The Weekend Review section leads this week with a cover-length historical essay by Matthew Avery Sutton — "Trump, The Pope and A New Holy War" — tracing 70 years of U.S.-Vatican strategic partnership and arguing that the current breakdown between the Trump administration and Pope Leo XIV is a genuine inflection point, not a passing spat. It is a serious piece and worth reading in full.
Peggy Noonan's Declarations column on the same subject (see our separate read) is the Washington view. Sutton's essay is the strategic one. The two pair usefully.
Sutton's Central Claim
Sutton argues that from Reagan and John Paul II in the 1980s through the Iraq War, U.S. presidents — regardless of party — treated the Vatican as a foreign-policy partner rather than a theological rival. Three shared objectives were the glue:
- Defending democracy. Reagan-John Paul II coordinated on Solidarity in Poland, undermining Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe, and human-rights advocacy at the UN.
- Championing human rights. Both Bush administrations, Clinton, Obama and Biden all looked to the Vatican as a moral voice on genocide, religious freedom, and refugee policy.
- Seeking world peace. The Vatican's ethical framework on "just war" shaped (or at least shadowed) U.S. decision-making from the Balkans through Iraq.
Sutton says that under Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope in history — this partnership has cracked. Leo has publicly called Trump's Iran campaign rhetoric "unacceptable," warned against "the delusion of omnipotence," and criticized administration language on immigrants and refugees. Trump has responded by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Christ, accusing the pope of being "WEAK on Crime and terrible on foreign policy," and, according to Sutton, recasting the Vatican "as an adversary rather than an ally" in ways no U.S. president has done in a century.
Why This Is In The Portfolio Newsletter
Our client book is roughly 53% Christian (with a meaningful Catholic subset), 22% Muslim, 8% Jewish, 17% other or unaffiliated. Religion itself is not a portfolio topic. But three things here are:
- U.S.-Europe coordination risk. The Vatican has historically been a low-friction diplomatic channel between the U.S. and European powers on security matters. If that channel is damaged, the second-order costs show up in NATO cohesion and — on the margin — in European defense spending acceleration.
- Immigration policy volatility. The pope's criticism on immigration bumps directly against the Trump administration's chief policy focus. The Barton Swaim essay on A11 of the same paper makes the companion point about labor-force participation. Both of those feed sector views: construction, hospitality, home-building labor availability.
- The "just war" framework matters for defense allocation. The Vatican is one of the few global voices that will publicly question U.S. military action. If the Iran cease-fire frays, Leo's posture becomes part of the macro backdrop. That doesn't change our 16% Defense weighting. It does inform how we'd message it.
Capital Wealth View
Sutton is a serious historian, not a partisan writer, and the essay lands its point. The U.S.-Vatican alignment that has been a low-noise feature of foreign policy since Truman is under real stress. That is a civic story, not an allocation story — but it's the sort of civic story that moves markets sideways when a crisis forces coordination and the coordination channel isn't there.
What We're Telling Clients Who Ask About This
A number of clients have called this week specifically about the pope-Trump exchange. Our answer has three parts:
- The market doesn't trade on it directly. Friday's S&P 7,126 print and 6.8% weekly Nasdaq rally say that the Hormuz opening is the story the market is paying attention to.
- We don't take political positions on it. Capital Wealth manages portfolios. We are not a political newsletter. If you want the political read, Peggy Noonan's column is the best one.
- We are watching the NATO and immigration spillovers. Both have downstream asset-price consequences. If they move, we'll move.
Bottom Line
Sutton's Review cover essay is the most important piece of context in this weekend's paper — more important, in our view, than the Hormuz news itself, because it describes a structural rather than cyclical change. We're not repositioning on it. We are, as always, reading it closely.