The New Pope Is American. He’s One (Implausible) Choice From Proving Some Early-American Alarmists Correct.
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On July 30, 1788, during debate in the North Carolina ratifying convention over whether the state would sign on to the proposed federal Constitution, pro-Constitution delegate James Iredell rose to confront what he considered a risible objection to the document brought by some of his colleagues.
Iredell’s fellow delegate, one Henry Abbot, had observed that Article VI’s proscription of religious tests for office made some people uncomfortable: “They suppose that if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain offices among us, and that the senators and representatives might all be pagans.” When Iredell rose to put Abbot’s mind at ease, he referred to a pamphlet he said he had just come across that, to his mind, expressed such concerns in their fullest, truest, and most absurd version, a straw man he could easily, gleefully set on fire.
The pamphlet worried not just about “pagans, deists, and Mahometans,” but also that without religious tests for office the pope in Rome himself could be elected president of the United States. Iredell, a bit of a card, leaned into the absurdity of this worry, born of that era’s run-of-the-mill Protestant anti-popery, some opportunistic fearmongering, and, well, plain stupidity.
“I confess this never struck me before,” Iredell said. The proposed Constitution mandated native-born citizenship and 14 years of residency for presidential eligibility. Iredell was pretty sure that this, among other things, would keep popes out of the running.
“I know not all the qualifications for pope, but I believe he must be taken from the college of cardinals; and probably there are many previous steps necessary before he arrives at this dignity,” Iredell pointed out, rightly. “A native of America must have very singular good fortune, who, after residing fourteen years in his own country, should go to Europe, enter into Romish orders, obtain the promotion of cardinal, afterwards that of pope, and at length be so much in the confidence of his own country as to be elected President.” Beyond that, he went on, in the late 18th century being president of the United States would be a significant step down from being pope. An American so intrepid as to make himself eligible for both offices would be unlikely to “give up his popedom for our presidency.” Iredell was unstinting in his mockery of such fearmongering: “Sir, it is impossible to treat such idle fears with any degree of gravity.”
At issue in this flashpoint of the debate over the Constitution was the specter of absolute, despotic authority, which American Protestants associated with the papacy, owing to views of Catholicism inherited from the Reformation. We can observe this as the bigotry it was while still taking the point: Americans, having thrown off the yoke of the British crown, should be, as Abbot put it, “suspicious of our liberties,” on the watch for any possibility that we might set ourselves up for a new despotism despite our best intentions.
As of Thursday, for the first time in the nation’s history, the bonkers worry that there might be a pope-president is, technically, a live possibility: Pope Leo XIV, a native-born American citizen of the correct age and more than 14 years’ residency, really could—if he ever wanted to give up or split time with his “popedom”—run for president of the United States.
That fear, of course, is no more going to be realized than it was in Iredell’s day. Much scarier is our actual president’s own mocking suggestion, the week before an American was named pope, that he would really like to be pope himself. While some during the American founding era may have actually worried about a pope wanting to be president, no one in those debates over the Constitution ever wondered if a president would want to be pope. That is, no one imagined that an elected scion of the new republican thing we sought to create with the Constitution would joke about wanting an earlier, older, more absolute form of authority. Donald Trump’s musing turns Iredell’s mockery on its head: How could someone who has successfully convinced the free people of the United States to elect him their president ever associate himself with what 18th-century Protestants saw as the despotism of papal rule?
Trump was trolling us, of course, the troll post being his default and favorite genre. He has already called himself a king and will persist in taunting us about his desire for a third term as president, in direct violation of the Constitution, right up until he actually tries to run for one (or just declares that he has one, by fiat). He is mocking our sense that he wants the absolute power of a monarch by professing his desire to have the absolute power of a monarch. Iredell knew there is no response to such mockery but more mockery.
To be sure, there are aspects of Iredell’s conception of religious freedom that today we find blinkered. Open-minded as he was in matters of religion, like most decision-makers of his era, he assumed that any good person fit for office would necessarily believe in a single supreme being and a future state of rewards and punishments. He was also an enslaver, blind, as so many others, to his own hypocrisies. But his instincts regarding religious freedom were the ones that we should revere today, and his mocking attitude toward bald stupidity is instructive and prescient. Religious tests, Iredell knew, had never done anything to keep the opportunistic out of office. “It never was known that a man who had no principles of religion hesitated to perform any rite when it was convenient for his private interest. No test can bind such a one.”
The president—an opportunistic person with “no principles of religion” if there ever was one—has called Leo’s election “a Great Honor for our Country,” characteristically missing the point while giving himself (since he is the country, to his mind) credit for something he had nothing to do with. “I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV,” Trump wrote. “It will be a very meaningful moment!” Obviously, he meant that it will be meaningful for Pope Leo to meet him. Nevertheless, such a meeting will be meaningful: an American president shaking hands with an American pope, two bearers of globe-altering power, their origins separated only by the distance from New York to Chicago. Trump obviously doesn’t realize that Leo will be the first-ever pope technically eligible to run for the American presidency, as those North Carolinian delegates feared so long ago, or else he would already be responding to the threat to his own power.
As Iredell knew, accepting the possibility of error is part of the wager of freedom. Our democracy under the Constitution opens a free people to the possibility of mistakes that, in our collective freedom, we will all have to live with. The Framers could not, would not, guard against all possible electoral errors. “It is impracticable to guard against all possible danger of people’s choosing their officers indiscreetly,” Iredell told the North Carolina convention in 1788. “If they have a right to choose, they may make a bad choice.” Error might be the cost of freedom, but freedom is also the only option for correcting error.
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