Yet even with that caveat, the outcome of Sunday’s presidential election in Argentina looms as a fairly singular event – a seemingly direct rebuff to a sitting pope by his own home country, through the choice of a president who’s pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum from Francis on virtually every issue.

It’s not just that self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei has a different social and political agenda from his country’s most famous native son. Milei has also verbally assaulted the pontiff on multiple occasions, referring to him as an “imbecile,” a “Communist” and a “son of a bitch.”

For bonus points, Milei’s running mate, Victoria Villarruel, is a devotee of the traditional Latin Mass who reportedly has links to the Priestly Society of St. Pius X, the body founded by the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre that broke with Rome over objections to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) — reforms which are, of course, the lodestar of the Francis papacy.

Frankly, if a group of church affairs junkies were to sit down in a bar and try to sketch a ticket on a cocktail napkin that would amount to a rejection tout court of a sitting pope’s agenda, it’s doubtful they could have come up with anything more vivid than what actually happened.

[Again, I’m not sure quite how to fit Milei’s landslide victory into Argentina’s current mess, but it’s very clearly a rebuke of the status quo, at the very least. And John’s a very adept Vaticanista who grasps these nuances well. It’s very much worth noting that the Argentinian Catholic establishment opposed Milei and Villarruel, for obvious reasons in this telling. This is a very intriguing angle to Milei’s victory that’s worth watching. — Ed]