Chicago, that somber city, has given the Catholic Church a pope, by way of Peru and Italy. Robert Francis Prevost’s life, like that of his church, has been nothing if not cosmopolitan, crossing borders and continents, spanning hemispheres. The Church, of course, is not only cosmopolitan but parochial as well, hewing to doctrines crafted more than a millennium ago by clerics a good deal less cosmopolitan than the crew that just anointed Prevost. The new pope, who’ll go by the name of Leo, brings to the job a background that’s pastoral, as was his predecessor’s. Whether that means Leo’s approach to humanity will be as inclusive as Francis’s, who didn’t let some of those ancient doctrines impede a more welcoming embrace to those who’d run afoul of some previously enforced thou-shalt-nots, remains to be seen.

Even if Leo proves more orthodox in such matters than Francis, both his pastoral and globe-trotting histories suggest his brand of Catholicism won’t be anything like the just-us Catholicism of JD Vance. That may well mean that he will continue the Church’s tradition of elevating the global over the national, and also continue Francis’s affirmation of the rights of immigrants, which Francis made part of his Easter message just a few hours before he died.

So, will the first American pope criticize the war on immigrants now being waged by the worst American president? And will it have any special resonance coming as it does from an American, Chicago-born, from one of the most polyglot of cities?

Historically, the Church in America has periodically been divided over a multitude of issues, up to and including right now, when increasingly right-wing, orthodox, and censorious priests are busily prompting more centrist and moderate and abuse-concerned Catholics to leave the Church. But if there’s one unifying through line in the American Church’s history, it’s support for immigrants. For much of its history, after all, the American Church—clergy and laity both—consisted not just of immigrants, but immigrants whom America’s Protestant majority degraded and despised: the Irish, then the Italians, then the Mexicans and Latin Americans. Most of that history may seem ancient to us today, but we should remember that our nation didn’t have a Catholic president until John F. Kennedy, who had to pledge he’d heed no Vatican communiqués in order to win election. For that matter, we’ve only had one more Catholic president (Joe Biden) since Kennedy.

Before Kennedy, there was just one Catholic presidential nominee in our history: New York governor and Tammany Hall alumnus Al Smith, whom the Democrats nominated in 1928, and whose whistle-stop campaign train was greeted by burning crosses as he traversed our country. Smith had been a forceful and eloquent opponent of the 1924 law that had effectively closed off immigration to America from anyplace other than northwestern, Protestant Europe, and spoke consistently thereafter on the harm the nation was inflicting on itself by failing to open its doors to immigrants of all faiths from all over.

Smith’s stance both reflected and informed that of the Church, so much so that the New York Archdiocese (Smith’s own) established a yearly Al Smith fundraising dinner, to which, in presidential election years, the nominees are invited to speak, so long as they don’t give campaign speeches. Last year’s was attended by Donald Trump, even though his views on immigrants and immigration were about as antithetical to Church doctrine as, say, a Chris Hitchens ode to atheism. Kamala Harris chose not to attend, perhaps in protest of the Church’s opposition to women’s reproductive freedoms, but thereby missing a chance to contrast her bona fides as Al Smith’s humanistic heir with Trump’s alignment with the anti-Smith, anti-Catholic cross-burners of 1928.

The history of the American Church, in which the history of Al Smith figures so prominently, is one of the legacies that Pope Leo inherits, all the more so since Pope Francis put the rights of immigrants at the center of Church concerns. And now that we have an American pope, will he invoke that history to oppose Trump’s conversion of the American republic to a deportation state? I have no way of knowing, but Leo has plenty of runway if he chooses to take that on.