Hope in a New Pope

When Fiction Becomes Prophecy

With over a hundred days into Trump’s second term, the spiritual exhaustion in this country is palpable.

We are governed not just by policy but by spectacle—bravado that masquerades as strength, vengeance mistaken for justice, and a hollow nationalism that demands worship while discarding wisdom.

And the cost is no longer metaphorical.

His tariff war—revived and expanded—has spiraled into a financial mess of staggering proportions. Supply chains have shattered, inflation has re-ignited, and international trust has evaporated. Farmers once courted are now abandoned. Families already stretched thin are paying more for less, all while being told this pain is patriotic. Economic policy has become performance art; its only measure of success is applause from his cronies.

It’s not just the politics that grieve me.

It’s the deeper erosion of moral imagination—the slow rot of conscience beneath the booming rhetoric.

As an American, I feel the fracture.

I feel it in the empty language of our leaders.

In the cruelty passed off as strength. In the despair hiding behind so many eyes.

And yet—even here, in this hollowing landscape, something unexpected stirs.

Not a movement.

Not a candidate.

Not a flag.

Hope.

And not from my own tradition.

Hope arrived from the most unexpected place: the Vatican.

Enter Pope Leo XIV

Born Robert Francis Prevost on the South Side of Chicago.A missionary in Peru. A scholar of canon law.And now, the first American pope in history.

It is a stunning twist of providence that, at the very moment our nation sinks deeper into its mythology of might and self-worship, the moral voice rising from Rome belongs not to a cardinal steeped in centuries of tradition, but to an American, shaped by the very contradictions and complexities of this land.

He knows us.

He knows our fractures—our longing for spiritual meaning, our addiction to spectacle, our confusion between dominance and purpose.

And yet he steps onto the world stage not as a nationalist but as a global soul, not to baptize American exceptionalism but to hold it accountable.

But it wasn’t just his biography that moved me.

It was his name: Leo.

By choosing Leo XIV, he reached back to Pope Leo XIII—a reformer who challenged the dark excesses of industrial capitalism and spoke to the dignity of the worker, the poor, the forgotten. That name was not nostalgia. It was a signal flare:

This papacy would not be neutral.

And in an era when neutrality is complicity, Leo has already begun sowing something rare: not dogma, not division, but virtue.

Like He Stepped Out of My Novel

Earlier this year, I released my novel, The Seven Seeds.

It posed two radical questions:

~ What if Rome never fell?

~ What if Christ never walked the Earth?

In this reimagined history, Pope Gregory is torn from our timeline and cast into an alternate Rome—one untouched by Christianity, still thriving under the rule of gods of power, conquest, and dominion. A civilization of staggering grandeur but spiritual desolation. There, the soul of humanity has been traded for the illusion of eternal control.

Gregory, a stranger in both time and faith, discovers a hidden manuscript—a sacred text preserving seven eternal virtues:

Compassion. Humility. Forgiveness. Justice. Wisdom. Courage. Sacrifice.

These are the Seven Seeds, ancient truths capable of softening even the harshest empire. Not through revolution, but transformation. Through the quiet, perilous act of planting values where none have taken root.

Fiction, yes.

But also a blueprint.A longing.A prayer for the soul of the world.

And now, as I watch Pope Leo speak into the aching void of our times—with words that rebuke cruelty, warn against consumerism without conscience, and lift the dignity of the forgotten—it feels as though my story has stepped off the page and into history.

Like Gregory, Leo moves not with political ambition, but moral imagination.

He has not named President Trump. But his every breath, his every call for justice steeped in mercy, stands as a spiritual counterweight to the forces of ego, vengeance, and spectacle now ruling the day.

It’s as if this pope is holding the same seven seeds Gregory once carried—offering them not to an alternate Rome, but to our own fractured civilization, teetering once more between domination and renewal.

What began as fiction now feels like prophecy.

And I, its author, am left in awe.

A Jew’s Hope

I don’t need a pope to speak to my theology.

But in an age of collapse, I need someone to speak to my soul.

And I pray that Pope Leo will do just that.

Judaism teaches that righteousness can emerge even in the shadow of horror. That Oskar Schindler—a German industrialist, a member of the Nazi Party, and a man who once profited from war—could undergo a transformation of conscience so profound that he risked everything to save over a thousand Jews from the Holocaust. He wasn’t a rabbi or a prophet. He was flawed, worldly, and complicit—until he wasn’t. Until compassion eclipsed convenience. His story reminds us that even in the darkest systems, the human soul can still choose light.

That act wasn’t merely kind.

It was redemptive.

And here I am, once again, watching righteousness rise from outside the lines I once thought defined it.

Pope Leo XIV, an American and a Catholic, standing calmly amid the moral chaos of our time, feels like another hand reaching into the river, lifting not just a child, but the soul of a people that has lost its way.

Leo is not a savior. He is a steward. A gardener.

A moral counterweight to a world spinning off its axis.

In a nation overrun by thorns, he reminds us of the soil we still carry within—and the seeds we still might dare to plant.

From Fiction to Faith

When I wrote The Seven Seeds, I saw it as a kind of compass—a quiet offering to anyone who felt lost in the noise of the world. I never expected that the virtues my protagonist carried through an imagined Rome would one day be reflected, almost uncannily, in a real figure standing before the world in papal white.

And yet, here he is.

Not a creation of fiction.But a living symbol.A pope.

A reminder that perhaps I wasn’t just telling a story.Maybe I was pointing toward something that was already on its way.