A significant number of SCOTUS judges are Catholic. Start there, since they enabled this.

well, ~21% of americans are catholic

"are Catholic" is so fuzzy though. "identify as" and "practices" are wildly different experiences, at least on the receiving end. I'm sure that percentage is mostly consisting of "identify as" rather than "practicing".

There's likely a large group in the middle - IDs as, but not regular practitioners of, who would absolutely not like being excommunicated despite their lack of practice.

100,000 people joined the catholic church in america this week.

At this point I don't think anything other than the church retains the ability to present a coherent moral or metaphysical intellectual framework to people who care about that kind of thing.

I would be very surprised if the united states is not majority catholic in ~100 years

For this purpose identify is enough - as anyone who identifies will be horrified even if they otherwise don't care about the church. Many non-Catholics (including non-Christians) are also horrified even though they otherwise don't care about what the pope says at all.

I don't think supporters of the current US president would be horrified. They already support his anti-christian behavior, and seem more interested in being part of that group than they are in the religion itself.

More likely he would just assert that the Pope isn't actually the Pope, and thus any excommunications are void, and his supporters would roll with it. Some of them already believe this. Any words, true or false, which make them feel better to believe. That's religion, right? He is their true religion.

Sure, but that is at most 25% of Americans. The rest are conditional in some way if they even support him at all.

There is nothing more catholic than not practicing catholicism.

People can identify as Christians without being "practicing" Christians. It's a very loose concept that varies heavily based on countries, denominations of Christianity and many other factors

I'm confused as to why you think one of the most popular religions on Earth would not be a decent chunk of the American military.

If you take this argument that general, then I would say Islam is also one of the most popular religions on earth but well, very lowly reprecented in the US army (below 0.4 percent)

https://soldiersangels.org/the-diversity-of-our-service-memb...

History is why catholics are at 20%. Which is a significant force and a dangerous game to alienate them.

I pledge ignorance. Yeah, sorry should have looked that up before posting. I was always under the impression, North America tended towards other faiths, like Baptism or Mormon.

Don't know about the leadership, but a quick googling tells me about 25% of the US military identify as Catholic. That's not nothing...

My guess is the vast majority of those are Hispanic Americans who have been Catholic since birth, and not part of the modern far-right Catholic conversion movement (like Vance).

Trump got 48 percent of Hispanic American vote in 2024, a historic high for the GOP. The anti women and anti immigrant parts (in spite of what appears to be cognitive dissonance) of the GOP platform are very popular in that community from what I have seen.

Latinos (~20% of the military) plus the very military-forward Italian and Polish American communities plus countless others... what a ridiculous statement

MAGA antipope is only a matter of time

Trump for pope! I hear he's going to be looking to do something new in a few years.

Biden was Catholic, yet not even him sponsoring a genocide was enough to warrant an excommunication.

He was denied communion on one occasion, though it was for his stance on abortion (he didn't support making it a crime).

Wait until you find out how many Latino people serve in the military.

Wait until you find out how many Latinos aren't catholic. (Yes, it's a lot, probably most, but in some LATAM countries Catholics are now outnumbered by evangelicals).