Leo XIV

I've been hesitant to post about the new pontiff, not least because just about everything that's come out of Rome since the passing of Francis has been hackneyed and unreliable. Cardinal Parolin, for example, was the sure front runner. But just as important, I'm a Catholic convert of about a dozen years standing, and the one thing I want to avoid is taking the attitude that Rome has gotten it all wrong, and I know how to straighten things out. With that preface, the big hackneyed headline I've seen for the paat 24 hours has been AMERICAN POPE!

But as best I can tell, although he grew up and went to Catholic schools in the Chicago area, then Villanova University, and then an MDiv from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago in 1982, after this, at age 27, he appears to have spent nearly all of his career in either Rome or Peru. He is a US citizen by birth but also a naturalized Peruvian citizen. It's difficult to know if he's been in touch with US life for the 40-plus years he's been a high-level church administrator on the fast track, and so far, little concrete has been said.

But here is the expectation from The Guardian:

What’s in a name? When it comes to a pope – everything. The white smoke from the Sistine Chapel earlier this evening told the world that a new pope to succeed Francis had been elected – and for the first time the pontiff is from the US.

But if Donald Trump and his Catholic convert Veep, JD Vance, are ready to cheer, then they should think again. Cardinal Robert Prevost has chosen the name Leo XIV – and if you’re a papal Leo, you tend to be a reformer at the progressive end of Catholicism. That Prevost has decided to become Leo XIV will make Catholics think immediately of the last Leo – Leo XIII – and his 1891 encyclical or teaching document, Rerum Novarum, which outlined workers’ rights to a fair wage, safe working conditions and the rights of workers to belong to trade unions. If Pope Francis was the People’s Pope, then Leo XIV is all set to be the Workers’ Pope.

The writer here gets one big thing wrong, as quite possibly Francis did as well: the migrants who entered the US during the Biden years weren't workers. They appear to have been, by and large, Lumpenproletariat, Marx's criminal underclass. Per Wikipedia,

In Marxist theory, the Lumpenproletariat . . . is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.

Legacy media has struggled to portray the migrants who repeatedly reach the haadlines as something other than gang members, murderers, sex offenders, addicts, and so forth, instead trying to turn them into devoted fathers and husbands, but oddly enough, almost never as competent and socially aware workers eager for a just wage. Nor do they ever turn out to be good Catholics or good Christians of any sort. But then, thieves don't fare well in the Decalogue, nor in the gospels, with the exception of the penitent next to Christ on the cross. As St Paul puts it in I Corintians 6: 9-10:

9 Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor sodomites 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Not only will these people not go to heaven unless they repent, they will not form a working class with reliable revolutionary consciousness. By and large, it's a mistake, whatever the political alignment, to confuse the Lumpenproletariat with either the working class or the kingdom of heaven. But here's an early interpretation of Leo from the right:

Why pick the first American Pope now? Robert Prevost was made Pope Leo XIV as a counterweight to President Trump.

There’s been little ambiguity about the new pope’s politics and less about the overall agenda.

Pope Francis had all but rigged the process to assure another radical successor.

President Trump’s return represents an ongoing institutional crisis. The ideological battleground is going to be the border and Prevost has been chosen to lead the response in the largest sense possible.

Choosing an American Pope is supposed to raise the stakes and elevate a leader with the stature to rally opposition to Trump and more specifically to his immigration policies by invoking the familiar tropes about the need for welcoming in every single migrant.

That’s what this is about.

If this is the case -- I'm anything but convinced it is -- it involves a misreading of the populist movement. What we saw in the 2024 election in particular was a recognition by organized labor that their interests lay more with the traditional Republican middle class than with the Democrats, who had by and large abandoned the workers, as traditionally defined, in favor of an alliance betwen the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat. This was never so clear as with the presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who dressed like an upper-class white woman, was married to a wealthy white attorney, but struggled to speak in black street argot.

In effect, Trump represents a consolidation of interests between the traditional working class and the lower bourgeoisie. As one result of this, a majority of US Catholics voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. At the same time, US Catholic priests are becoming more conservative:

The results of a national survey of Catholic priests released by The Catholic Project on Nov. 7 [2023] revealed an interesting dynamic in U.S. Catholic life. In the terminology used in the survey questions, young U.S. Catholic priests tend to be theologically traditional and politically conservative, particularly compared to older priests.

I see this in our own parish: new associates passing through are more inclined to wear cassocks, while our current pastor, who also wears a cassock, is friendly to reception of the Sacrament kneeling or on the tongue. Francis appears to have viewed this trend with alarm:

Pope Francis blasted what he described as groups of "very strong, reactionary" American Catholics, warning against becoming "backwardists" who oppose change in the Catholic Church.

"The situation in the United States is not easy: There is a very strong, reactionary attitude. It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally," said the pope. "I want to remind these people that backwardism is useless, and it is necessary to understand that there is a correct evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals."

It's hard to tell if Leo thinks his task is to bring the American Church to heel, and with it, Trump and Vance. If it is, I've got to think this is a profound misunderstanding of his native country and the populist movement. It's a misunderatanding even of Marxism, and probably as well Leo XIII, who had a lot to do with modern Catholic social teaching. But we'll have to see. And as a famous workers' advocate once asked, "How many divisions has the pope?"