In a letter to US bishops, the Catholic leader warned that the plan will harm the already vulnerable.

Francis previously said that Trump cannot be a Christian if he plans to build a wall to keep migrants from Mexico out.

Pope Francis hurts right arm after another fall

It’s a peculiar symptom of where we’re at—caught between phases of consciousness, between the ruins of one world and the unknown shape of the next—to be seeing two things at the same time. Or to be seeing the same thing in two ways simultaneously. Stuck in the transition, we’re condemned to a species of double vision: cross-eyed, as it were, in the cross-fade. And sometimes, sometimes, this can be quite useful. When you meet a guy, for example, like Francis of Assisi.

Genius or crackpot? Both. Sensuous embracer of life or self-mortifying freak? Both. Exhibitionist or recluse? Anarchist or company man? Runaway rich kid or true voice of the rejected? Both, both, and both. And when God spoke to him in 1206, his voice issuing from a crucifix and saying, “Francis, do you not see that my house is falling into ruin? Go, therefore, and repair the house,” did God mean the dilapidated, bat-flitted, holes-in-the-roof church in which Francis, at that moment, happened to be kneeling? Or did he mean the whole of medieval Christendom? He meant, of course—are you getting the idea?—both.

Volker Leppin’s Francis of Assisi, newly translated from the German by Rhys S. Bezzant, is subtitled The Life of a Restless Saint, and the restlessness of the subject is shared by the author. His book, Leppin writes, “does not present itself as a biography in the classic sense.” Which is not to suggest that Leppin, a professor of historical theology at Yale, has written some kind of jazzy meta-book. But Francis of Assisi does have double vision, maneuvering constantly between hagiography and history, legend and fact, heaven and Earth, miracles and—what’s the opposite of miracles? Leppin comes not to debunk but rather to discover in what fashion those early, physics-defying accounts of Francis, the tales told within the blast radius of his actual presence, might be understood as true.

Francis was born around 1181, in Assisi in central Italy, the son of a well-to-do merchant named Pietro di Bernardone. After that, the story gets hazy. Some versions would have him quite a nicely behaved youth; in others, the more fun ones, he’s a profligate, a sybarite, a tearaway. Seeking honors on the battlefield, he signs up for one of the endless local town-on-town skirmishes, only to be swiftly captured and imprisoned. When he gets out, a year or so later, the changes begin: conversion.

[From the August 2000 issue: Being St. Francis]

Francis tears off his fancy clothes; he kisses lepers; he starts begging. It’s all a bit unbalanced. He turns his back on privilege and plunges madly downward. (Perhaps this is the point in the story at which Francis—were he trying something similar today, here in America—would find himself scooped up by psychiatry and institutionalized, or at the very least heavily medicated, at the behest of his family maybe, or he’d go rattling unattended into the tunnels of the justice system.)

Desperate to impoverish himself, he tries to donate a large amount of his father’s money to a local church; the priest, afraid of Bernardone Sr., refuses it, whereupon Francis—the anti-alchemist, King Midas in reverse, turning gold back to base metal—casts the money scornfully aside, “valuing it,” as Saint Bonaventure wrote in his 13th-century Life of Saint Francis, “no more than dust that is trodden under foot.”

But gradually, via great humiliations, a stint in a cave, and a complete rupture with his father, these lungings and impetuosities resolve themselves into the properly achieved Franciscan humor, a kind of continual outrageous sanctity. Francis becomes Francis, and he begins to attract followers. What he’s doing is pretty straightforward. He’s living—actually living—by the words of Jesus: Love your neighbor, give it all away, praise God, and don’t worry about tomorrow.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

Pretty straightforward, and a head-on challenge to the world. It is no longer enough, for example, to give alms to the lepers and walk off feeling pious: Now, like Francis and his brothers, you have to accompany the lepers. You have to stand with them in what Leppin calls “the world of the excluded,” of the lowest in society, which in the cosmic reversal effected by the Gospels turns out to be the highest place on Earth.

To get in touch with the miraculous Francis, the folkloric Francis, read the Fioretti, or The Little Flowers of St. Francis, a 14th-century collection of tales about the saint and his friars. It’s a beautiful book. Here we find Francis “raising his face to heaven” like a solar panel, taming wolves and preaching to the birds and subsisting for weeks on half a loaf of bread to “cast the venom of vainglory from him.” We see him healing a leper, and then, when that leper dies (“of another infirmity”) a couple of weeks later, encountering the man’s heaven-bound soul whooshing past him in a wood.

We see him—in a typically self-condemning mood, regarding himself as the vilest of sinners and the basest of men—earnestly instruct Brother Leo to tell him, “Truly thou dost merit the deepest hell.” And Leo tries to say it—he tries his best—but when he opens his mouth, what comes bulbing out instead, Jim Carrey–style, is, “God will perform so many good works through thee that thou shalt go to paradise.” Francis, peeved, renews the effort, enjoining Leo this time to tell him, “Verily thou art worthy of being numbered among the accursed.” Again Leo assents, but the words that come through him, rebelliously, are, “O Friar Francis, God will do in such wise that among the blessed thou shalt be singularly blessed.” And repeat. It has the rhythm of an SNL sketch. We also meet the amazing, more-Francis-than-Francis Brother Juniper, a figure of such affronting innocence that Francis himself, when he’s wrangling a particularly tenacious demon, simply has to mention Juniper’s name to make the demon flee.

G. K. Chesterton wrote very beautifully about Francis. For him, the saint’s jangling polarities resolve themselves quite naturally if we imagine him as a lover: Francis was in love with God, so he did all the crazy zigzag things that lovers do. The feats, the ecstasies, the prostrations and abnegations. And he loved the Church too. “Francis,” Leppin notes, “certainly did not engage in any polemic against the clergy.” It never occurred to him to question directly the institutions and practices of Catholicism: The polemic, so to speak, was himself. The story goes that when he went to Rome to get Pope Innocent III’s blessing, and Innocent said something waspish about him looking like a swineherd, Francis left the papal court, found a couple of pigs in the street, rolled around companionably in their pig-mess, and then came back.

Did that really happen? Does it matter? A story like that, we need it to be true. And right now we need Saint Francis. Now that kindness is countercultural, we need his extremes of wild charity to pull us back toward it. And we need his asceticism: His self-denial, his merry disdain of health and comfort and security, is a rebuke to our self-care. There are no safe spaces, and no guarantees—the only stability is the bottomlessness of divine love. The trapdoor held open by grace. So we take the hand of Francis, and down we go.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The Wild Charity of Saint Francis.”

As I witnessed the despair and incomprehension of liberals worldwide after Donald Trump’s victory in November’s U.S. presidential election, I had a sinking feeling that I had been through this before. The moment took me back to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism and the lifting of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War II. The difference was that the world that collapsed in 1989 was theirs, the Communists’. Now it is ours, the liberals’.

In 1989, I was living within a Warsaw Pact nation, in my final year of studying philosophy at Bulgaria’s Sofia University, when the world turned upside down. The whole experience felt like an extended course in French existentialism. To see the sudden end of something that we had been told would last forever was bewildering—liberating and alarming in equal measure. My fellow students and I were overwhelmed by the new sense of freedom, but we were also acutely conscious of the fragility of all things political. That radical rupture turned out to be a defining experience for my generation.

But the rupture was even broader—on a greater global scale—than many of us realized at the time. The year 1989 was indeed an annus mirabilis, but one very different from the way Western liberals have framed it for the past three decades. The resilience that the Chinese Communist Party demonstrated in suppressing the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square turned out to be more consequential than the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Russians, the most important aspect of 1989 was not the end of Communism, but the end of the Soviet empire, with the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. It was thus the year that Osama bin Laden proclaimed the jihadists’ victory over the godless U.S.S.R. And 1989 was also when nationalism began to reclaim its political primacy in the former Yugoslavia.

The return of Trump to power in the United States may prove another such instance in a period of enormous political rupture. If liberals are to respond effectively to the challenge of a new Trump administration, they will need to reflect critically on what happened in 1989, and discard the story they’ve always told themselves about it. The means of overcoming despair is to be found in better comprehension.

[Tom Nichols: Stalin’s revenge]

From a liberal point of view, comparing the anti-Soviet revolutions of 1989 with the illiberal revolutions today might seem scandalous. In Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase, 1989 was “the end of history,” whereas Trump’s victory, many liberals assert, may portend the end of democracy. The year the Berlin Wall fell was viewed as the triumph of the West; now the decline of the West dominates the conversation. The collapse of Communism was marked by a vision for a democratic, capitalist future; that future is now riddled with uncertainty. The mood in 1989 was internationalist and optimistic; today, it has soured into nationalism, at times even nihilism.

But to insist on those differences between then and now is to miss the point about their similarities. Living through such moments in history teaches one many things, but the most important is the sheer speed of change: People can totally alter their views and political identity overnight; what only yesterday was considered unthinkable seems self-evident today. The shift is so profound that people soon find their old assumptions and choices unfathomable.

Translated to this moment: How, just six months ago, could any sane person have believed that an aging and unpopular Joe Biden could be reelected?

Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more. The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return. Even most liberals do not want it back. Few Americans today are comfortable with the notion of American exceptionalism.

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, some political commentators grimly looked back to the 1930s, when fascism stalked the world. The problem is that the 1930s are beyond living memory, whereas the 1990s are still vivid to many of us. What I learned from that decade is that a radical political rupture gives the winners a blank check. Understanding why people voted for Trump will be little help in apprehending what he will do in office.

Political ruptures are achieved by previously unimaginable coalitions, united more by their intensity than a common program. Politicians who belong to these coalitions typically have a chameleonlike ability to suit themselves to the moment—none more so, in our time, than Trump. American liberals who are gobsmacked that people can treat a billionaire playboy as the leader of an anti-establishment movement might recall that Boris Yeltsin, the hero of Russia’s 1990s anti-Communist revolution, had been one of the leaders of the Communist Party just a few short years earlier.

[Read: How China made the Tiananmen Square massacre irrelevant]

Like the end of the Soviet era, Trump’s reelection victory will have global dimensions. It marks the passing of the United States as a liberal empire. America remains the world’s preeminent power, yes, and will remain an empire of sorts, but it won’t be a liberal one. As Biden’s spotty record of mobilizing support to defend the “liberal international order” in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, the very idea of such an order was for many critics always a Western fiction. It existed as long as the U.S. had the power and political will to impose it.

This is not what Trump will do. In foreign policy, Trump is neither a realist nor an isolationist; he is a revisionist. Trump is convinced that the U.S. is the biggest loser in the world it has made. Over the past three decades, in his view, America has become a hostage, rather than a hegemon, of the liberal international order. In the postwar world, the U.S. successfully integrated its defeated adversaries Germany and Japan into democratic governance, international trade, and economic prosperity. This did not apply to China: In Trump’s view, Beijing has been the real winner of the post-1989 changes.

Trump’s second coming will clearly be different from the first. In 2016, Trump’s encounter with American power was like a blind date. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, and American power didn’t know exactly who he was. Not this time. America may remain a democracy, but it will become a more feral one. Under new management, its institutions will likely depart from the safety of consensual politics and go wild. In times of rapid change, political leaders seek not to administer the state, but to defeat it. They see the state and the “deep state” as synonymous. Illiberal leaders select their cabinet members in the same way that emperors used to choose the governors of rebellious provinces: What matters most is the appointee’s loyalty and capacity to resist being suborned or co-opted by others.

In Trump’s first administration, chaos reigned; his second administration will reign by wielding chaos as a weapon. This White House will overwhelm its opponents by “flooding the zone” with executive orders and proclamations. He will leave many adversaries guessing about why he is making the decisions he does, and disorient others with their rapidity and quantity.

[George Packer: The end of Democratic delusions]

In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by promising normalcy. Normalcy will no longer help the Democrats. In the most recent example of an antipopulist victory, Donald Tusk triumphed in Poland’s 2023 parliamentary elections and returned to be prime minister, not because he promised business as usual but because his party, Civic Platform, was able to forge a compelling new political identity. Tusk’s party adopted more progressive positions on such controversial issues as abortion rights and workers’ protections, but it also wrapped itself in the flag and embraced patriotism. Tusk offered Poles a new grand narrative, not simply a different electoral strategy. Civic Platform’s success still depended on forming a coalition with other parties, a potentially fragile basis for governing, but it offers a template, at least, for how the liberal center can reinvent itself and check the advance of illiberal populism.

The risk for the United States is high: The next few years could easily see American politics descend into cruel, petty vengefulness, or worse. But for liberals to respond to this moment by acting as defenders of a disappearing status quo would be unwise. To do so would entail merely reacting to whatever Trump does. The mindset of resistance may be the best way to understand tyranny, but it is not the best way to handle a moment of radical political rupture, in which tyranny is possible but not inevitable.

Back in 1989, the political scientist Ken Jowitt, the author of a great study of Communist upheaval in that period, New World Disorder, observed that a rupture of this type forces political leaders to devise a new vocabulary. At such moments, formerly magic words do not work anymore. The slogan “Democracy is under threat” did not benefit the Democrats during the election, because many voters simply did not see Trump himself as that threat.

As the writer George Orwell observed, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The challenge of apprehending the new, even when the fact of its arrival is undeniable, means that it may come as a shock to liberal sensibilities how few tears will be shed for the passing of the old order. Contrary to what seemed the correct response in 2016, the task of Trump opponents today is not to resist the political change that he has unleashed but to embrace it—and use this moment to fashion a new coalition for a better society.