Timeline: Catholic nationalism and the online right

After Pope Leo XIV criticised the war with Iran, President Trump attacked him on Truth Social, and in a Fox News interview reported on 14 April Vice President Vance said the Vatican should "stick to matters of morality." The U.S. bishops' doctrine committee chair defended the pope's use of just-war teaching. The dispute continued: on 5 May Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt that the pope was "endangering a lot of Catholics" (OSV News).

Religion News Service reported that newly released Justice Department files include 2019 messages in which Steve Bannon discussed with Jeffrey Epstein a never-made documentary based on In the Closet of the Vatican, writing that it "will take down Francis." RNS noted that it is unclear how serious the plan was. The book's author, Frédéric Martel, said he never accepted Bannon's offer.

Pope Francis wrote to the U.S. bishops criticising plans for mass deportations. Without naming him, he answered Vice President JD Vance's use of ordo amoris, writing that Christian love is not a "concentric expansion of interests" and pointing to the Good Samaritan.

Lauren Horn Griffin's article in the Journal of Media and Religion argues that men's trad Catholic Instagram accounts circulate "counterknowledge" as a populist strategy, building an identity around a community seen as under threat and presenting fragments of Catholic social teaching out of context.

Political commentator and podcaster Candace Owens announced on social media that she had been received into the Catholic Church at the Brompton Oratory in London, calling it a "decision to go home". Her conversion, a month after her split from The Daily Wire, drew wide coverage and debate in Catholic media over her statements about Jews.

Timothy Gordon, host of the Rules for Retrogrades podcast, lost his job at Garces Memorial, a Catholic high school in Bakersfield, California, after posting on 3 June 2020 that Black Lives Matter was a terrorist organisation. National Review's John Hirschauer, a friend of Gordon's, argued that the dismissal followed swiftly after the comment.

In a letter dated 25 June 2019, Cardinal Raymond Burke ended his association with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, writing that he did not think Frédéric Martel's book In the Closet of the Vatican should be made into a film. Steve Bannon had been promoting such a film. The episode was revisited in 2026 after Epstein-file messages about the film were released.