His Holiness Pope Leo XIV

I announce to you a great joy; we have a pope who scares the hell out of the MAGA movement!

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost is now His Holiness Pope Leo XIV.  And his elevation to the papacy is the Roman Catholic Church's way of challenging Donald Trump and the more reactionary elements of the American Church - perhaps the most socially conservative national Church within Catholicism - with a new Holy Father who will remain faithful to Pope Francis' mission for the Church to be more welcoming to the ostracized and shunned elements of society, more committed to preserving the environment and saving the planet, and providing charity and comfort to migrants.  Pope Leo is for all of these objectives; MAGA is for crushing them.  Leo also took his name in honor of the previous pope of that name - Leo XIII (1878-1903), the former Gioacchino Pecci, who in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum argued for social justice for industrial workers, the right of workers to organize, and the right to a living wage. 

And MAGA is really pissed off about that! 

Furthermore, Leo is an American, and he is likely to preach his message of fairness and charity directly to American Catholics and sympathetic non-believers, which is an obvious threat to the American reactionary power structure created by Trump and his confederates.  Leo is in a position to stoke the flames of resistance to MAGA, and he is likely to foster a new covenant between American Catholics and migrants from Latin America, rooted in what he learned from parishioners of his ministries in Peru. 

Leo's election is an acknowledgment that the United States is no longer so powerful that the world would fear an American heading a Church of 1.4 billion followers.  It's a statement that the United States, long a colossus of unilateralism and unfettered strength, is merely a paper tiger that must be humbled by one of its fellow countrymen.  Leo, as the priest-king of Vatican City, is yet another world leader who has been chosen to oppose Donald Trump in the aftermath of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's election and the return of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to office.

Leo is likely to use his position to urge American Catholics to continue to resist Trump and the MAGA movement without violence, and he could purge the more conservative elements of the American clergy.  The Church is now an instrument to pull at the thread of MAGA and have the whole enterprise unravel.  The last pope to have such an impact on a similar threat to world peace, John Paul II, was able to encourage his homeland of Poland and other Catholic populations in eastern Europe to stand for their faith and their rights in resisting communism; the resistance he fostered ended up bringing down the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics without a shot fired in anger.

All American Catholics with a conscience should renounce Trump and accept Leo XIV, the Holy Father, the sovereign of the Vatican papal state, as their one and only leader.  There are only two followers they can choose from.  One is the Holy Father, the representative and voice of God on Earth, and he points the way to a fair and just life in the light of goodness; the other, as described in 2 Thessalonians, is the lawless one, "the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God."

Donald Trump is not my President, and he never will be.  My leader is the Holy Father, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV.

And once Trump put out an AI picture of himself as the pope, it only makes sense that the Vatican would deliver swift and severe punishment.