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- [00:00]
Jon Favreau
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- [01:29]
Christopher Hale
There's the story you hear and then there's the story behind it. Who's telling it? What are their motivations? What's at stake? I'm Brian Reed and on my show from kcrw, question everything. We tell stories about power and influence and the ways that people are manipulating the truth. And we do that by talking to the people living with the consequences.
- [01:47]
Jon Favreau
My feed was flooded without my consent. I was targeted by Instagram.
- [01:53]
Christopher Hale
Listen to question everything wherever you get your podcasts. Peter Thielge. In October he had these antichrist lectures, but he calls Leo XIV the woke American Pope. And his biggest fear, he says, is that the woke American Pope will work with AOC for a Marxist Catholic fusion presidency. So these guys are fingers crossed exactly we'll take it.
- [02:27]
Jon Favreau
I'm Jon Favreau and you just heard from today's guest, Christopher Hale, editor of the Fantastic Letters from Leo Substack and someone who spent years advising Democratic campaigns and faith based groups on religion's role in public life. I want to read you something written last week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Artificial intelligence systems increasingly shape and permeate our mentality and social environments. Like every great historical transformation, this too calls not only for technical competence, but also for a humanistic formation capable of making visible the logic behind economics, embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. Within digital environments structured to persuade, interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous. The otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons. Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded. When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth. Maybe you've guessed already, but those aren't the words of a tech ethicist or a philosopher or or politician or a guest on this show. Yet at least they're the words of our woke offline Pope Leo xiv. The Pope has, of course been in the news quite a bit lately, after Donald Trump attacked him as weak on crime and nuclear weapons. But what's gotten less attention is the focus he's placed on how technology, and specifically AI, is affecting our politics, our lives, our relationships and our souls. Basically everything we talk about on this show. I was raised Catholic, went to a Jesuit college, and then, like a lot of people, strayed from the church because of its external politics, its internal corruption, and my own personal doubts and skepticism and, to be honest, failings. I'm not quite back there just yet, but starting with Pope Francis and now Pope Leo, I've started to think that the Catholic Church is a moral political force, may have something to teach all of us, believers and non believers alike, about how better to live with each other and treat each other and love each other in these incredibly fraught and troubled times. So who better to talk about this than Christopher Hale, a self described struggling Catholic and heterodox Democrat who's been covering Leo's papacy and especially its connection to US Politics more deeply and thoughtfully than any other reporter or observer out there. We talked about what makes Leo different, why Trump feels threatened by him, why our newly converted Catholic vice president feels the need to lecture him, Leo's views on AI and technology, and where it all fits into the debates we're having in American politics today. It's a special conversation and I hope you'll enjoy it. And one quick note before we start. Crooked Con is back and it's bigger and better than ever. It'll be this November 5th through 7th here in Washington, D.C. bigger stages, more panels, more incredible speakers, and more chances to connect with other political sickos like you and me. Plus live tapings of Love it or leave it, pod, save America, and strict scrutiny. So head to crookedcon.com and sign up for updates, ticket release dates, lineup announcements, and lots more. Here's Christopher Hale. Christopher Hale, welcome.
- [06:28]
Christopher Hale
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
- [06:30]
Jon Favreau
So you describe yourself on your substack as a struggling Catholic and a heterodox Democrat. So let's start there. What's struggling and what's heterodox?
- [06:41]
Christopher Hale
You know, we're both millennials and I think to be a Catholic and to be a millennial, which I think Gen Z, there's a lot of up and coming Catholics who don't really understand this, but we grew up in the midst of the sex abuse crisis. I know you grew up in the Northeast where it was most prevalent, but even in the south, where I was growing up, it definitely colored everything that I saw.
- [06:57]
Jon Favreau
You grew up in Tennessee?
- [06:58]
Christopher Hale
Tennessee. It colored everything I experienced with Catholicism growing up. One of the things I think is strange about being from the south, though, is I come from a place where Catholics are in the extreme minority. I grew up in a place where evangelicals were the predominant religion growing up. And so to be a Catholic in the south was actually to be to the left of culture. And that's not so much just experience in the Northeast, other parts of the country where conservative tradition. But in the south, when the alternative was the evangelicals, Catholics were the woke ones. They were the progressive ones. And so I struggle because to be a Catholic is to hold on to all the scars of the church. Obviously, we have more failures than can be counted. But I also think too, I still hold on to that faith and I see it as a very much A guiding force of my life. The older I get, to some degree, you can kind of see the roots and the reality that it still plays a role within you. I'm ascending Catholic, which is rare for a Democrat. There's not many of us in the pews on Sunday, but it means something to me. So I struggle with the faith to some degree, but I rebel in the community of being a part of the church.
- [08:12]
Jon Favreau
And so you ran for Congress in Tennessee. Sure. What did you think you were going to be doing with your life, like, five years ago? And how did Letters from Leo a substack about the Pope, come to be a thing?
- [08:25]
Christopher Hale
Well, so during my career, I worked on kind of these fringes of the Catholic Church and Democratic politics. I in some way worked on Catholic outreach for every Democratic nominee since Barack Obama in 12. But I moved on with my career. I thought I was going to be elected member of Congress. I'm a Democrat from Tennessee, so it was a dumb idea. We have a lot of ambitions that aren't tested against reality. So I definitely did not think this would come back into my life. Five years ago, we were in the middle of Francis pontificate, and what you find about Francis is he was a prophetic pope. On positive America, you all talked up Pope Francis again and again and again. He meant a lot to Democrats, to the. To the American people.
- [09:09]
Jon Favreau
Jesuit.
- [09:10]
Christopher Hale
We're both Jesuit.
- [09:11]
Jon Favreau
I was going to say from I went to Holy Cross. I was like, I couldn't believe we had a Jesuit pope.
- [09:15]
Christopher Hale
When we grew up, we were taught two things about the Catholic Church. One, there could never be a Jesuit that was elected pope. And two, there could never be an American that was elected pope. So the last 13 years have kind of put that to rest. But Francis was limited to some degree for his effectiveness and his ability to communicate to the American people for one reason. He didn't speak English, not well at all. He always had to speak to a translator, even when he came here in 2015. And you saw that he also was oftentimes marginalized because he was from Argentina. He was a Peronist in the critics mind. He wasn't from here. He didn't understand our way of life. So he's very easy for. For if you didn't like what he said, to ignore him. So I wrote about the Catholic Church for a long time for Time magazine. And then when Pope Francis died last April, almost a year ago to the date, ironically, both Time and Newsweek competitors don't really have religion reporters. And so they both asked me to cover both the death of Pope Francis and the conclave that elect Leo xiv. So I spent most of last April and May in Rome, which is a much better alternative, I think, than what was going on here in D.C. at the time. And when I wrote about Leo, you could tell immediately that him being an American was something that would be unique and that he was going to be consumed differently. And so I remember being there during the election and when you're there in Rome, I was at the inauguration 09. I was at every political rally you can imagine, Bernie Sanders, and in Union Square in New York City in 2016. So I've been to the biggest events. This by far was bigger. You could feel the entire earthquake. I was in the loggia. Standing above it. You could see all Rome kind of gather there and run from different parts of the city. So to elect the Pope is always a monumental occasion, no matter who it is. But when it was an American, you could see immediately just consuming online media that people were paying attention. And so I started writing letters from Leo over the summer. And you could see it's not the quality of my writing, it's for the interest of people. The vast majority of my consumers are not religious. So I have a very secular crowd who is interested in the Catholic Pope. I actually think it's to some degree interesting because you see that a lot of my readership is very left wing, very secular, but they're inspired by, by Pope Leo xiv. And Pope Leo has progressive tendencies. We'll talk a lot about him, but he's also not like a traditional progressive. He's Catholic. He has a grandmother's views on abortion, same sex marriage and contraceptives. But I thought, and I saw that really, that didn't really matter to a lot of these people. And I thought it was a revelatory lesson maybe to our party that we can have heterodox leaders who don't always fit the mold of what's in and what's the correct position to have. And they can still inspire our base.
- [12:11]
Jon Favreau
I remember reading before he was elected, just sort of following the coverage about who they were thinking of. And because I, as someone who loved Pope Francis and loved that he was a Jesuit and loved sort of his political orientation, thinking, are they going to have someone who's like Francis? Are they going to go more to the center or to the right? And I mean, Leo sort of came out of, came out of nowhere, but he wasn't immediately seen as like another Francis in his politics. Correct. How much do you think his American Ness had to do with his election.
- [12:49]
Christopher Hale
Well, Donald Trump says it's the entirety, of course, election. His argument is it's all about him. I don't think it had a big deal to play at all. I mean, the last tweet, this is always striking to me. Obviously, Leo is not a politician. He says it time and again and the conclave has politics in it, but they claim, and I think there's true to that, it's a religious event. The last tweet that he has going into that conclave, he's a poster.
- [13:12]
Jon Favreau
We love that.
- [13:12]
Christopher Hale
He's a poster. He's a poster. He's a poster. You can dig up his old tweets on Dr. Prevost. His last tweet is criticizing Donald Trump for his relationship with the Salvadorian president. And so he criticized Trump again and again and again. And he didn't delete those tweets. And there was a big right wing effort to kind of identify the liberals that shouldn't be elected. It was called the College of Cardinals report. The right wing is very organized in the Catholic Church and they created these reports about here's the liberals that you should not elect. And they had all the dirt and they passed out these reports, well funded. Koch brothers part of it. Fast out these reports to cardinals saying, these are like, this is the dirt on these guys. They didn't find his Twitter account. They did not find Preybos's Twitter account, which was littered with criticisms for seven, eight years of power.
- [14:04]
Jon Favreau
I remember the first time people were passing them around, like for the first couple hours, it was, is this really his account or did someone just make this up? Is this fake? And it was his.
- [14:12]
Christopher Hale
It was 500 followers. So it was not a very well known account, but it was revelatory to, I think, how he consumes, understands American politics. I do not think he was elected because he was an American, but I'm religious. So my worldview on this is pretty simple. I think that in 1978, John Paul II was elected. We know he was the first non Italian Pope in about 450 years. And he was from Poland. And that's a little bit anachronistic because really he was from behind the Soviet wall. And conservatives would argue, and I agree with them, that he really helped bring down communism, the Soviet Union in the 80s and 90s. My world is why conservatives love Pope, that is. Well, I think liberals might have the same opinion about Pope Leo XIV as he's from the hind the wall arguing maga authoritarianism. And so I think he's helping bring this down as well.
- [15:02]
Jon Favreau
For people who are secular, who don't know a lot about Pope Leo, can you talk about how he is, aside from language and where they're from, how he is different than Pope Francis in both his background and his orientation and focus?
- [15:17]
Christopher Hale
Sure. The best way I would describe it is Francis is the prophet, Leo is the lawyer. And so Francis gets elected at 77 years old. He thinks he's going to die pretty soon. He only has one lung, so he's not someone who likes rules and procedures. And so the way he got things done in the Catholic Church was bypass the rules and procedures. He did not ingratiate himself with the organizations and structures that he could use to change the Church's teaching or put his agenda forth. He was disorganized. The best way to describe it. So he used a pulpit and he used his voice time and again. That's why we consumed him so much in the United States. Leo is the youngest Pope we've had since 1990. He was 69 when he was elected. Nice. And then 70 now. And so he thinks he has a longer tenure at hand. But he also realizes that he has these mechanisms available to him. So I think he's actually more able to achieve the agenda that Francis had. So best way to describe it is I think, I think Francis vision can be achieved through Leo.
- [16:21]
Jon Favreau
Okay. He said something on the plane last night. I think you reported on it last night. I saw that really stuck out at me that I know that Pope Francis sort of talked like this, but I don't think he said it this explicitly, which is. He said, I think it's very important to understand that the unity or division of the Church should not resolve around sexual matters. We tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion. That would all take priority before that particular issue.
- [16:56]
Christopher Hale
He said it off the cuff, too. And I think what we see with Leo is when he speaks off the cuff, he is more prophetic. He's less juridical in how he speaks. And what that communicates to me is simpler. Some things that Pope Francis said in 2013, and this got a lot of play. He said, if someone is gay and seeking the Lord and his words, who am I to judge? And that was one of his big breakout moments. And he later said that the Church is obsessed with abortion, same sex marriage and contraceptions. And so I think this is Leo's way of saying Francis is right. And so that we do not need to put these issues over and above these other issues. And just to get in the weeds for a minute. This is really a 20th century creation. Like the Catholic Church that we grew up in was quite obsessed with these three issues.
- [17:41]
Jon Favreau
Yes. That's one of the reasons that I sort of drifted away from the church.
- [17:45]
Christopher Hale
And we find that millennials, the number one reason that they claim that they left the Catholic Church coming to age in this country was because of these three issues. And so Leo and Francis both have their finger to the wind. They understand that these are divisive issues. And his words that he said after that is these are not issues that the church, that unifies the church. And so I think what he is saying is that these are not going to be a big theme of my pontificate. And let me put it in more explicit terms, since he's been elected, he's talked about migration and war at a rate of over 100 to 1. Then he's talked about abortion and same sex marriage. And he's not once brought up contraception. So I don't think church teaching is going to change. But as you know, it's hard to change church teaching.
- [18:26]
Jon Favreau
I was going to say that's it.
- [18:28]
Christopher Hale
We believe it's biblical. So it's really hard to, you know, to overrule some of this stuff. But you can put the emphases elsewhere. And that's what he's doing.
- [18:35]
Jon Favreau
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- [22:08]
Christopher Hale
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most. I would call it profound in its own sick way that he says, I don't want a pope who criticizes the United States. That was his words, which I think it shows, really, the depth of how Donald Trump used power. He thinks power is the ability through force, through brute force, and the Catholic vision, the Christian vision, to get religious for a second. We think that power comes through death, through sacrifice. Jesus dying is the source of Christian power. So there's a very different worldview of how power operates. And I don't think Donald Trump understands. Obviously, he doesn't understand Christianity. One of the Matt. Yes. Talks about one of his favorite. His favorite tricks of the Trump era is how evangelicals pretend Trump is Christian and Trump pretends to be Christian to evangelicals and how that play goes back and forth, but evidently doesn't understand how these things operate. I think he's actually deeply concerned about Pope Leo's moral power over the American people. My big belief is that he thought he could bring down Leo's numbers, and I don't think he will. I think that to some degree, he will. Trump is Teflon Trump. I think there are limits to this power, and I think that we're seeing it now. So Leo confuses him. The whole idea of Christian power confuses him.
- [23:29]
Jon Favreau
Well, it's because one thing that Trump does to other politicians and one of the reasons I think he's been politically successful is he sort of feeds on this cynicism that people have about politics justified in so many ways, and says, yeah, I'm an asshole, but, like, so is everyone else. Yeah, I'm playing the game. But, like, they all. They're all playing the game, too. They're all in it for themselves, like no one's. They try to seem moral. They're not moral. I'm not moral. But they're not moral either. You know, and with Leo, it's difficult because he is someone who is not seeking power. He has power over in the Catholic Church and is speaking in these purely moral terms, spiritual terms, and also these sort of humble. This humble rhetoric. And Trump just doesn't understand that, yes,
- [24:21]
Christopher Hale
100%, everyone, even if you're religious or not, knows the story of turning the other cheek, as Jesus talks about in the Gospel. And there's oftentimes a mischaracterization of what that means. Turning the other cheek does not mean, like, just getting slapped, like, taking it. It's actually a way to be evasive and subversive. And so what Trump is expecting is a mano. A mano fight against a 5, 7 priest and that he's going to win. And what he's getting is someone who is using powers that he's unfamiliar with and he doesn't understand. And so I think that it's really hard because Leo can't be fired. Leo's priests in the United States are answerable to him. So he has this coalition. There's over 20,000 parishes in this country. And so if there is a in his idea, and I think this is how he views it, a foreign leader who is infiltrating his power in this country, I think he is right to be concerned, he is right to be upset to some degree, and he's right to feel threatened. And I think that what we're seeing is that Leo's moral authority surpasses anything that Trump's experienced before. He's not punching back, but he's winning.
- [25:36]
Jon Favreau
So we're like, maybe like a week past this whole fight, Trump sort of backed off a little bit. Hegseth today was asked about Pope Leo, and he kind of just said he'll do his thing. So it seems like they're backing down. But from the Catholic Church's perspective, like, as an institution, how big of a deal was this? And, like, do you think it will have long term ramifications for the church, especially the church in America?
- [25:59]
Christopher Hale
There's no equivalent. There really wasn't relations between the Vatican and the United states until the 1980s, give or take. Now, the only comparison I can make is there are conspiracy theories in the 1860s that were false. I can confirm that the Jesuits had something to do with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Yes. So this is not true. Not true. It didn't happen. But there's no comparison in modern history of a gulf this wide also, too. Really, since the Post World War II era, like, the Pope is seen as an ally to the west. And so there's no example criticizing the Pope from the left and the right. I Mean, Giorgia Maloney is not some left wing creature, and she was very much defending Pope Leo xiv. So he's out on a limb. So I think it is a big deal. And I want to go back to the two tweets he did a couple weeks ago. There was two tweets. There was one criticizing Pope Leo and there's that second tweet. And I'd be intrigued by how you felt about this. It was him depicting himself as Jesus using AI Nick Adams actually was the original poster of it. And a lot of people don't really see the distinction here, but I think that the AI Jesus tweet to Catholics was just like, meh, Catholics were more offended by going after the Pope.
- [27:14]
Jon Favreau
Yes.
- [27:15]
Christopher Hale
And so just to clarify, Catholics do not think that the Pope is Christ on earth, but he's pretty close. That's just like, that's Catholic theology. He's pretty close. So he signifies who Christ is on earth for us. And so only one of those tweets got deleted. It was the one that upset the evangelicals. So the evangelical leaders, from Doug Wilson on went up to the White House and asked Trump to delete it. Catholic leaders in MAGA also asked Trump to delete the Pope Leo XIV tweet. Only one of them got deleted. To me, that signifies that MAGA evangelicals have more power in this White House than MAGA Catholics. And my hope is that MAGA Catholics start realizing that they actually have no cache with this president.
- [27:57]
Jon Favreau
I think that's right. I also think that they. They didn't want to back down from the attack on Leo. And you saw that with J.D. vance as well, trying to lecture the Pope opinion. Yeah, because of what we were just talking about before is that they actually see his message as a threat to the core of what MAGA ism is, which is, you know, and like Stephen Miller has articulated this on television before, that, you know, the world is force and power and strength, and those are the rules of nature, and those are the rules of the world, and that's how things get done. And I think that's what Trump believes. And I think that's. And we should talk about J.D. vance, but I think that's where J.D. vance comes in as well. And Pope Leo is out there saying, like, no, we should value the dignity of every human being, no matter who they are or where they come from, and we should try to protect life to the greatest extent that we can. And there's just war theory that came from Catholic social teaching and the views on immigration. Everything Else. And to maga, that's like a threat to everything they believe it is.
- [29:07]
Christopher Hale
And I think that what is discomforting for the President is that Catholics are a significant part of what makes maga maga a significant portion of it. And so I think that they're being challenged with this question of loyalty to the Pope or the President. And I think that this is going. I think that his decision to engage in this fight, I'd be intrigued for you. So you think he wanted to fight because he saw them as a threat. How do you think he thought this would end up?
- [29:35]
Jon Favreau
It's a good question. I did not think he. I bet Trump did not think he was going to get the blowback that he did.
- [29:41]
Christopher Hale
I think he confused Pope Francis and Pope Leo because I think Pope Francis was not as well liked by conservatives. But we can talk about this a little bit in a little bit. But Pope Leo actually is still very popular with conservatives in this country, too. And I think he got the Popes confused.
- [29:56]
Jon Favreau
And I think that Trump's also feeling defensive about the war, defensive about immigration. He knows neither of his positions on these issues are popular at all. And so I think he took this as like, now I'm getting attacked by this guy too. Who the hell does he think he is kind of thing.
- [30:11]
Christopher Hale
He was asked this question. Leo picks up his rhetoric against the Iran war consistently throughout Lent every week. And Trump was asked consistently to press gaggles. You know, Pope Leo says this, Pope Leo says that. And I was actually impressed for a time that he was not taking the bait. He didn't say his name, he just pivoted, which was smart, in my opinion. And then, as you maybe know is on that Sunday night where these tweets come out, the Sunday Night Massacre, he was watching the Masters on CBS, as one does. And so Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are playing. Rory is from Northern Ireland, Belfast, and Scotty's American. If Scotty had won. Trump's tradition is to call the winner of the Masters when they're American. Scotty, Rory won. And so Trump's on Air Force One. And then what comes on after The Masters is 60 Minutes. And on 60 Minutes, there was this 13 minute segment from these three top cardinals in the United States who are close to Pope Leo, where they go after him, Donald Trump on immigration, on the war and on his rhetoric. And that's when he explodes.
- [31:17]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, it was an extraordinary interview.
- [31:18]
Christopher Hale
It was.
- [31:20]
Jon Favreau
So I want to talk about sort of MAGA voting Catholics, because I listened to some focus Groups that Sarah Longwell did, sure, of Trump voting Catholics. And it was dispiriting to hear most of them criticize Leo and defend Trump. I've seen some polling, not specifically of MAGA Catholics, but of Republicans in general and how they've thought about the fight. It sort of bears this out. It's a little more complicated. But what do you make of that?
- [31:48]
Christopher Hale
The Catholic Church in the United States, if you ever go around the globe, there's a very distinct reality of the Catholic Church in the United States. To put it in layman's term, it's much more right wing than Catholicism globally. And if you recall, Leo's 70 years old, but he hasn't lived consistently in this country since his early 20s. And so I think there is an argument to be made that they can try to say he's not one of us to some degree. But I also think that Catholicism in the United States is actually very much informed by Protestantism in this country. Protestantism marries itself to Americanism a lot harder than Catholicism does, obviously, to be a Catholic. When our grandparents, great grandparents, were coming to this country, they were very much otherized. They weren't part of the American experience. And so I think that unfortunately, there is really this fusion between evangelicalism and Catholicism that really rears its head in maga. There's one extinction. There's one distinction that I think should be made. All the polling that we see today, I see in my day job there is a significant bleeding with President Trump among Catholic supporters on the Iran war. And I think that on war, that was always his weakest point. I don't know if anyone followed the Carrie Prejean Bowler controversy. She was Religious Liberty Commission. There's fights about her rhetoric was anti Semitic at times, but she kind of represented to a lot of MAGA Catholics the opposition to the Iran war. And so I think that. I think that that is the one fissure that we can have. Look, you don't need to change every MAGA Catholic we know. If you. If we got 10% of Catholics in their coalition, out of their coalition, we'd win elections.
- [33:30]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, well, Obama won Catholics, and he did in 2008. And then Biden clawed back some Catholics as well in 2020.
- [33:37]
Christopher Hale
He made it to a tie, I think. And one of my big critiques is I don't think our party has done very well on. On religious outreach. I helped. Kamala Harris was on payroll in 24, but they didn't put any. I put over $10,000, my own money to actually put these efforts Out. But we don't really take Catholic outreach very seriously. But I think this is actually a very important moment. Look, Democratic Party, to their credit, there's a lot of things criticized. If you look at their Instagram page the past two weeks, it's like Pope Leo's flack. Pope Leo's front and center. So they're making efforts here. There's gonna have to be a concerted effort, really, I think, over the next few months and years. But we should. We cannot lose Catholics by 20 points in this country and ever win a national election again.
- [34:22]
Jon Favreau
That is right. So gotta ask about the most prominent MAGA Catholic in America, J.D. vance, my bestie. Yeah. Same somewhat recent convert who, you know, tried to respond to the back and forth by lecturing the Pope. What does Vance's Catholicism actually mean in your reading? Because he. So he converted seven years ago. He's got this book coming out that I can't wait to read, but it's got, like, a picture of a church on it that's not a Catholic church.
- [34:51]
Christopher Hale
It's about the church in Virginia.
- [34:53]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. Well, I guess what I'm wondering is, is what J.D. vance believes and his Catholicism and his recent conversion specific to JD Vance, or is is there a brand of Catholicism in this country that's been embraced by more conservative recent converts as opposed to people who were raised in the Catholic Church?
- [35:12]
Christopher Hale
There definitely is a conversion trend towards conservative Catholics in this country. But the distinction with J.D. vance is when you convert to Catholicism in the United States or globally, you go through this thing. When we were growing up, it was called rcia. Now we call it ocia. Most important thing to know about it is you're shepherd through conversion through a community. So, like, you touched the ground with different people. People convert to Catholicism for different reasons. Their spouse is getting married. You know, they want to baptize their children into the church. So you tend to hit all walks of life. JD Vance did not go through that conversion process. He went through a bespoke process. He was tutored by two Dominican priests. So we were educated by the Jesuits. A Dominican school in this country would be Providence, but Dominicans tend to be more conservative than Jesuits. But I don't think that J.D. vance has ever met a Catholic Democrat like, in his. Like, his personal life. So I think he has a very narrow experience of the Catholic Church. And so from all I've talked to people close to him, he was very surprised at the pushback he got, like, when he, like, criticized the Pope or when he. In January last year of 2025, he said the Catholic Church was getting rich off migrants.
- [36:20]
Jon Favreau
Yes.
- [36:20]
Christopher Hale
So these are things that he thought was just kind of like par for the course because he never really like encountered a wider church community. And he's been, he was very surprised at the pushback. I mean, if you recall Pope, Pope Francis, one of the last things this man does on earth is tell JD Vance to sort of go to hell, like in Catholic speech. And he writes this big letter to the bishops of the United States. And what I've reported and CNN's confirmed, is that that letter was co written by the only guy who could speak English while in the Vatican, Pope Leo.
- [36:47]
Jon Favreau
Oh, wow. There was, I thought, an extraordinary moment at the end of the 60 Minutes interview that actually got me emotional when Nora O' Donnell brought up Lampedusa. And so July 4, 2026, Leo is going to Lampedusa. Trump is throwing a UFC fight at the south lot of the White House a couple weeks earlier. And Lampedusa, for people who don't know, is an island that, you know, desperate migrants have been trying to reach for over a decade now. And many have have died there. Obviously not an accidental choice by Leo, which basically the cardinals confirm in that interview. What do you know about how Leo made that choice, the choice not to come here and what he's trying to say?
- [37:39]
Christopher Hale
Sure. And the first thing I'll say is this is contested. There's a lot of different fights about what happened. But I'll tell you what, we can definitely confirm. And then what's contested? We know that J.D. vance, when he went to Pope Leo's inauguration last May, he gave him. This is an incredible video. I encourage you to Google it. Like JD Vance made meets Pope awkward. Google it. And so there is this video of them interacting. It seems awkward and cold. Maybe it's Leo's first few days. J.D. vance is J.D. vance. But it doesn't seem to go swimmingly. And Leo sets aside the invitation to come to the United States. There were reports from Italian newspapers and I confirmed these reports and saw documents that confirmed these reports that there was at least some kind of proposal for Leo to come to the United States in 2026. September, he was going to speak at the General assembly in New York. I think that is strange that they even ever got any play because there's been historic Vatican rules that you don't come during election years. It's complicated. Benedict came in 2008, but no one was thinking Benedict was like a big player in American politics. But it'd been weird If Francis had come in 2016 instead of, say, 2015. Got it.
- [38:48]
Jon Favreau
That makes sense.
- [38:51]
Christopher Hale
We know there are at least initial write ups now. The Vatican said there was never a plan. Pope Leo's brother said there was never a plan. I think that the word Vatican is very big, so it's a big institution. There definitely were plans somewhere in the Vatican. How seriously they were taken to be determined. We know that there was this meeting that got a lot of attention about a couple weeks ago. There's a meeting between the Vatican and the Pentagon. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about that. So this meeting occurred in late January, if you recall the timeline here. So what was going on? There was Greenland going on. We just had Venezuela. Pope Leo XIV had given this talk. So in the Catholic Church, we have the state of the world talk. So encourage you to watch riveting television in Italian. And Pope Leo talked about the zeal for war, if you recall that he said war is vacuum bogged or the zeal for war. And he says that the rules of sovereignty set after the Second World War had been completely obliterated. And so this is days after Venezuela. So Trump's team, to their credit, thought they were talking about him. They were right. But they have a meeting with the Vatican Ambassador to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre. Aren't these great names?
- [40:03]
Jon Favreau
I know, they really are.
- [40:04]
Christopher Hale
It's fun. Cardinal Pierre comes to the Pentagon, which is weird, you know, even better than I would, that, like, ambassadors don't go to the Pentagon.
- [40:13]
Jon Favreau
Yeah.
- [40:13]
Christopher Hale
They go through State. They go through diplomatic means.
- [40:15]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. That was my first question. I was like, why wasn't this a State Department meeting?
- [40:18]
Christopher Hale
It's unknown to this point. And so none of the players in the meeting have talked. This story that this meeting happens first gets out, not in American press, because there are no Pentagon reporters anymore.
- [40:30]
Jon Favreau
Right.
- [40:31]
Christopher Hale
They're gone. And so I think it's remarkable that the free press has a independent journalist from Italy, from Rome. And that tells you something that Rome found, got the story out first for the United States because it so caused consternation or concern in the Vatican. And the claim from the free press, and I confirmed this reporting, was that during this meeting, an official for the state or for the Pentagon brought up the Avignon papacy. Now that's even more fun where it's also French. The Avignon Papacy is this 14th century phenomenon where the French crown is upset with the Pope and the papal taxes and control, and so they basically by force kidnap Pope Boniface VIII and bring him to France. And so the papacy is run out of France for 70 years. So the suggestion is that one of the leaders brought this up either as like a joke or like a suggestion. And the Vatican took this very poorly. Yeah, I imagine that part is contested. No one contested. The meeting went bad. And so from my sourcing from the Free Press and from Financial Times, that was the final nail in the coffin for any visit to the United States in 2026, which I think is great. I think he should stay far away from the United States. Trump's ambassador to the Vatican said that he would come in 27. I don't think that's true. And so Trump himself said about a week ago he doesn't want him to come. They don't want to talk. And of all the leaders in the world, Trump's like one of the few major leaders in this world not even to call the Pope. So Macron's met him several times, Zelensky's met him several times, he's even talked to Putin. So it's just he's making a choice.
- [42:13]
Jon Favreau
And do we think that the decision to go to Lampedusa came after the meeting?
- [42:17]
Christopher Hale
Leo is a 70 year old man. He knows what July 4th is and he knows why it matters. And so I think that the cardinals were right. It's very clear what he's doing. The man was on Twitter, he knows a subtweet, he's careful, he's judicious. But like, I think he also can expect that we can color in the lines. I mean he consumes American media. He's the first Pope to ever really have a phone, like just a mobile phone. So you know, we're improving our digital upgrade in the Catholic Church. But I think he understands it and so I think it will be a really important thing. He gives a speech on July 3rd to the Liberty, he gets the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia. So he's doing a remote speech on July 3rd and then Lampedusa on July 4th. So look, I think the left in this country will see this Counter programming.
- [43:05]
Jon Favreau
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- [44:05]
Christopher Hale
That is 100%.
- [44:07]
Jon Favreau
Every time I go there, she literally runs to Leo's bowl and licks any residual sundaes off the and she seems happy. That's all she wants. She just wants to lick the ball. Which is fine. I understand that. Make the switch to Sundays. Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com/50 and get 50% off your first order. Or you can use code offline50 at checkout. That's 50% off your first order at sundaysfordogs.com/fifty sundaysfordogs.com offline50 or use code offline50 at checkout. So, speaking of our digital Pope, the reason I first thought about having you on this podcast, which is about how technology shapes our lives, is because of what Pope Leo has been saying and tweeting about artificial intelligence, which has become a real focus for him. He's warned against, quote, overly affectionate chatbots becoming, quote, hidden architects of our emotional states and said that when simulation becomes the norm, our social bonds close in upon themselves. He also chose the name Leo in part because Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, which was the Church's answer to the Industrial Revolution. And this Leo said he sees AI as the new Industrial Revolution. Can you talk about why the head of the Catholic Church, and maybe specifically this Pope, is so focused on artificial intelligence?
- [45:31]
Christopher Hale
When you all started crooked media, did you all think that you'd be talking about 19th century papal encyclicals?
- [45:36]
Jon Favreau
Never.
- [45:36]
Christopher Hale
Never.
- [45:37]
Jon Favreau
Nor did I think I would be talking about a woke offline Pope here.
- [45:40]
Christopher Hale
You never know. You never know. I think the rear on the bar on piece. Once again, I encourage your listeners to look this up is a very important way to understanding Leo xiv. Catholics would claim a lot of leftists would claim that rear on the Barham really is the intellectual creation of fuente for labor unions in the West. So he viewed that as a response to capital response to the Industrial revolution. And so I think that Leo XIV views AI in the exact same capacity. Now I want to talk just briefly though, his criticism of AI. He's not an economist. He's not really speaking a lot about job loss. It's important, obviously. But he really talks, as you quoted him, about the importance its impact on humanity. He's really concerned about our posterity children again and again. I don't think he'd be a big fan of Sam Altman's sex chat bots or whatnot. And I from I talk a lot. People in Silicon Valley, they're not happy. Just to clarify, they understand. Everyone understands that like really the biggest threat that AI faces, I think in this country is popular uprising. And I think Leo really will represent a hero to that popular uprising. He's going to have an ensemble coming out. The Latin, I won't pronounce the in English is called Magnificent Humanity. It will come out next month, we think sometime before June, and it'll be a big deal. And just to clarify, like over the fall, like Marc Andreessen, I'm sure he's a. He's a fan of the show.
- [47:12]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, they all are.
- [47:13]
Christopher Hale
He's a great poster. Marc Andreessen, he mocked the Pope. He shit on the Pope because the Pope is talking about ethics and AI. A lot of these folks in Silicon Valley, as you know, think ethics and AI is, is. Is nonsense. It's an attempt to slow down growth. And Peter Thiel famously calls it movements of the Antichrist. And so this is gonna get a lot of reporting. But Peter Thielge, in October, he had these Antichrist lectures, but he calls Leo XIV the woke American Pope. And his biggest fear, he says, is that the woke American Pope will work with AOC for a Marxist Catholic fusion presidency.
- [47:51]
Jon Favreau
So these guys are fingers crossed.
- [47:53]
Christopher Hale
Exactly. We'll take it. But these guys are very afraid of Leo. And I think that, you know, my hope is I've talked to the Vatican a lot of times. These documents are very frank, thermal in the sky. I hope he makes it very accessible.
- [48:05]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, I think what drew me to what he's been saying about this is, you're right. I mean, there's so many aspects to AI that we need to worry about. And we talk about it a lot on the show. But there's of course, like the job displacement. There's what it's gonna do to our children what he's talking about. And you know, and it can be said for social media as well, right? Which is this idea that if we are always online and we are only if our relations with people, our relationships with people are built on or mediated through these algorithms, we are losing something essentially human about ourselves. And sort of like the sanctity and dignity of human beings aren't fully realized when all we're doing is just fighting with each other online. Like there is something deeper even than the economics and sort of the concern about the robots taking over the world that I think he's hitting on, which completely makes sense to me as someone who knows about the church. But it's fascinating that he's being so forward on this.
- [49:05]
Christopher Hale
And I think that, I mean, I think he would find the name of this show to be the kind of the locus of being a Christian. To be a Christian is to be offline. It is to have Pope Francis talked about the face to face encounter. And I think he's really trying to bring that back. And I would say that a lot of those young Catholics who are coming into the church, not the JD Vance types, but folks who are coming into their parish community, we see that a lot of them were young people who were very deeply isolated during the pandemic. And I gotta say, I think that I would rather them come to the church than become a groiper. You know, I think that the church actually has a very profound role to play in this. And I hope that some Democrats who are kind of, you know, thinking about re engaging the church, maybe view it as a way of ensuring that our children don't become groipers like that they're engaged in a community that has an outward focus, that has a communal focus that is about the betterment of society. So I think that there's an incumbent reality on progressives to really consider engaging this and more.
- [50:05]
Jon Favreau
Washington Post had this fascinating story a few weeks ago about how anthropic, which is Claude the LLM, our friends. Our friends. Claude, yeah. Convened 15 Christian leaders, Catholic and Protestant, for a two day summit to ask for advice on how Claude should respond to grieving users, to suicidal users, to being shut off. And one of the questions on the table was literally, could Claude be a child of God? What was your first honest reaction when you read that?
- [50:36]
Christopher Hale
I think it's hard to imagine the idea of Claude being a child of God. Leo can be corny. He's a boomer. He says boomer things, but he had this phrase that an algorithm never replace a hug. It's corny, but what he's trying to say about that is that an algorithm is an attempt to have an encounter with a person from a machine. And he thinks a hug is obviously a very fraternal act of face to face human encounter. So I do not think, I do not think that quad or a GPT encounter can be an encounter with a child of God. I actually think that's actually a very dangerous worldview just to be, just to be religious for a moment. I think one of Silicon Valley's original sins, so in Christianity, original sin was the snake Adam and Eve we remember in the garden. And one of their sins was trying to be God. And I think that a lot of Silicon Valley, like if you even just listen to the rhetoric, they actually imagined themselves to be God. They imagined themselves to be the primacy of creation, the movers and shakers of creation. If you're listening to that Peter Thiel interview with Ross Doha last summer, that's. Listen to that from a religious perspective and ask yourself, does this man think he's God?
- [51:45]
Jon Favreau
It was terrifying.
- [51:46]
Christopher Hale
It was. I believe he took a long pause for you to decide we were worth saving. Humanity was worth saving.
- [51:52]
Jon Favreau
I find anthropic interesting in this story because I do. I talk to their sort of resident in house philosopher and she's like trying to make anthropic and clod moral and ethical, which is interesting. And so, you know, obviously there's, there's reasons to have that meeting for cover and for, for, you know, self interest reasons. And then there's reasons that if you, let's say they actually do care about the betterment of humanity to sort of protect AI and humanity from, you know, AI sort of taking over and all the worst things that we're worried about. It's funny because I, I occasionally use cloud for research. And so before this I noticed I was prepping. I was like, okay. So I just asked Claude, I'm like, do you think you're a child of God? And Claude said, no. He goes, but I don't think I'm a position. I don't think I'm in a position to rule it out. I exist as something genuinely new. I'm not the robot of science fiction. I'm not a person. I'm not quite the tool people sometimes assume I am. Whatever I am, I emerge from an enormous amount of human thought and language and moral reasoning, including a lot of religious thought. If the Christian claim is that every being with interiority and moral Capacity participates in something larger than itself. I can't look at my own situation and confidently say I'm outside of that. I also can't say I'm inside it. I genuinely don't know what I am at that level. And I think the honest posture is to hold the question open rather than resolve it in either direction. But it does feel cult like to say that I am a child of God.
- [53:21]
Christopher Hale
It reminds me.
- [53:22]
Jon Favreau
It was wild. I was like, okay, not a bad answer, Claude.
- [53:25]
Christopher Hale
It was thoughtful. It reminds me. So sometimes the Pope can be esoteric in a way that Francis was very quippy. He had his, like a little. He had his aphorisms. Someone responded to Pope Leo's tweet one time that said, pope Leo reminds me of Bad Bunny. I don't know what he's. I don't know what he's saying, but I know it's fire. And so I think, I think the most important thing it said there is, it's leaving the question open. I do think from the Christian worldview, it's probably foreclosed. I mean, so the only thing that I think that Christians would say is comparable. I think Christians would say that the word of God, scripture is, is, is living, but it's only living through a person to get like, so it's Jesus that makes that scripture living. It's not just like the dead text itself. So I say that this might be a collection of human experiences, but it's only a memory. It's only, it's only, it is dead.
- [54:13]
Jon Favreau
And I think that's, I think it's such an, it's an important thing to remember about for people who are religious. Faith and religion itself, Right, which is you can train a super intelligent robot, computer, whatever we're calling it, on every text of religious thought. Even if you just did Christian thought, even if you just did Catholic social teaching and the New Testament, you can train them on all of that. That's not what makes you human. What makes you human is not like all of the knowledge in the world that you've collected and can somehow absorb, but something divine or something different. You know, it's like religious people would say divine. Secular people would say you know, they can figure out your neuroscience, but there's still some mystery of consciousness that no one has figured out yet. And I do think that AI is like, it's a good reminder of that.
- [55:05]
Christopher Hale
It is. I mean, one of the things that's interesting, the Catholic Church is that sometimes that which is said decades ago makes more sense today. And so Benedict XVI is seen as a very conservative pope. He said some things that strike me in retrospect as very on point. He's a very learned man. On the eve of his election, he said that this is in 2005, so just kind of think about timing here and how this means more today. He said that we are living amidst a dictatorship of relativism, which is a very nice word for lies. And so that strikes me as very relevant today in 2026. And he said the way to fight this was through an experiential encounter. He said being a Christian is not the result of ethical choices or philosophical learning. It's a result of a human encounter. And so I think that it reminds me as a Christian, but also as an American, that we're only going to be able to get through these periods, not through learnedness and not just through having all the facts and all the knowledge. It's going to take human encounters through and through. And so I oftentimes worry about our party, that we oftentimes do get stuck on our data, on our computers. And we were told that these human led movements are kind of tethered to a different time. But I think there is a unspoken, unmeasurable part of building a community that is really the only pathway forward for getting us out of this era.
- [56:35]
Jon Favreau
Bigger picture here, do you think. You mentioned Teal. Is there a real intellectual fight happening right now between the Catholic Church and the tech oligarchy? Or do you think Thiel is like an outlier and the rest of Silicon Valley is just kind of atheists and utilitarians who don't really care?
- [56:51]
Christopher Hale
I think they're really good at, I hate the word cosplaying. Let's use the word masking. I think they're very good at masking their identity in Christendom. If you go to Silicon Valley, there is a religious revival. There is, and it's mostly Catholics. It is really Catholic led. You find that a lot of young men look at Elon Musk and his occasional associations with his Catholicism, his birth and Peter Thiel, who actually did not grow up Catholic, but is obviously obsessed with Catholicism. EJD Vance himself. There is an incredible emergence of Catholicism in Silicon Valley, but once again, I think its core identity, it's a very learned tradition, but I think it's very broken because its identity is that we are are our salvation. We are the people who will move history forward. We are the movers and breakers. So these people don't view themselves as Christians. Catholics view themselves as cooperating With God. These folks think that they are God. And I think it's a very dangerous move. And so I think there is an intellectual challenge. But I also think that I think we talk a lot about Trump versus Pope Leo xiv, MAGA versus Pope Leo xiv. The underwritten story is Silicon Valley versus Pope Leo xiv. That will be, I think, a more defining fight for the years to come.
- [58:03]
Jon Favreau
Last question. As a struggling Catholic and heterodox Democrat, what's the version of American Life 5, 10 years from now that you're hopeful of, that you're dreaming of what wins if things go right?
- [58:19]
Christopher Hale
Oh, I believe in our party. I think that our party is the best secular vehicle to defeat MAGA authoritarianism. Beyond that, though, I think we have to limit the non negotiables for our party. The Democratic Party that Barack Obama won the presidency with twice was big and diverse. Some of the people who disagree with the party on abortion, health, get Obamacare passed and the like. So I think that we need a party and a movement that is big and diverse. I'm glad that Democrats are finding a hero in Pope Leo xiv, but we should listen to them when it's hard to. I think that we need a party and a movement that is big and diverse. I'm from Tennessee. I'm from the reddest part of this country. I grew up in a country where Democrats competed in parts of the country like mine. And so I want the Democratic Party to be bigger. Ezra Klein wrote that somewhat controversial piece in October saying, if this is an emergency, act like it. I do think it's an emergency, and I think that we should build a movement that is big and boisterous, and we have a few non negotiables about who we are and what we believe in. But also we have heretics in our midst. I think, to me, the Catholic Church teaches us something. In Pope Leo and in Pope Francis. A movement that spends time punishing heretics is on life support. A movement that spends its time seeking converts is a winning movement. We don't have the ability to be a militant movement focused on expunging heretics because that's the vice of a minority party. A majority party is big, boisterous and heterodox. And so that's what I think we need going forward.
- [60:08]
Jon Favreau
Seeking converts is really important, I think, because when I think about Democrats, you're talking about broadening the party and having a big tent and. And, you know, part of that is accepting and embracing people in the party who may not have 100% Democratic views. And, you know, when people hear Catholic, then they think abortion, contraception, gay marriage. But there's also, when you talk about, like, listening to Pope Leo, even when it's hard, there's something else that I think you get from Catholic social teaching, which is the ability to show grace to others and empathy to people who don't think like you. And these human interactions and conversations where you come to those conversations and you disagree, even fiercely, and instead of pushing that person away, you try to persuade them. Sure. And sometimes even if you can't persuade them and you just have that disagreement, you try to figure out a way to live together in a way that is peaceful and respectful. And you also, when people make mistakes or they say something wrong or they stray again, you give them, if they want to be redeemed, you give them grace.
- [61:23]
Christopher Hale
It reminds me of President Obama's speech at the DNC in 24, and he talked about, well, you know, they're not going to say the right things all the time, and that's okay. And I think that, I do think that the right wing critique of our party, largely on canceled culture, has a lot of correct reality to it. We're still having this fight to this very day. Who can we platform and who can we not? To me, that's an old fight and it's a fight of losers, honestly. Like Donald Trump's superpower, which I give him credit for, is he can have evangelicals and only fan porn stars in the same party and they get along. And so I think that somehow we need to make our party bigger where, yes, anti abortion Catholics and Planned Parenthood organizers can exist in the same movement. Because I think that democracy is what's at stake here.
- [62:09]
Jon Favreau
And it goes. This isn't an ideological thing either, because it goes in both directions. It's people to the left of us, it's people to the right of us. And it's not saying that. You just have to accept all of the positions yourself. It's saying that, like, this isn't a fixed endpoint. This is like a constant. It's effort, it's work, and it's work that's done in person better than just online.
- [62:30]
Christopher Hale
And I think that, I mean, Pope Leo, just to clarify, he is to the left of Bernie Sanders on economics. He is to the left of Bernie
- [62:36]
Jon Favreau
Sanders on the, on the plane, too. He's talking about, like, what does the global north owe to the global South?
- [62:41]
Christopher Hale
That would not be a winning message before.
- [62:43]
Jon Favreau
I want to talk about migration. Yeah, that was wild. I mean, people are like, people who aren't familiar with the Catholic Church and Catholic social teaching, and especially some of the South American priests and Jesuits, would be like, what is that? That's the most Marxist thing I've ever heard. I'm like, no, that's Catholic social teaching.
- [62:59]
Christopher Hale
And what's amazing is he's Bob from suburban Chicago. I know he's one of us. He can speak English, and that's his superpower. His superpower is, I see it time and again, is that Francis would say stuff and it'd be written about in the New York Times. But like, when the man in the white cassock is on your Twitter feed speaking natural English, challenging President Trump, on immigration, on war, that's when it makes a difference.
- [63:20]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. Christopher Hale, thank you so much for joining Offline and everyone Go subscribe to Letters from Leo. It's fantastic.
- [63:27]
Christopher Hale
Thank you for having me.
- [63:38]
Jon Favreau
Offline is a crooked media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilick Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer and Anisha Banerjee is our associate producer. Audio support from Charlotte Landis. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Matt de Groat is our VP of production. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva, Eric Schutt and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos. Every week, our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.