention in national news. Given that he is the first pope to ever be born in the US, he has brought into focus the relationship of the Catholic Church to the United States in particular.
At a glance, it seems like he can speak to Catholics as both a divine authority and an American. With such a relatable and authoritative figure, it seems like American Catholics’ actions, beliefs, and votes should align with church doctrine more than ever.
The US Catholic Church, however, has a complicated political history, especially in recent years. Like the general American public, American Catholics are rapidly splitting along partisan lines, a divide which has slowly eroded the importance of actual church doctrine in their political views.
Pope Leo XIV’s predecessor, Pope Francis, tried laboriously to reassert the importance of doctrine to Catholics during US political events, to no avail. And despite being the first American to assume the papacy and a spiritual successor to Francis, it seems like Pope Leo XIV will be just as powerless in stopping the tide of American partisanship crashing over Catholicism.
Brief History of the American Catholic Vote
Since the mid-1800s, when Catholics began to enter the US in droves, they have formed an incredibly important voting bloc, and often formed reliable, key components of Democrat political machines. However, since 1960, there have been sixteen Presidential elections, and Democrats and Republicans have both won the Catholic vote eight times.
As such, modern Catholics are swing voters, and since Catholics number 53 million and comprise 25% of the US voting age population, this makes them a massive target for Presidential candidates.
The results of this shift are undeniable and extremely consequential for American politics and the future of the Pope’s ability to influence them.
Why and How Catholic Politics Have Changed
Since 1960, American Catholics have become significantly more diverse. In 1991, Catholics were 87% white, and in only 35 years that has dropped to 54% due to increased migration from various nations. Additionally, church attendance, which dramatically influences how much church teaching influences beliefs, has fallen precipitously, with weekly attendance dropping from 70% in 1960 to 23% today. This has substantially and swiftly increased cultural, linguistic, and ideological variation within the church, leading to rapid political change.
Increasing diversity and declining religious commitment have created a Catholic population that votes largely based on personal and political preference. This trend is so distinct that for nearly all major political issues, Catholics have nearly identically polarized views to the broader American public. The Church strongly opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, yet a similar majority of Americans and Catholics support them.The church is also strongly in favor of climate action, yet only 57% of Catholics believe it’s a serious issue, an identical proportion to the American public.
Pope Francis’s Attempts to Reinforce Church Doctrine
This shift away from church teaching in tens of millions of Catholics did not go unnoticed by the Vatican, so Pope Francis spent nearly a decade trying to reverse this trend. However, beginning in 2012 and persisting through his entire pontificate, Catholics remained extremely split and harshly divided, similar to the trend of overall American polarization.
In a 2015 address to Congress, Pope Francis decried federal immigration/refugee restrictions, and in 2016 he called Trump’s plan for the border wall “not Christian.” Despite Francis’s criticisms, Republicans who overwhelmingly supported these initiatives, narrowly won the Catholic vote in the 2016 Presidential election (52-45 margin) and split it in half during the 2018 midterms (49% Republican, 50% Democrat).
In 2020, Francis renewed a deal with China involving the administration of Catholic churches against the explicit protests of the Trump administration, even refusing to meet with a representative in fear of endorsing his Presidency. Yet Trump evenly split the Catholic vote in 2020, and despite a massive push for global environmental cooperation in 2021, Republicans won it soundly in the 2022 midterms as well.
And, after winning Catholics in 2024 by a 54-44 margin, one of Pope Francis’s final acts was authoring a letter denouncing Trump’s mass deportation policies.
Then finally, in 2025, the beleaguered Pope passed away mere hours after meeting JD Vance in person.
Will Pope Leo XIV Take the American Church in a New Direction?
No matter how much Pope Francis spoke out, his words evaporated in the heat of American political polarization, and despite widespread approval among Catholics, he was ultimately powerless in quelling America’s political hatred.
Seeing the results of this tumultuous battle, the Vatican elected Pope Leo XIV (among numerous other reasons) to fight it in a different way.
The intended symbolism of his papacy is clear. He was born and raised in Chicago, and is the first pope to ever speak English with an American accent. His papal name is an homage to Pope Leo XIII, the first pope to heavily engage with the US, writing numerous letters praising and criticizing it to shift it towards the church.
His first speech as pope from the balcony of Christianity’s most sacred church was about dialogue and bridge building. He is meant to be a signal to American Catholics that, despite the literal and ideological ocean separating them and Rome, the Vatican has found a man who is dedicated to bridging the gap.
Pope Leo XIV has made it clear, however, that his bridges are for the world, and has made no effort to focus on the US specifically. In that same opening speech, he did not speak a word of English, and mentioned only one non-Italian place by name: Chiclayo, Peru, where he conducted the vast majority of his work as a Catholic.
In his first mass marking the start of his pontificate, his speech focused on global peace efforts, specifically in Myanmar, Gaza, and Ukraine. Dozens of world leaders were in attendance, including JD Vance, yet the pope chose to meet only with Zelenskey of Ukraine.
He has gone so far as to delete his old Twitter account, where he criticized JD Vance for misrepresenting Catholic theology to promote immigration restrictions.
It’s clear that while he is the first pope from the US, he is not an American pope. The rising tide of partisanship in the American church is something that, as a successor to Francis who has quoted him numerous times, Leo knows he is powerless to stop.
Rather than tying himself to a country and people that are seen as becoming increasingly erratic on the world stage, he has chosen to spread his efforts for peace and security equally worldwide.
Does this mean the Catholic church will abandon the US as a lost cause? Certainly not. It only means that, for the United States, the next papal conclave won’t be when Pope Leo XIV dies, but in 2028.