<p>Hurricane Trump has not found the American Catholic Church unprepared. In fact, while the US can no longer be considered solely a Protestant country, it is the Catholic Church that fills the columns of the Republican Party, turned into Trump’s Party. Catholic conservatism, no longer the uncomfortable fringe, has finally become mainstream religious culture since Trumpism has surged in the United States, overcoming a history of Catholic proximity to political democratic traditions. This transition is due to several structural factors. But one noticeable element to be considered is the backlash effect for Pope Francis’s emphasis on social justice issues and the environment, and his branded ‘heretical’ opening to letting divorced and civilly married Catholics to receive the sacraments. Pope Francis rejected the fear that modernity had called forth an onslaught of secularism undermining Catholicism, and Christianity’s cultural and social role. Finally, Francis’s embrace of guys and lesbians, and his liminal papacy, in the grieving globalized world, to the more overtly diverse humanity that is featured in the twenty-first-century life, marked a thunderclap break with the kind of orthodoxy that had long defined the Catholic Church to the faithful and outsiders alike. In Rome, the complex transition from Jorge Bergoglio to the first Chicago-born Pope, Leo XIV, is still underway at the Vatican. And many questions still have to wait for an answer.</p>