Iwish we would stop calling Leo XIV the “American pope.”

Don’t put that on him.

The chauvinism seems so wrong — people shouting “USA, USA” in St. Peter’s Square.

And he is at least as Latin American as American, and more fundamentally Augustinian. He’s a synthesis, not a bumper sticker.

It sometimes seems to me that everything in our common culture and times is about dividing — taking sides; picking tribes.

Even faith.

Popes are supposed to be figures of unity: “So that they all may be one.”

But we are prone to division, not multiplication.

“Twas ever thus,” you might rightly say.

But American Catholics, these days, trivialize their own faith by taking sides, when we don’t have to do that.

We pick our favorite popes, based on Catholic “left” and “right”: JP II good; Benedict good

See Full Page