Pope Francis’ pontificate was a hostile one for conservative Catholic Americans who found themselves at odds with some of his teachings and with the man himself, compounded by the Vatican’s financial mismanagement and scandals which made US donors wary.
“It is an honor for me if Americans attack me,” Pope Francis said on a plane trip back from Africa in 2019.
Massimo Franco recounts that on the heels of that comment, an important Vatican official in the Secretariat of State said to him:
“I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that at the next Conclave, the US episcopate asks an impoverished and divided Vatican to elect a Pope who is less hostile to America. And that they use their financial weight as incentive.”
That official was Msgr. Antonio Mennini, a long-time Vatican diplomat and former nuncio in Moscow and London.
Massimo Franco says Mennini’s “prophecy” came back to him six years later upon the election of Leo XIV and so he set out to see if it might be true.
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