When Stephen K. Bannon was still heading Breitbart News, he went to the Vatican
to cover the canonization of John Paul II and make some friends. High
on his list of people to meet was an archconservative American cardinal,
Raymond Burke, who had openly clashed with Pope Francis.
In
one of the cardinal’s antechambers, amid religious statues and
book-lined walls, Cardinal Burke and Mr. Bannon — who is now President
Trump’s anti-establishment eminence — bonded over their shared
worldview. They saw Islam as threatening to overrun a prostrate West
weakened by the erosion of traditional Christian values, and viewed
themselves as unjustly ostracized by out-of-touch political elites.
