For those of us who hold out hope that the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born bishop and missionary to Peru, Robert Prevost, will lead to more Christ-centered and less ideological leadership from Rome, the last few weeks have been disappointing.
First, a 2023 video of the new pope resurfaced, where he spoke about the need to welcome people of diverse “lifestyles” to the Church (this follows the lead of his immediate predecessor Pope Francis), although he assured us that there had been no change of doctrine, at least “not yet.” Can one imagine Christ telling the adulterous woman whom he saved from stoning in the Gospel of John (John 7:53-8:11) not “to sin no more” but to continue in her “lifestyle” while being welcomed to his Kingdom? Or St. Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians, where he declines to chide these new Christians for their gross resort to sin and moral corruption, but encourages them to remain steadfast in their less-than-admirable “lifestyles”?
Pope Leo was also near silent about the killing of the Catholic schoolchildren by a trans fanatic in Minneapolis, initially treating it as an unfortunate example of gun violence. As Rod Dreher has pointed out, on the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the pope tweeted about migrants on the island of Lampedusa. While anti-Christian violence spiked, Rome seemed to fiddle.
The pope’s recent blessing of a block of glacial ice from Greenland was a self-parodic act, cringe-worthy and telling in important ways. His dismissal on that occasion of legitimate challenges to climate apocalypticism as “pseudo-scientific” aimed to cut off legitimate debate just where it is most needed, as Matthew I. Ramage, a critic not unsympathetic to the Church’s concerns about “climate change,” recently pointed out at Catholic World Report.
Leo’s approach to these matters, uncritically adhering to the positions of his predecessor, continues to ignore the “human cost of prevailing climate proposals—many of which are not only wedded to contraception and abortion but also risk depriving the global poor of essential energy resources” and the benefits of economic growth. These fashionable ideological approaches to global climate issues “often overlook the futility” of the sacrifices demanded, “while the world’s largest emitter, China, barrels full steam ahead with seemingly no moral compass.” As the same sympathetic critic writes, “[T]he Holy Father missed a great opportunity here to say something distinctively Catholic in a context that desperately needs to hear it.”
Alas, the Church continues to present herself too much of the time as a left-of-center humanitarian NGO adhering to an elite consensus that no longer persuades and increasingly reveals its intellectual and moral bankruptcy. Why is the official Church so afraid of fearlessly putting forward and proclaiming her own wisdom? Is it a lack of courage, of conviction, of understanding, or some combination?
In this vein, the American pope, the former head of an Augustinian order, strangely “spiritualizes” and softens St. Augustine’s often tough-minded teaching, ignoring the rich moral realism that informed his political reflection about what “the tranquility of order” requires in a fallen and imperfect world. The pope recently described himself as an “optimist” about human nature, something that is quite extraordinary for a Christian of any sort, not to mention an Augustinian.
He appears to share Francis’s functional pacifism and presumes that war is always the worst solution. The Church is obliged to proclaim the healing message of “the Prince of Peace.” But is there never an “evil peace” or a “just war,” as Augustine had argued? Is the death penalty directed at truly heinous killers as “intrinsically evil” as the deliberate killing of the most vulnerable of all, the innocent unborn, as Pope Leo recently opined during the controversy about the vociferously pro-choice Senator Dick Durbin being honored by the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago? Sts. Paul, Augustine, and Thomas made the relevant moral distinction, as many pro-life stalwarts do every day.
Abortion was denounced in the Didache (“The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” a widely respected Christian instruction from the apostolic period), but not the death penalty. The teaching of Francis and Leo on these matters is an innovation, as much or more “humanitarian” as authentically Christian. If Israel and the United States had listened to the Vatican’s call for an immediate cease-fire, the nihilistic death cult that is Hamas would continue to dominate Gaza and the Palestinians in perpetuity, rather than the possibility of a viable peace emerging in that heretofore “intractable” conflict. The path of peace is rarely traced by utopian sentimentality or by eschewing the morally serious statesman’s prudent use of the carrot and the stick. The possible end of the “intractable” Israel-Gaza conflict might serve as a powerful lesson of this, if Rome is capable of learning what history and hard-earned moral-political wisdom have to teach.
At this point, no doubt, I should issue a caveat: it is clear to all who observe him, even from afar, that Pope Leo is a very sincere Christian and is far less ideologically charged and politicized than his immediate predecessor. He is much more Christocentric and far less polarizing than the Argentinian pope, and therefore should not be simply characterized as “Francis Lite.” He clearly wants to maintain at least the appearance of continuity with his immediate predecessor. But his most important statements and initiatives lie ahead.
He may come to free himself from the worst of Francis’s legacy, one so full of doctrinal ambiguity and a unilateral progressivist interpretation of Catholic teaching. But at this point Leo seems to uncritically accept humanitarianism as his default position. His political theology is thus not in any decisive respect Augustinian.
This is on display in his Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te (“I Have Loved You”): On Love For the Poor. This is a document inherited from Pope Francis, but which no doubt has been marked by Leo’s own distinctive emphases and his more self-consciously theological and Christocentric approach. It contains a great deal of wisdom about the love of the poor that is central to the message of both Scripture and Tradition, without which the commandments “To love God” and “To love your neighbor as yourself” risk becoming very thin reeds, indeed.
The examples Leo gives of the special place of the poor in the life of the Christian, examples taken from Christ himself and everyone from the Apostle James, St. Francis, and St. Mother Teresa to the full range of popes, ancient and modern, are often moving in their beauty and powerfully reinforce their call to sacrificial fidelity to the Gospel. To his credit, Pope Leo XIV firmly defends “almsgiving” and personal charity against those who believe that in a social order imbued with true “social justice,” both would become unnecessary. One could add that Pope Benedict XVI powerfully made the case that justice without love and personal responsibility risks becoming soulless, bureaucratic, and even tyrannical in Caritas in Veritate, his 2009 encyclical, a text strangely uncited in the new apostolic letter.
Be that as it may, the encyclical strains too hard to interpret the “poverty” and self-giving of Christ in terms of social class. The Gospel of Luke tells us that rich Jewish women materially sustained the earthly ministry of Christ (Luke 8:1-3). Moreover, his apostles were hardly destitute: Peter and Andrew owned their own boats, and could arguably be called small businessmen. More importantly, Leo fails to make any distinction between “the poor” and the “poor in spirit” (the latter—including the well-to-do—who know they owe nothing to themselves and are thus especially close to God in their humility). And though he tells us the Church does not understand the poor in a sociological manner, he then proceeds to do so throughout much of the document, seemingly forgetting how sin and fallenness in large measure are what afflict the poor.
Indeed, the only sin that is invoked is “social sin,” as if “unjust social structures” are alone responsible for evil and injustice in the world. Here the contemporary Church comes perilously close to the teaching of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, who taught (in Pierre Manent’s words) that “the place and principle of evil reside in ‘society,’ whose evil spring is inequality.” The modern papacy’s obsession with inequality is troubling, since destitution, not inequality per se, is the great evil to be avoided, as the French Catholic philosopher and poet Charles Péguy often pointed out. The theologian Larry Chapp is right that the document endorses no Marxist or socialist “solutions” to the problem of poverty. But its one-sided animus against the market economy is there for all to see.
Thus, Pope Leo XIII is rightly invoked for criticizing the excesses of industrial capitalism, but his even stronger criticism of the evils of socialism and his defense of private property (rightly used) as a “natural right” go unmentioned. Like Francis, Leo XIV simply ignores the billions of human beings freed from grinding poverty by the economic growth brought about by what the late Michael Novak suggestively called “democratic capitalism.” Similarly, the pope is silent about the crimes and deprivations that define collectivist socialism—crimes that are committed in the name of emancipating the poor from injustice. This abusive appeal to the poor and the consequent assault on them is a powerful lesson that has not been learned or taught by the last two popes.
In addition, Leo XIV unfortunately repeats Francis’s demagogic locution, “an economy that kills,” referring to a largely fictitious “free market economy,” while remaining silent on the destruction of freedom and prosperity inherent in socialist economies. Likewise following Francis, he praises liberationist “popular movements” which advocate policies and programs that too often keep the poor poor, as they had done in Francis’s native Argentina until the election of President Milei. Here too the truth of reality is obscured by something approaching ideological distortions and excessively sentimental hopes.
As though registering an objection to this, Venezuelan opposition leader and newly minted winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, María Corina Machado, has “plunged into the barrios that formed the bedrock of Chavismo” and argued quite compellingly to those who lived there “that Chavez and Maduro’s Socialist governments had made their lives worse, with crime soaring, the economy tanking and their children facing a bleak future.” Why isn’t such a cruel and despotic regime castigated by the Holy See for “social sin,” especially since leftist regimes such as the ones in Caracas and Managua actively oppress the Catholic Church, too? The silence of the Vatican on these matters is not just lamentable, but inexcusable.
Nonetheless, “We live in hope,” as St. Paul said. We should hope and pray that Pope Leo XIV begins to free himself from such default humanitarianism and progressivism. As we suggested above, attention to reality and to the cries of the poor themselves may help. Perhaps he will come to see that the failure to truly address the concrete needs of the poor will drive even more Latin American Catholics to evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, as so many millions have done already. On the whole, these churches speak of personal sin and responsibility, not “social sin” or liberation theology; they call for morally serious entrepreneurship and speak of lives “transformed by God’s grace.” Here are lessons in effective Gospel proclamation.
Perhaps Leo will come to see that the “liberationist” moment has played itself out, and that the flesh-and-blood poor are tired of those who speak too facilely and unrealistically in their name. What is needed is the antidote of moral and political realism of a decidedly Augustinian character. To acquire it, Pope Leo XIV only needs to repair to the writings and wisdom of his order’s beloved patron saint. Theologians too could help him in this much-needed ressourcement.