A Tiger in a White Cassock

A tiger, a pope, Bad Bunny, migration, hell, the Spanish left, and the curious tendency of otherwise intelligent people to mistake agreement on one issue for agreement on everything else.

My latest essay, A Tiger in a White Cassock, was published yesterday in CounterPunch and has now also appeared in Spanish translation in Nueva Tribuna. The piece began with a question that kept nagging at me during Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain:

Why do so many progressives become oddly sentimental about a man whose views on migrants they admire but whose views on women, sexuality, marriage, and authority remain fundamentally unchanged?

The argument is simple. Leo does not defend migrants despite being Catholic. He defends them because he is Catholic. The same theological machinery that produces compassion for the stranger also produces doctrines that much of the modern left finds deeply objectionable. You don’t get one without the other.

Or, to put it another way: Richard Parker is still a tiger.

Read it in English at CounterPunch:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/a-tiger-in-a-white-cassock/

Or in Spanish at Nueva Tribuna:
https://www.nuevatribuna.es/articulo/actualidad/tigre-sotana-blanca-papa-leonxiv/20260619091830251485.html