(RNS) — Nearly a year after the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV, two deeply sourced books offer competing portraits of the context and maneuvering behind the first U.S. pope’s election. “Popes, Dollars and Wars,” by renowned Italian journalist Massimo Franco, traces how the church in the United States, long treated in Rome as a periphery of the Catholic Church, became a force to be reckoned with in the centuries-old institution. Published on March 31, it is currently only available in Italian. Franco’s book relies on research and never-before-seen documents scavenged from the bunker of the Vatican’s own secret archives, now called the Pontifical Apostolic Archive, with the guidance of its former prefect, Bishop Sergio Pagano. The documents show how decades of U.S. money, millionaire donors and fundraising cardinals made a pope from the U.S. increasingly plausible. The second book, “The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis,” by veteran Vatican reporters and power couple Elisabetta Piqué (of Argentina’s La Nación newspaper) and Gerard O’Connell (of the U.S.-based America magazine), delves …