Who would have thought that, on an elemental point of liberal democracy, the United States could take instruction from the white-robed man in Rome? And who would have thought that liberal democracy itself could have a stake in the unfinished struggle for the soul of the Catholic Church?

For readers consumed with the Trumpian chaos of the past ten days, images of a white-robed Pope Francis standing beside a man dressed like a nutcrackerthe Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, epauletted and festooned in red and goldlikely seemed absurd and irrelevant. The Pope, one might have read, had forced the resignation of the head of an ancient vestige of Catholic Europes cult of aristocracy. Headlines conveyed the impression of a bizarre Vatican dustup sparked by yet more conservative resistance to the liberalizing impulses of the Pope from Argentina. But the contest between Francis and the Order is more than an irrelevant mummers play. It is an emblem of the Churchs wider effort to embrace modernity. More than thatand here is the newsit is a front in the now urgent global struggle against all that Donald Trump has come so quickly to represent. Pope Francis is the anti-Trump.

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a small but powerful Catholic organization that traces its lineage all the way back to the Crusades. Its history consists of a bloody, centuries-long retreat forced by infidels, from the Levant to Rhodes and finally to the island-fortress of Malta, where, instead of disappearing, it underwent a metamorphosis. The Orders creation myth combines military valor in holy wars with humanitarian virtue in maintaining hospitals for the war-ravaged, a tension that survives in the martial nostalgia of its uniforms and its significant charitable outreach. Now based in Rome, it counts more than thirteen thousand membersknown as knights and damesand engages more than a hundred thousand employees and volunteers worldwide. Its claim to be a sovereign national entity is bolstered by the passports it issues, the stamps it prints, and the more than a hundred nations with which it has diplomatic relations. That it is an expressly Catholic organization, holding no territory, with its leaders bound by a vow of obedience to the Roman pontiff suggests, however, that this is a sovereignty that genuflects.

Last week, the Grand Master knelt, symbolically yielding his sword to the Pope. Fra Matthew Festing, a Brit, had been embroiled in a nasty squabble with an underling, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, a German, whom Festing fired for allowing the Orders charity to distribute condoms in Myanmara violation of Catholic practice. The details of the dispute matter less than Pope Franciss firm intervention on the side of Boeselager, who, after Festings resignation, was reinstated. Defenders of the Order objected to the papal intrusion, calling it a violation of sovereigntyand with condoms at issue, many also caught a whiff of the Pontiffs liberalizing incense. Conservatives, as usual, gagged. (Ross Douthat, for example, saw a characteristic move of the papacy of which hefamously disapproves.)

Traditionalists have become increasingly peeved with Francis since last November, when he released the encyclical Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), which seemed to provide an opening for divorced and remarried Catholics to be readmitted to the sacraments. The conservative Order of Malta is not to be confused with anything having to do with the actual island nation, a fact underscored last month when the Catholic bishops of Malta, appealing to Amoris Laetitia, declared that a separated or divorced person at peace with Godcannot be denied communion.But to some Catholics, that is heresyand no one holds that view more firmly than Pope Franciss hierarchical nemesis, Cardinal Raymond Burke.

First famous as the bishop of St. Louis who, in 2004, threatened to withhold communion from the Presidential candidate John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic, Burke was promoted to Rome by Pope Benedict XVI, who made him the Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the Catholic Churchs highest court. From that bastion, after Francis became Pope, the conservative Burke soon began launching discreetand then less discreetsalvos. In 2014, Francis, consolidating his power, marginalized Burke by removing him from the tribunal and naming him as Patron of the Order of Malta. Burke seemed to like dressing up in medieval regalia, and the ceremonial sinecure should have been no more than a Gothic folly.

But Burke made it another stronghold from which to lob mortars. Last November, objecting to the widespread interpretation of Amoris Laetitia, Burke and three other cardinals threatened Francis with a formal act of correction of a serious erroran extraordinary impudence. The Pope declined to take the bait. Instead, the contest between Francis and Burke shifted to the Order and the phony war over the Maltese condoms. Grand Master Festing was Burkes cats paw. That Francis forced Festings resignation without deigning to pick up Burkes gauntlet was further vindication of the Pope, who will soon appoint his own legate to run the Order. Burke remains its toothless patron. Whos sovereign now?

But just as the Malta affair, epaulets and all, was cover for more deadly Vatican intrigue, it was also a distilled instance of the world-historic conflict that Donald Trump has so stupidly escalated. History is to the point, and, ironically, no one nailed it like Cardinal Burke. Last November, invoking the Orders many centuries of combat, he said, Our ancestors gave their lives to save Christianity, because they saw that Islam was attacking sacred truth. Capitulating to Islam would be the death of Christianity. The imagination of Christendom, with Islam as its negative other, was shaped in the wars that the militant monks of Malta fought. The prize of those wars, Jerusalem, eluded Christendoms grasp for a thousand years, and the resulting trauma has corrupted the conscience of the West to this day. (Not for nothing did George W. Bush call his war on terror this crusade.)

When Burke touted the Orders ancestors, he was speaking at a press conference for the launch of his new book, Hope for the World. In that book and elsewhere, Burke consistently denigrates Islam, describes Sharia law as a global threat, and echoes Pope Benedicts fear of Muslim dominance in Europeall sentiments that Michael Flynn, Trumps national-security adviser, has also voiced. At the time Burkes book was published, a headline trumpeted, Top Cardinal: Islam Wants to Conquer the World, and the West Is Letting It. The headline was Breitbarts.

Burkes opposition to Pope Francis is as much geopolitical as it is theological. Pope Francis is, at this point, the worlds staunchest defender of migrants, and of Muslim migrants. A year ago, in a gesture widely understood to bea rebuttal to Donald Trump, he went to the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, and on his flight back to Rome said expressly of Trump, A person who thinks only of building walls is not Christian. On Inauguration Day, Francis sent cordial good wishes to Trump, but added that Americas stature depended on above all its concern for the poor, the outcast, and those in need who, like Lazarus, stand before our door.

The American prelate who most closely resembles Francis in thought and style is Blase J. Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, whom Francis made a cardinal only days after the U.S. election. This week, in a resounding rebuke to Trump, Cupich described the Presidents executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority nations as a dark moment in U.S. history.

The Catholic Church, despite retaining some of the trappings, costumes, and mental habits of the past thousand years, has left its war with Islam behind. The West seemed to have done so long ago, but now, with the West at war with itself (a match to the intra-Islam conflict), the questions have returned. Who are the faithful? Who are the infidels?

Who would have thought that, on an elemental point of liberal democracy, the United States could take instruction from the white-robed man in Rome? And who would have thought that liberal democracy itself could have a stake in the unfinished struggle for the soul of the Catholic Church?

_James Carroll_is the author of eleven novels, most recently Warburg in Rome, and eight works of nonfiction, most recently Christ Actually: Reimagining Faith in the Modern Age. This article first appeared in The New Yorker on February 1, 2017.