Simony, properly defined by the Catholic Church as the selling of ecclesiastical offices and positions, has been designated as a grave sin since approximately 300 C.E. and can merit excommunication for the parties involved.
So what is to be made of recent reports that the Trump/MAGA media machine actively courted votes in this month’s Papal Conclave that elected Cardinal Robert Prevost to the Throne of Peter?
“All of us will be articulating our views quite vociferously, I expect [prior to the Sequestration],” Michael Knowles, a Catholic and conservative podcaster, told Axios. No less than Trump’s MAGA Svengali Steve Bannon proclaimed his intention to create a “show of force of Traditionalists,” the sect of revanchist Catholics who use the cover of the Latin Mass as a vehicle for an entire neo-fascist agenda.
“For an institution that is 2,000 years old, that traces its origins back to St. Peter, which supposedly chooses its head based on the direct guidance of God, there’s an extraordinary amount of human politicking and horse trading going on,” Gareth Gore said in an interview with The Daily Beast. The author of Opus, Gore is an expert on the secretive conservative group Opus Dei that exerts its tremendous impact upon secular politics. The Napa Institute, a pro-MAGA Catholic nonprofit, flew an entire coterie of big-dollar donors to Rome for their annual pilgrimage that just coincidentally had been scheduled for the same week as the Papal Memorial Requiem. While this was in fact unintentional, only a heretic would not skip that opportunity for Borgia-level banality.
I have been following the developments that led to this moment for 25 years and there are larger tides that have to be addressed to properly gauge these events.
First point, there has existed for a long time in the United States a robust and distinctly neoconservative Catholic media machine, one that has repeatedly mobilized against progressive Catholics as well as against the larger advancement of progressive causes. Since the Papacy of St. John Paul II, the US cable television broadcaster EWTN has evangelized teachings aligning with the most regressive views amongst the hierarchy regarding gays, women, and reproductive healthcare.
This is far beyond the scope of the old Cardinal Fulton Sheen public access show and is best embodied by the career trajectory of one Raymond Arroyo. Arroyo is a frequent broadcaster on Fox News Channel after having established his bona fides as the dutiful lay member of the EWTN ministry when it was led by the late Mother Angelica, a Poor Clare nun whose publicity stunts included gaslighting Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles in the press.
As the wider American public has recently begun to discuss Christian Nationalism within the Trump Coalition during the past decade, it has been easy for this writer to find echoes and resonances with the Traditionalist stances broadcast by this media machine. Traditionalist Catholicism provides a major intellectual pillar to Christian Nationalism equaled only by the Calvinist thinkers like R.J. Rushdoony or the barn-storming mega-church base-building fire-and-brimstone preachers. As a formal repudiation of Liberation Theology, these intellectual currents instead place high estimation on Aquinas as a distinctly Medieval notion of theology governing the body.
Second point, the Republican Party has been completely overtaken by the “dirty tricks” Roger Stone School of Politics. Stone first rose to prominence as a member of the coterie surrounding Richard Nixon because of his ruthless use of “ratf-cking” tactics to defenestrate an enemy by any means necessary. This was seen most clearly in 2016 with how Stone supported nominee Donald Trump alongside Steve Bannon. In All the President’s Men (dir. Alan Pakula, 1976), Robert Walden plays Donald Segretti, a jittery, confused 31-year-old Nixon administration bagman trying to lay low after one particularly ludicrous “ratf-cking” stunt, at a little hole in the wall named Watergate, goes way outside of expectations. Walden effectively is Pakula’s stand-in for not only Segretti (a still-living personage) but also the altogether immature nature of this mode of political engagement. Segretti is a weaselly cretin who confesses “I’m probably going to jail” yet continues to protest innocence. While it was embraced for a variety of noble reasons at the time, perhaps the most valuable nugget we take from Pakula’s film is how intellectually bankrupt this mode of politics truly is and always has been. Whilst seemingly a truism, in fact it is later the logic of fascism that seeks to dignify “ratf-cking” as anything but that.
Third point, Steve Bannon himself has dedicated a significant amount of time to courting this aforementioned Catholic Traditionalist cohort in service of his own nativist agenda. His politics have a clear debt to the rhetoric of the schismatic French Bishop Marcel Lefebvre, whose intransigence regarding reforms under the Second Vatican Council became so strong he was excommunicated by John Paul II.
The stalking horse for Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) acolytes was fanatical estimation for the old Latin Rite Mass liturgy. Yet this is merely a cover for the much more despicable rejection of the Second Vatican Council and its formal repudiations of racism and antisemitism. SSPX represented the final gasp of the Vichy collaborator generation, the fascists in France who endorsed the Nazi invasion and its puppet regime under General Petain. The Bishop furthermore served as a bridging figure between the wartime generation and the French New Right. His intransigence on the Mass signified a rejection of not just Modernity but also the lessons of Auschwitz. Out of this brew is where books like the apocalyptic screed Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail emerged. Filled with ghoulish imagery, up to and including a villainous Asian named only “The Turd Eater,” the novel is to the European New Right what The Turner Diaries was to the U.S. militia movement and characters like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah Federal Building at Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people.
Combined with the forces that have historically relied on petrochemical extraction, mining, and other capital interests pursuant to the imperial agenda, Traditionalist Catholicism has played an overtly political role in American public life, in ways perhaps unseen at the time, that might be shocking. Ever since the 2000 presidential election in Florida, wherein Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of the Republican nominee as well as a Knight of Columbus, illegally flipped the plebiscite to George W. Bush, Traditionalist Catholicism has insinuated itself into the halls of power in Washington, impacting the jurisprudence of multiple Supreme Court Justices and thereby underwriting major laws and decisions, including the repeal of federally-guaranteed and safe access to abortion healthcare and contraception. Entire studies have been undertaken, by scholars and journalists, so as to trace the roots between the Catholic Conservatives on the Supreme Court, the secretive Opus Dei sect, and various major industrial interests over the last quarter century. Part of the infamous VaticanLeaks scandal that culminated with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI pertained to the illicit use of Vatican charity funds in relationship with an offshore African oil field development project, serious petrocapital industrial interests crossing international boundaries and relying on multiple nation-state banks for illegal transactions.
Now comes verifiable evidence that these forces initiated a full-court blitz against the Curia last month in anticipation of the Vatican Conclave that ultimately elected Cardinal Prevost to the Throne of Peter. The new papacy of Leo XIV proved to be a visible disappointment for the MAGA Catholics and other conservatives who labeled Prevost as a “woke Marxist” over social media posts denouncing the xenophobic nativism and brutal treatment of migrants by the Trump administration.
“What we’re all praying for, because we’ve seen, at least in Europe and the United States, this resurgence of the traditional Christians. People are tired of the mamby, pamby, light, shallow, substance-less Christian faith,” said Jack Posobiec, a prominent Traditionalist Catholic, on May 7, 2025 with regards to his own desired outcome of the Conclave.
Oh if only their sweet words had merely taken flight upon the wings of the seraphim!
Soon after the news of Francis’s death reached faithful the world over, the American counter-revolution mobilized, Vatican watchers say.
Red-eyes to Rome were booked.
Long-distance phone calls were made.
Various cardinals likely received sudden dinner invitations.
No one involved calls it “lobbying” – that would be untoward, and it’s “subtler than what you see in DC”, Philip Lawler, a conservative Catholic writer and the author of a book critical of Francis, said. “But representatives of all points of view, from across the spectrum, will be doing their best to ensure that the cardinals understand their concerns.”
“I’m going to Rome on Saturday, and I’m late to the game,” Francis X Maier, a Catholic writer and the former adviser to Archbishop Charles Chaput, said last week. “There are all sorts of people already meeting with bishops and cardinals and trying to create the environment that they want.”… [Emphasis added]
“Do I have time to talk to the Guardian about the fake pope?” Steve Bannon asked when I reached out for an interview. “Of course I do. Always.”
The Daily Beast further reported:
Napa Institute members are staying in the Hotel de Russie, a five-star luxury hotel in the heart of the Eternal City where rooms start at 2,000 euros (more than $2,200) per night. Since Pope Francis’ funeral on April 26, they’ve joined Cardinal James Harvey, another American who will vote for the next pope, for a private dinner, the [New York] Times reported. Over the weekend, they also attended a dinner at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, also known as the Angelicum or Collegio Angelico, where [Napa founder Tim] Busch served his Trinitas Cellars wines, according to the National Catholic Reporter.
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was one of the most prominent and popular Catholic clerics in the mainstream American media at the start of this century. McCarrick was a frequent Sunday morning talk show guest, making regular appearances on Meet the Press and CNN. His subtle intransigence when asked to withhold from Communion pro-choice Catholics, such as Ted and Patrick Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and basically every other Democrat with a Baptismal Certificate, drove his peers insane with rage.
He was also a closeted homosexual and a serial sexual assailant. Cardinal McCarrick was infamous for bringing Seminarians to his New Jersey beach house for trysts. This not only violated his clerical vows but also was ethically unforgivable owing to the undeniable power imbalances in a sexual relationship between a student and the top authority that can unilaterally for any reason expel that pupil from their matriculation.
The Right used McCarrick as a weapon against Francis.
Former Papal Nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò, a harsh critic of Rome’s new direction, authored a scandalous letter claiming that Francis had perpetrated an active cover-up to hide McCarrick’s improprieties. A man named James Grein came forward with a story claiming that McCarrick had assaulted him during the Sacrament of Confession. In hopes of simply cutting their losses and moving forward, the Vatican defrocked McCarrick, sending him to live his remaining days internally exiled as a pauper in an undisclosed religious community. He was the highest-ranking member of the clergy that has gained formal sanction for sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, former Papal Nuncio Viganò, drunk on his own ego, persisted with antagonizing Francis until he was excommunicated. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine that the Traditionalist agenda included getting a Pope onto the Throne who would have lifted that sanction. Viganò represents a diplomatic current in Rome that has extended its notion of “Traditional” to include revival of Cold War saber-rattling militarism towards Beijing, contra Francis, McCarrick, and others who desire a rapprochement and normalization. The Cold Warriors operate upon the mad fantasy that, in spite of being predominantly Confucian, there will arise an indigenous Catholic insurgency that will topple the Xi Jinping in the same manner that happened in Poland.
As I said at the start, simony has been banned by the Church since approximately 300 C.E. The sad fact is that Steve Bannon had nothing on the Borgias and it can be attributed to a combination of his own tactical stupidity combined with gauche manner. Regardless of their own personal opinions on queers, abortion, contraceptives, China, the resurgence of social democracy in the US and EU as a corollary to Traditionalist Catholicism, and everything else, the College of Cardinals just does not like getting bullied by a slumlord from Queens.

What if, far from just a bizarre posting from a confused President, instead it was a nod towards the ongoing ground-game afoot outside the Conclave led by Bannon, a nod that was deeply insulting and scandalous to the Curia?
In a year when a film ABOUT a Papal election had been released theatrically, this was perhaps the first Conclave carrying Baudrilliard-level meta-cognition of itself as not only a body of clerics but also as participants in a text. The newly-elected Pontiff’s brother has even confirmed in interviews, Cardinal Prevost told his siblings he had watched the Conclave film before taking off for Rome so he could know how to act during the Conclave!
And so the appearance of scandal that could have been cast by selecting any of the Cardinals favored by the Traditionalists ended up being the bullet in their own foot. They were far too flagrant in seeking to commission simony and it would have taken only one Cardinal to raise the complaint.
Rather than helping the cause, “Pope Trump” might have sealed the deal for the Traditionalists. Not only will this be remembered for the foreseeable future (and remember, this is the Church that still references 15th century prelates in a manner wherein nobody blinks at mention of the Borgias), the MAGA media blitz has scandalized the names of all the Traditionalist Cardinals permanently, Axios even provided a Scorecard before the Conclave and it can now go down in history as a list of suspected co-conspirators.
Raymond Burke: The American cardinal is a prominent voice in the church’s conservative wing. He has clashed with Francis, saying in 2014 the church was like a “ship without a rudder.” He was believed to be frustrated with Francis’ stances on homosexuality and divorce.
Péter Erdő: The Hungarian cardinal is an expert on the church’s esoteric legal intricacies. He won over conservatives when he closed church doors in Hungary to migrants a decade ago, warning “we would become human smugglers if we took in refugees.” He later reversed himself after meeting with Francis.
Gerhard Müller: The German has taken strong stances in support of conservative social issues. He recently said he wants the next pope to be “strong on doctrine” and stand up to the “gay lobby.”
Pierbattista Pizzaballa: An Italian cardinal who is the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pizzaballa has earned publicity for offering himself in exchange for some of the hostages taken by Hamas in its Oct. 7 terrorist attack. He has voiced support for traditional aspects of the church, but he’s viewed as a wild card after having spent decades in the Middle East away from the church’s power center in Rome.
Robert Sarah: A Guinean cardinal, Sarah is one of the first names offered by many traditionalists. He is the former head of the Vatican’s liturgy office and was a vocal Francis antagonist, decrying the introduction of “ruptures and revolutions.” He is also an advocate for the Latin Mass, a practice fiercely defended by traditionalists.
When the Cardinals were sequestered, they knew this Scorecard had been publicized. It had made all the names on the Scorecard politically radioactive for even the moderates and undecideds who might have been swayed to vote for one of these Traditionalist candidates.
There was no way that a Traditionalist named on the Scorecard and endorsed by the MAGA pilgrims running around Rome that week could have been allowed to emerge from the plebiscite as the Pontiff after a secular government had so publicly, shamelessly, and scandalously endorsed them in front of the entire planet.
Again, simony was first declared a sin in the year 300 C.E.
The MAGA attempt to ratf-ck the Conclave was child’s play in comparison with what has besieged the Curia during earlier centuries. The Middle Ages and Renaissance are littered with corpses compelled to die on swords defending these silly men in red robes running around Roman castles behaving like this. There have been Popes, Antipopes, schisms with various Orthodox Rites, and this does not even begin to acknowledge those unique International Brigades commissioned by Rome called the Crusades.

As philosopher Slavoj Zizek is fond of noting, Pope Pius VII pulled Napoleon Bonaparte aside in the vestry of Notre Dame Cathedral before they began the French imperial coronation ceremony. “I know what your plan is,” said the Pope. “Your goal is to destroy Christianity.”
“Let me just give you the advice of an old pro: The Church has been trying for 2000 years, it just hasn’t worked out for us.”