The President of the United States posts a painting of himself as Jesus Christ. Glowing hands, a sick body under his palms, eagles and flags stapled to the background. He made it with an AI, then deleted it, then told a reporter it was never Jesus at all: it was him as a doctor. Something to do with the Red Cross.
The painting is not the point. The point is why he keeps reaching for the halo. The reason, in my view, is that somebody else is already wearing one: a man from Chicago, in Rome. And the two of them are now fighting the strangest turf war of the century. Not over land. Over sanctity. Over who gets to be the holy face on the screen when you unlock your phone.
The assembly kit
Trump has gathered most of the parts, in plain daylight.
An office: the first one dedicated entirely to faith, in the West Wing, reporting straight to him. A commission of hand-picked believers, whose chairman has called the separation of church and state one of the biggest lies ever told in America. A doctrine: their report proposes replacing that load-bearing wall with something warmer, called bridges.
Then the honours: a proposed Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty and First Freedom Hero awards. The relics: the AI paintings, resurrected each news cycle. Even a possible in-house rival, Louis Prevost, the pope's own brother, whom Trump has publicly described as close to the MAGA world.
"We saved religion," he told a conference in June. "It was going down." He said it the way a man announces he has refinanced a distressed asset.
Two Leos, one old diagnosis
Here history hands you a gift as per my research. In 1899 a pope named Leo, the thirteenth, wrote to the American bishops warning them of a sickness he called Americanism: the tendency to feel American first and Catholic second. They brushed it off as a phantom heresy.
One hundred and twenty-seven years later, another Pope Leo, the fourteenth, faces the same tension. American Catholics are five percent of a Church of one and a half billion people. A loud slice of that five percent seems convinced it is the whole thing. One magazine summed up the mood: Maga si, Magistra no. The mother, yes. The teacher, no thanks.
The schism they let you see
On the first of July, in a field in Ecône, Switzerland, the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X consecrated four bishops without the pope's permission. Under Church law that is the extreme option: automatic excommunication, a formal act of schism. Rome declared the society schismatic.
And it came with a full launch apparatus: a countdown clock on the website, Ecône 2026 caps, thousands of worshippers, a livestream in several languages. A schism with a launch event.
I will be careful here. The historical roots of that world include well-documented and much-debated episodes; as for the individual men consecrated this week, I make no accusations, because I do not have the evidence to.
But watch the choreography. A traditionalist schism erupts, with thousands of American chapels in play, just as an American president stands up a rival faith machine in his own capital. You do not need a conspiracy to notice that a supply and a demand have found each other. And to be clear: the idea that the two are connected is my own reading, not a proven fact.
The holy man knows the cameras too
Here you were hoping I would let you rest, with the good pope against the bad king. No.
On the Fourth of July, while America throws its birthday party, Leo will not be celebrating a country. He flies to Lampedusa, the little rock aside Sicily, where migrants wash up drowned. A split-screen. According to press reports, the contrast is deliberate.
The pope currently polls very high with Americans, while the president sits far lower. He too, then, knows what an image is worth. He is not above the theatre. He is simply winning it.
They are selling the same product, these two. Not left and right. Not good and evil. A story. One brands it with eagles, the other with drowned children, and both of them know exactly what the image is worth by Thursday.
The management
So no, America is not leaving the Church. That would take courage, and courage is expensive. It is doing the comfortable thing instead: building a spare. A parallel outfit with a friendlier interface. A pontiff who has already painted himself as Christ. A curia in the West Wing. A doctrine that fits on a bumper sticker.
The schism livestreamed from Switzerland, in this reading, is the decoy. It came with the clock and the cap so you would look at it and call it the crisis. The real break, I would argue, went through quietly, months ago, in a well-lit office with a reporting line to the President.
You were shown a schism with merchandise so you would not notice the one without any.
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