Originally published in Religión Digital, November 7, 2025
Translated and edited for Where Peter Is, with permission from Religión Digital
[Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a six-part investigative series originally published by Religión Digital on November 7, 2025, and presented here in English translation with permission. The series explores the rise of the global Catholic far right, tracing its ideological and financial roots to movements within the United States and examining how these networks intersect with political and ecclesial power centers around the world.
This opening piece situates the papacy of Pope Leo XIV within the broader context of today’s “culture war,” showing how conservative American Catholic organizations, think tanks, and donors have shaped global narratives about faith, politics, and authority. Where Peter Is offers this translation to make the series accessible to English-speaking readers as part of our ongoing effort to document the worldwide dynamics influencing Catholic life and leadership. —ML]
Mapping a Movement
We begin a series of articles aimed at mapping and identifying the “who’s who” within the web of hidden interests and pressure groups — political as well as ecclesial — that make up today’s global Catholic far right.
This growing phenomenon has deep roots in the polarized religious landscape of the United States. We will examine its interaction with the Pope and its connections in Spain and within the Roman Curia.
The Vatican in Trump’s Culture War
Although integralist Catholic groups, radical evangelicals, and fanatical Orthodox Christians remain small minorities, they have learned to use new technologies with striking coordination and abundant financial means. Under the banner of faith and tradition, they conduct a relentless campaign of manipulation and permanent social conflict.
They have grown comfortable in the post-truth era — privileging emotion and personal conviction over objective fact. All repeat, like a mantra, conspiracy claims about George Soros and the “global agenda” of the World Economic Forum. They present themselves as the “true believers,” while undermining others through insinuation, spreading insecurity and visceral fear.
This twenty-first-century inquisition, disguised as a defense of “dogma and Catholic tradition,” conceals a no less disturbing global agenda — to advance in the West the authoritarian project embodied by Donald Trump.
Trump’s second term — following the climax of his first with the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — has made the “culture war” the catalyst for the old American republic’s transformation into the empire he seeks to personify and perpetuate. The MAGA movement, beyond its slogan, aims to redefine Western values and identity, transforming social life into a form of technocratic vassalage — a new world political order.
In his dealings with the other great rising empire, China, Trump has wielded the constant threat of arbitrary tariffs, the weaponization of strategic alliances, and the cynical use of regional conflicts to secure access to resources — especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Ukraine — while subjecting Europe to diplomatic humiliation. His constant belligerence could almost, some joke, earn him the Nobel Peace Prize for provocation.
Yet a growing share of American public opinion — guided by common sense and economic realism — favors a path of peaceful coexistence with the “Middle Kingdom.” Many recognize that a measure of cultural symbiosis between empires is inevitable.
If Nvidia depends on Chinese developers, many Western economic circles are now intrigued by the way technocapitalism fuses marketization and authoritarianism — as analyzed by scholar Ya-Wen Lei. Massive technological surveillance and social-credit systems invade privacy and restrict individual freedoms, but such opaque and undemocratic methods are also gaining traction among elites in Washington and Brussels, where bureaucrats contemplate the digital euro and Chat Control 2.0.
Amid so much populist theater, many voices call for moderation, dialogue, and realism — not only in Europe. The Rand Corporation and other U.S. think tanks, for instance, advise the Pentagon to stabilize its rivalry with China and abandon once and for all the logic of total victory over Beijing.
The emperor, however, is naked. His real struggle is not political — his buffoonish posturing has grown dull and predictable — but ideological. Alongside his rival and sometime admirer Xi Jinping, the White House has discovered the advantages of social control.
Thus his true battle is ideological — and the liberal Catholic Church, especially Pope Leo XIV, himself a North American, has become a primary target. They know that authentic Catholicism will never compromise with the manipulation of conscience or the distortion of truth.
The Plot Against Prevost
On May 3, 2025 — two weeks after the death of Pope Francis — the theatrical U.S. president offended Catholics worldwide by posting a photo of himself dressed as the Pope on X, a clumsy bid for attention to events in Rome. At the same time, the Spanish website Infovaticana, aligned with far-right Catholic ideology, managed to infiltrate the General Congregations and continue its smear campaign against Cardinal Robert F. Prevost, then Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 3, 2025
These two unprecedented intrusions violated the long-respected confidentiality of the Conclave.
As El País revealed on June 11, 2025, the journalists who harassed Prevost outside the Aula Nervi were acting directly on behalf of the leaders of the now-defunct Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. Indirectly, however, their campaign aligned with the worldwide network promoting an increasingly aggressive far-right agenda.
“It is outrageous,” said one cardinal who followed the events closely, “how near a few unscrupulous people came to depriving 1.4 billion Catholics of the great spiritual leader who is Leo XIV. I mean those of the Sodalitium and certain Spanish ultraconservative journalists. Even more scandalous is the childish and malicious nature of this disinformation campaign. Some of us cardinals have taken careful note and have asked the Pope to investigate what occurred in those days within the Vatican.”
As that elderly prelate observed, the failed attempt to mislead Catholic public opinion — and above all to manipulate the 133 cardinals who soon after would elect Leo XIV by an overwhelming margin — was, at its core, an act of revenge against the then Prefect of Bishops. In April 2024, Prevost had requested the resignation of Peruvian Archbishop José Antonio Eguren Anselmi, a member of the Sodalitium, citing serious concerns about his leadership.
The Sodalitium Connection
La República, the recent biographical interview of the Pope by Elise Allen, and especially El País, have documented that the attack on Cardinal Prevost was directly financed by Sodalitium leaders. In addition to enlisting sympathetic media outlets, they reportedly hired the legal services of Ricardo Coronado, a former Augustinian priest later accused by victims of sexual abuse in Chiclayo of exploiting them for his own ends.
The deeper sources of funding for these networks of ecclesial harassment are harder to trace. Sources close to the Spanish Bishops’ Conference point to possible ties with secret societies such as El Yunque, founded in Mexico but now active in Spain, which reportedly controls organizations like Hazte Oír, its international arm CitizenGo, and several far-right movements in Europe, Russia, and South America. Other investigators go further, identifying connections to ultraconservative circles in the United States.
The American Funding of the Ecclesial Far Right — The “FOB”
In the ongoing “culture war” against Western democratic rights and freedoms, liberal Catholicism — grounded in the robust theological vision of the Second Vatican Council — has become a formidable obstacle to the project of Donald Trump and his admirers.
This form of Catholicism is pro-life, but not narrowly so — it embraces concern for migrants and for those condemned to death. It defends non-negotiable principles, but without turning the Catechism into a weapon, listening instead to others, seeking to understand, and accompanying them in suffering. It values freedom of opinion and a critical spirit, but without rejecting magisterial documents such as Amoris Laetitia, Fiducia Supplicans, or Traditionis Custodes — each a breath of fresh theological air for a Church that must speak to modern society without falling into either relativism or fanaticism.
Vatican Media image
Hypocritically, U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance — a recent convert both to Catholicism and to Trumpism — lectures Europe for restricting free speech even as he promotes growing limits on rights at home. At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, he spoke of “the enemy within,” the supposed fifth column to be defeated. Beyond the exaggerations of “woke culture,” many fear that what truly disturbs Vance and his allies is the moderation long embodied in Europe by the Christian Democratic tradition.
For more than a century, the Centrist Democrat International — animated by Christian humanism and open to a broad, not exclusively religious or European electorate — has provided a genuine alternative to conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. On April 30, 2015, Pope Francis proposed two of its founders, Robert Schuman and Alcide De Gasperi, for canonization as “Catholics who practiced politics that was not dirty, but good.”
By contrast, a group of billionaires from the United States and the United Kingdom — champions of unregulated capitalism, promoters of Euroscepticism, and advocates of Trump-style populism — have spent decades working to erode the moral and democratic foundations of this “good, clean politics.” To achieve their ends, they have not hesitated to attack the Pope’s moral authority.
American theologian and digital commentator Dawn E. Goldstein has referred to this network as the “FOB” — Friends of Bannon and Busch. The origins of the FOB reach back to the pontificate of John Paul II. Key figures such as Tim Busch, Frank J. Hanna III, David Hanna, and Tom Monaghan — known for funding the Legionaries of Christ before the fall of its founder Marcial Maciel in 2009 — helped build a system aimed at a far broader, global agenda.
Before Pope Francis’s election, their main institutional bases included First Things, the Acton Institute, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The FOB set out to reshape post-conciliar Catholicism by orchestrating a coordinated financial, media, and political operation — a twenty-first-century crusade intended to steer the Church’s public voice toward a nationalist, market-driven ideology. Today, their organizations remain well funded and actively cultivate distrust of the Pope on social, economic, and political questions.
From Francis to Leo XIV
First they fought Francis. Now they fight Leo XIV — a Pope born in Chicago who, from the outset of his pontificate, has made clear his ideological distance from Trump and his aggressive brand of domestic and foreign policy. Trump’s destruction of the foundations of multilateral diplomacy has alarmed the Vatican Secretariat of State, while his demonization of broad sectors of society — especially Latino immigrants, most of them Catholic — has deeply troubled the U.S. episcopate.
For these reasons, future installments of this series will explore in greater depth the world of ultra-conservative American Catholicism. With a North American now seated on the Chair of Peter, understanding this movement has never been more urgent.
To be continued…
Featured image: “St Peter’s Square” (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by iorit_
José Manuel Vidal (born 1952 in Sobrado del Obispo) holds degrees in Theology and Sociology and a doctorate in Information Sciences. He is the director of Religión Digital and the religious correspondent for the newspaper El Mundo. He is the author of various works on religious themes and contributes to numerous national and international publications.
Dawn Eden Goldstein, JCL, STD, wrote on Pope Francis's spirituality for healing of trauma in Remembering God's Mercy. Her latest book is The Sacred Heart: A Love for All Times. Follow her on BlueSky @dawnofmercy.
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