Opinion: The Pope Has More Power Than You Think

Written by Misha Mehrfar

Edited by Rebecca Oxtot, Francesca Howard, and Annika Lilja

Image under Public Domain

“Long Live Charles, crowned by God, the great Roman Emperor!” is what Pope Leo III exclaimed on Christmas Day, 800 C.E., when crowning Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. In that single gesture, the papacy did not merely bless a king, but created one. No monarch could claim legitimate authority without the Church’s approval. The Pope was the source of power, not a participant.

Most people assume that era ended somewhere around the Renaissance. After the Reformation, it is undeniable that the Pope had lost much of the power he had enjoyed in his glory days. In modern imagination, the Pope is a spiritual figurehead, a gentle old man in a white robe who blesses crowds and issues generic peacemaking pleas. In reality, the papacy is the only institution in the Western world that has had an unbroken chain of supreme leadership for two thousand years. The Catholic Church counts 1.4 billion members worldwide. It also runs the largest non-governmental school system in the world, and operates hospitals on six continents. When the Pope speaks on war, poverty, migration, and more, he is activating a global network that no elected government can replicate, and that no election can dismantle. Unlike any other Western religion, the Church has one man at the top of its structure who carries its full power and is prepared to use it.

This authority shows up in politics whether people want it or not. For example, in March, Leo XIV paid a visit to Monaco, praising the state’s official adherence to Catholicism, something no Pope has done in over 500 years. Prince Albert II of Monaco recently rejected a proposal to legalize abortion in his state, citing the doctrine of the Church. A sitting head of state, in 2026, shaping domestic law around Catholic teaching - that is Rome’s fingerprint on the modern world. The issue is far from being strictly international, nor is it strictly in support of the Pope. Even before President Trump’s rift with Leo, the Pentagon had shocked American Catholics by holding a Protestant-only Good Friday service, marking a significant departure from inclusive traditions. Secretary of War Hegseth also faced pushback for joining a church led by Pastor Doug Wilson, who has called for nationwide bans on Catholic practices. Coincidentally, the Administration’s April conflict with Rome regarding support for the Operation Epic Fury came right around the time both of these events occurred. To someone who doesn’t realize the role religion still plays in society, all of this may seem shocking. To others, it’s not.

Skeptics have long asserted that religion was falling out of place in Western society. Service attendance numbers across most major faiths have been down since the turn of the century. Those numbers tell an incomplete story, though. What they capture is the collapse of “casual religion,” specifically, people who invoke religion in name or culture but do not actually apply it to their own lives. These groups are declining. A few decades ago, major liberal religious positions were ones that sought to tone down religion and reduce its role in society. Now, this middle group is dissolving. Evidently, it is fundamentally a contradiction to try to disband religious life and everyday life. All religions, whether implicitly or explicitly, contain some sort of truth claim about the world, whether about the nature of the universe, moral codes to live by, or the divinity of holy books. It is antithetical to religion to simultaneously claim you follow the truth of the universe, as the major Abrahamic religions do, while also separating that from your personal beliefs. As we have entered a new world of politics, shaped by constant tensions, a fault line has arisen in Western politics based on these principles - secular vs. religious (not left vs. right). 

The data on this has been clear for years and is getting harder to ignore. In a February poll by Pew Research, 43% of Americans raised with a childhood religion said they have become extremely more religious, and 23% have become slightly more religious. At the same time, 48% of people raised with no childhood religion say they have become less religious and/or spiritual in adulthood. Religious people are becoming more religious, and secular people are becoming more secular. The middle, the vaguely spiritual crowd that once formed the soft center of society, is shrinking. People are being pushed to one side or the other, and as that happens, the two groups are developing not just different policy preferences but fundamentally different frameworks for understanding reality itself. They do not share the same assumptions about human nature, about where rights come from, about what a person owes to society, and what society owes to a person. Still, some have chosen to ignore the role religion plays in societies, even in governments that are supposed to be secular, like ours.

Consider an issue like abortion. The debate is almost always conducted in the language of rights, bodily autonomy, and medical privacy. Both sides have constructed careful legal and philosophical arguments. However, I argue that the underlying disagreement is really theological, no matter what people otherwise pretend. The question of when life begins, and what obligations that creates, is inseparable from a prior question about whether human beings carry inherent dignity because they are created in the image of G-d, or whether personhood is something assigned by law and convention. Those two starting points lead to irreconcilable solutions, and no amount of debate about trimesters or viability resolves the deeper dispute. The same is true of marriage, assisted dying, and LGBTQ+ rights, among others. Every major cultural controversy of the past fifty years can be traced back to this same divide.

Bringing this back to the Pope, the fault line is more visible than ever. Leo XIV has continuously spoken on political matters, much like his predecessor, surely influencing the ideologies of many worldwide. What’s more noteworthy, though, is the bigger role that religion itself still plays in society. While the law may not explicitly invoke divine authority, every legal and moral debate has it woven into it. After all, the document most frequently cited by the Founders was the Bible, accounting for an estimated 34% of all citations. Clearly, religion still plays a bigger role in society than cultural unification, and that role is only growing. Religion has more power than you think. The Pope has more power than you think.

---

Sources:

https://medium.com/catholic-way-home/the-first-all-catholic-presidential-race-vance-vs-newsom-in-2028-99b4125a93ec

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Leo-III

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/10/20/growing-share-of-us-adults-say-religion-is-gaining-influence-in-american-life/

https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/sywdwfy1111g#google_vignette

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/06/22/denominational-switching-among-u-s-jews-reform-judaism-has-gained-conservative-judaism-has-lost/

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-03/pope-leo-xiv-apostolic-visit-principality-monaco.html