Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, born in Chicago, is now Pope Leo XIV. He is the first American, by way of Italy and Peru, to be elevated to the See of Peter.

His election coincided with the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945. Pope Leo XIV’s first words on the balcony of St. Peter’s were the first words of the Risen Christ: “Peace be with you!”

The world ardently desired peace in 1945. Peace remains desired now — enduring peace, true harmony, not just the absence of war. That peace which is most deeply desired in hearts, in families, in cultures and between nations, is not the work purely of human hands, but remains the gift of Jesus risen from the dead.

Pope Leo began what has been the primary task of the Apostle Peter and his successors since the day of Pentecost, to bear witness to the Risen Christ who, as the Holy Father put it in his first address, “is the bridge by which the love of God reaches us.”

After Leo’s election, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York — the contemporary

caput mundi

, as Rome was in Peter’s day — said of the new Holy Father that he is a “citizen of the world.”

Having grown up in Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Leo studied in Rome, spent two decades as a missionary priest and bishop in Peru, and 12 years in Rome as the superior general of his religious community, the Order of St. Augustine.

“Citizen of the world” is an appellation in bad odour today, as “globalists” are denigrated as architects of all manner of evils and ills. Those who faced the reconstruction of Europe in 1945 — and the building of an enduring peace — did not fear the broader view. They had painfully fresh memories of the horrors of nationalism and the failure of international bridge-building.

Dolan of New York added that the Christian’s true citizenship is in “the world to come” or, as Pope Leo put it, “to walk together toward that homeland that God has prepared.”

Here and now though, the Christian is called to be a citizen of the world, not in opposition to his own country, but as a complement to it. The salvation promised first to Israel has become a light for all nations.

The word “catholic” means “universal,” which why the Catholic Church speaks of her pope as the “universal pastor” and herself as a sign of the universal bonds of humanity. Every Catholic is supposed to be a citizen of the world; Pope Leo’s tricontinental life just makes that more plain.

In Peru he was in a different country, but not amongst strangers. He learned a new language, but did not preach a different faith. He adopted the nationality of that country, but he already shared with his flock a common baptism.

In 2025, the world is turning away from the institutions of peace built after 1945. Those are strategic and commercial decisions, but they reflect a moral change, a desire to draw back from the other, a retreat from great catholic enterprises, in the universal sense.

God, we pray, gives the Church — and the world — the pope she needs rather than what any faction might want. Is it possible that this new shepherd — whose own life links together the rich and the poor, the north and the south, the material and the spiritual, the faith of a young country with the heritage of the Church Fathers — is what is needed now?

Some nonsense was talked about a taboo against an American pope. The papacy was in Italian hands since 1523, nearly a century before the Mayflower sailed. Any taboo, such as it was, applied to every country but one.

The first non-Italian in centuries was St. John Paul II in 1978, opening the papacy to all peoples. He lived until 2005, succeeded by a German and then an Argentinian. Thus “the American taboo” lasted 20 years and two popes.

The fear had supposedly been that the world’s commercial and strategic superpower ought not to “control” the moral conscience of mankind, too. Perhaps the cardinals in the conclave took note that America no longer aspires to lead the alliances of peace and comity that emerged after 1945.

In the course of World War II, Chamberlain’s famous “peace in our time” was roundly mocked as a great failure. The diplomacy failed, but the phrase itself comes from the lovely Anglican liturgy. It is a prayer addressed to God, not the chancelleries of Europe then, nor America now.

The world needs those words, the words of comfort, the words of fraternity, the words of salvation. The world needs them now, as always, and on Thursday evening they sounded again, to the city and to the world:

Peace be with you!

• Full text: Read the first address of Robert Francis Prevost, to be known as Pope Leo XIV
• Michael Higgins: Expect Pope Leo XIV to bring more liberal controversy

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s election victory speech included a note of humility: “Over my long career, I have made many mistakes, and I will make more, but I commit to admitting them openly, to correcting them quickly, and always learning from them.” Yet it is too late to correct one of his big mistakes. Will he at least admit to and learn from it?

During the election campaign, 28 Liberal candidates (19 of them elected) signed onto a five-point anti-Israel

Vote Palestine

platform. Vote Palestine began as

a BDS project

, and quickly gathered steam after a trial run in the 2021 election. The platform contains

demands

— such as a two-way arms embargo against Israel, a full boycott of Israel-controlled territories and recognition of Palestine as a state — that do not reflect current Liberal policy. In total, 362 candidates signed on.

Carney could have stopped his own candidates’ irresponsible trend early

in its trajectory

by issuing a memo that foreign policy is the purview of party leadership, not individual candidates, and ordering signers to rescind their endorsement of the platform. Instead, he remained silent, essentially giving the green light for more candidates to pledge fealty to a platform crafted by ideological stakeholders in a global campaign to delegitimize Israel and whitewash terrorism.

By endorsing these demands, the candidates lent an air of respectability to the anti-Israel groups that organized the campaign — including the

Palestinian Youth Movement

(PYM), one of the lead organizers — obscuring their ugly

values and activities

, which include celebrating Hamas’s October 7 pogrom, lionizing Hamas and Hezbollah, and organizing Jew-baiting student encampments at universities throughout the United States and Canada.

In May 2024, PYM organized the People’s Conference for Palestine, featuring speakers affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both designated as terrorist organizations in Canada, the U.S., Israel and the European Union.

PYM’s aim is to normalize terror as a righteous response to (alleged) colonialists. The most insidious of the five Vote Palestine platform demands, therefore, is the innocuous sounding, “Address anti-Palestinian racism (APR) and protect freedom of expression on Palestine.”

The definition of “anti-Palestinian racism,” as conceived by the

Canadian Arab Lawyers Association

, includes speech or action that “dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.” The word “narrative” — in this case an origin story held sacred by a group of people that is based in belief rather than evidence — is a trap, inserted into the APR definition to promote a legal prohibition against criticism of that group’s beliefs.

Along with other Islamist groups obsessed with Israel’s alleged sins, PYM represents a movement best described by Israeli politician Einat Wilf as “

Palestinianism

.” The Palestinianism movement is dedicated to opposing the existence — and more important any right to the existence — of a Jewish state by any means necessary, including October 7-style massacres.

Palestinianism’s umbrella narrative is that Zionism is an inherently racist ideology. Drawing on that premise, pro-Zionist expression may be legislated as hate speech, but the glorification of Hamas “martyrs” and calls for the eradication of Israel should not be. (When Bill C-63, the online harms act, is revived, they may

get their wish

.)

Vote Palestine’s strategy, according to one of its

Instagram posts

, is to “force Palestine onto the debate stage through nationwide visibility” and shame political actors who do not endorse its platform.

Leading PYM activist Yara Shoufani, who has a

long rap sheet

of anti-Israel extremism, explained on a

podcast

how “pressure is applied” by PYM foot soldiers within ridings to non-endorsing candidates. They “make it impossible to organize fundraising events … impossible for those MPs to canvass without being met by someone from within the community asking, ‘Why are you not supporting an arms embargo?’ ” she said.

Shoufani seems proud that PYM has managed to, in her words, “create a kind of crisis within the Canadian electoral system.” And all of this, fellow Canadians, is what 362 candidates — not a single one of them Conservative — signed onto.

At 1.8 million and growing, Muslims constitute around five per cent of Canada’s population. The

Canadian Muslim Vote

, a nonprofit, estimates that Muslims hold significant influence in between 60-80 of 343 ridings.

According to

Joe Adam George

, lead researcher for Islamist threats in Canada at the Middle East Forum, “Islamists have been working overtime” to see “their favoured party,” the Liberals, re-elected, “so that the good times keep rolling for them for at least another four years.”

Credulous candidates’ greed for Muslim votes is understandable. Which is why it is so important in these matters that savvy political leaders provide a backstop to their candidates’ lack of judgment in collaborating with what essentially amounts to foreign interference in the election.

As my colleague Tristin Hopper

posted on X

in regard to the Vote Palestine scandal, “This is how foreign interference happens. If a literal pro-terror group can get an MP’s signature without difficulty, you think they’re standing guard for thee against Iran or China?”

National Post

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Twitter.com/BarbaraRKay

• Opinion: Canadian universities have an Islamist problem
• John Ivison: Government policy is now in the hands of pro-Palestinian radicals

What allowed U.S. President Donald Trump to move so quickly since taking office in January is an approach that may also leave many of his policies easy to reverse by his successors: unilateral executive action.

The current occupant of the White House is very comfortable acting in a kingly fashion, but it’s an approach he inherited from his predecessors, as the presidency has increasingly come to resemble something akin to an elective monarchy, with Congress willingly — almost eagerly — assuming a lesser role.

But if the political class is comfortable sliding towards an all-powerful presidency, that’s not necessarily true of voters, most of whom believe the country should function more like the republic it was intended to be.

Last week, AP-NORC pollsters

reported

that “57 per cent of adults feel Donald Trump has gone too far in using presidential power to achieve his goals.” Unsurprisingly, Democrats are most likely to agree that Trump has gone too far, with 86 per cent endorsing that sentiment, while only 23 per cent of Republicans say the same. But a solid 61 per cent of independents also believe Trump is abusing his presidential powers.

Tellingly, if you take Trump’s name out of the question and just ask about the presidency, 54 per cent of respondents think “the president has too much power.”

Pew Research conducted a

similar survey

in February, which found that 65 per cent of American adults believed it was “too risky” to give Trump more power to deal with the country’s problems, and an even higher 78 per cent said the same of granting such powers to U.S. presidents in general.

The

executive orders

Trump has been relying on to carry out his agenda used to be more like interoffice memos for managing executive branch offices under the president’s control. Nobody even bothered trying to track executive orders

until 1907

. Over the years, however, they’ve evolved into a means for instructing federal agencies on the exercise of their power in novel ways and on the interpretation of laws — often beyond the intent of legislation passed by Congress.

“If it seems as if more recent presidents have had more power than even Washington or Lincoln, it’s not an illusion,” Erin Peterson wrote in

Harvard Law Today

in 2019. “The last three presidents in particular have strengthened the powers of the office through an array of strategies. One approach that attracts particular attention — because it allows a president to act unilaterally, rather than work closely with Congress — is the issuing of executive orders.”

Peterson wrote that even before the left-leaning editorial board of the New York Times

advised Joe Biden

, a president the newspaper supported, to “ease up on the executive actions,” because “this is no way to make law.”

The Times editorial board warned that, while executive actions are tempting for a president who can’t get his preferred programs through a resistant — or simply stalled — Congress, they’re relatively easy for a subsequent president to undo through new orders.

Sure enough, among Trump’s initial actions was

reversing
some

of Biden’s

orders

. The Biden administration, of course, had already done just that to

orders

issued during Trump’s first term. You can already guess what the next president is likely to do to Trump’s preferred policies.

Importantly, Trump has turned global trade into a matter of personal whim by invoking the

International Emergency Economic Powers Act

(IEEPA). Passed in 1977, the IEEPA is only one of a set of laws Congress passed to offload its responsibilities to the president.

The law allows the president to exercise wide authority to regulate the economy during declared emergencies. So President Trump issued

an order

declaring that “foreign trade and economic practices have created a national emergency” and imposed “responsive tariffs to strengthen the international economic position of the United States and protect American workers.”

Is simply evoking the word “emergency” a good enough excuse for exercising such power? Plaintiffs

suing

the federal government don’t think so. They point out that

Article 1, Sec. 8

of the U.S. Constitution reserves the regulation of foreign trade and tariff powers to Congress.

The courts will decide if Congress gets to surrender those powers to the president. If the courts go along with the cession of authority, it essentially means the constitution of a republic can be turned into the blueprint for a monarchy by sufficiently lazy or craven lawmakers.

“That turns the constitution on its head,” Gene Healy observed in his recently revised book, “

The Cult of the Presidency

.” “The Framers erected significant barriers to the passage of legislation in an attempt to curb ‘the facility and excess of lawmaking.’… But when the executive branch makes the law, those constitutional hurdles then obstruct legislative efforts to repeal it.”

But if the courts oppose Trump on his unilateral assumption of the power to impose broad tariffs, it’s reassuring to know that Americans expect the president to abide by the ruling. According to an

April Ipsos poll

, 83 per cent of Americans think the president must abide by court orders.

It’s worth emphasizing that criticisms of excessive presidential power don’t necessarily reflect one way or another on any given president’s policies. It’s possible to be enthusiastic about Trump’s

Department of Government Efficiency

, favour repealing intrusive

green appliance regulations

that raise costs and limit choice, and advocate for America’s military allies to

pay more

for their own defence costs without thinking that any U.S. president should rule unilaterally.

Unfortunately, even as the power of the chief executive grows with every new officeholder, Americans’ appetite for a restrained presidency tends to be situational.

In its

February poll

, Pew Research observed that, “In general, majorities of both Republicans and Democrats are skeptical about giving U.S. presidents more power. However, their opinions tend to shift depending on which party controls the presidency.” An accompanying graph of opinion over time shows supporters of both major parties becoming most skeptical of presidential power only when the opposing party holds the White House.

That an overall majority of Americans now agree that President Trump has gone too far in bypassing Congress and acting on his own demonstrates that there may finally be an opportunity to restrain the presidency. Whatever is done should bind not just the current officeholder, but all those to come.

National Post

• Raymond J. de Souza: Tendency towards enhanced executive power on rise in U.S. and Canada
• J.D. Tuccille: Don’t bet on a third Trump term