President-elect Donald Trump and Pope Francis are leaders with such vastly different agendas and perspectives that it’s tempting to imagine the two men right now being involved in a high-stakes game of chess, as both prepare for “The Donald” to take the oath of office a second time.
Trump opened the chess game on 20 December by moving his knight – naming Brian Burch his new ambassador to the Holy See. Burch is a veteran political operative and cultural warrior whose advocacy group, CatholicVote, is credited with helping Trump reconquer a majority of Catholics in 2024 after splitting them roughly down the middle with Joe Biden in 2020.
A frequent media commentator, Burch has made no secret of his disagreements with the Francis papacy.
In a post on X last November, Burch asserted that Pope Francis’s treatment of his critics vindicates those who dismiss his rhetoric on synodality as “merely a ruse”. In late 2023, Burch gave an interview to the conservative outlet Newsmax in which he asserted that Fiducia Supplicans, a Vatican document authorising priests to bless people involved in same-sex unions, had created “massive confusion” about Catholic teaching on marriage.
In an interview with the New York Times in October 2024, Burch was equally explicit.
“The pattern of vindictiveness and punishment seems to fly in the face of what [Pope Francis] says about being an instrument of mercy and accompaniment,” he said. He also said Francis’s 2015 comment that Catholics need not “breed like rabbits” had offended traditionally minded believers.
The bottom line is that it seems Trump wanted to dispatch an envoy to Rome who, to use the American argot, will “give as good as he gets”.
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