It’s hard to overstate just how dire a situation we find ourselves in, politically and culturally. The problems we face are of such scale and complexity that the prospects for any kind of humane and liveable future seem to grow dimmer by the month. The West is being drained of democratic energy, its liberal-democratic systems bled dry by a vampiric tech oligarchy and by increasingly rabid right-wing populist movements. In recent years, those of us disinclined to look away have witnessed daily evidence of an ongoing campaign of annihilation and destruction by Israel and its active European and American partners of the Palestinian people. The slaughter has been so relentlessly and luridly visible that it is hard to see how any of us – victims, perpetrators, witnesses, deniers – might emerge from it with any kind of collective humanity intact.
In the wake of this horror and degradation we are seeing the normalisation of war crimes, including the casual invocation by the US president of genocidal threats against his enemies. All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of imminent and intractable climate catastrophe. This knowledge is, culturally and politically, half-repressed by the political class and the public alike as evidenced by such absurdities, in an Irish context, of a “fuel crisis” arising not out of our continued reliance on fossil energy, but rather the cost of diesel.
Bad enough though all of this is, we must also acknowledge it is happening at a time of unprecedented cultural and intellectual vacuity. At the precise moment when we need to think and communicate with clarity and seriousness about our situation we are drowning in misinformation, transfixed by the phantasms emanating from the screens in our hands. We are reading fewer and fewer books, outsourcing more and more of the work of thinking to machines at an incalculable cost to democracy and to human flourishing, and to the vast enrichment of the owners of those machines.
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At the level of global leadership there is really only one figure who seems to be thinking and speaking from a place of moral seriousness about our current impasse. The fact that person is the leader of the Catholic Church, an institution that has been responsible for more than its fair share of suffering and human degradation over the centuries – and in recent decades too – is either ironic or appropriate, depending on where you stand.
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Much of the recent commentary on Pope Leo XIV has focused on his remarks on the US and Israel’s pointlessly destructive war with Iran, and on how his advocacy of peace has placed him at odds with a US president who initially welcomed the Vatican’s choice of an American pope as a tacit endorsement of his own power. As the pontiff is the most powerful and influential representative of the Christian faith, it shouldn’t be all that surprising he has taken a public stance against war. (It’s worth remembering for instance that John Paul II spoke out against the invasion of Iraq – albeit in terms mild and general enough for George Bush to award him a Presidential Medal of Freedom the following year, a medal the then pope was happy to accept).
Leo’s opposition to the Trump administration represents a genuinely significant diplomatic rift between the US presidency and the Holy See. During a Palm Sunday Mass at St Peter’s Square he made a series of remarks that seemed especially pointed at a time when US secretary of war Pete Hegseth was holding worship services at the Pentagon, praying to Jesus for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. The pope, by contrast, invoked a Jesus who “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them”; quoting the Book of Isaiah, he said: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.”
The subsequent spat is well known: JD Vance’s risible attempts to lecture the pope on theology; Trump’s deranged social media posts portraying himself as Christ, along with his absurd accusation that the pope is “weak on crime” and should “stop catering to the radical left”; Leo’s insistence, in response to an American journalist’s question, that he is “not afraid of the Trump administration”.
This conflict has garnered the pope a lot of support among non-believers, liberals and leftists, and has roused a lot of anti-Trump sentiment among conservative Catholics who have otherwise not been especially exercised by Trump’s increasingly chaotic and bloodthirsty presidency. All of this is extraordinary and has unsurprisingly accounted for much of the commentary on the early period of Leo’s papacy.
But it seems to me his opposition to Trump is only a part of what makes Leo a unique and important figure in our time. He has been more generally a consistent defender of human dignity against the depravity of contemporary capitalism, which he implicitly connects with the illegal war in Iran and with Israel’s horrific attacks on Lebanon. Take, for instance, these remarks he delivered during a Holy Thursday Mass in Rome earlier this month: “The cross is part of the mission. The imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within; the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. The poor, imprisoned, and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death, yet in so doing He brings a new creation to light.”
Leo is clearly drawing here on liberation theology, a Marxist strand of Catholic tradition popular in Latin America, where he spent many formative years after his ordination. He is reminding Catholics that Christ was executed by an occupying empire, and that his execution gave rise to a movement that, under the subverted symbol of state repression and torture, disrupted that imperialist occupation. Leo is pointing his followers and his critics alike in other words toward the most basic truth of Christianity: that Christ, the poor and rejected Messiah, was no friend of the powerful and wealthy.
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His statements on artificial intelligence and the dangers this technology poses to human freedom and flourishing, to our capacity to connect with each other and the world, have been similarly sophisticated, certainly by the standards of other world leaders. This is, it is true, an exceptionally low bar nowadays. And for those lapsed Catholics considering returning to the mother church under the sign of a righteous anti-capitalist papacy, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Leo-era Vatican has not changed its position on reproductive freedom, or on women’s rights more generally, areas in which it remains rigidly reactionary.
But the pope, infallible though he may be according to Catholic dogma (and how jealous must Trump be of that one!), doesn’t have to be right about everything to be welcomed as a lone voice of decency and humanity in a time of barbarism, greed and all-consuming cynicism. And you don’t have to darken the door of a church or believe in anything other than human dignity to recognise the value in that voice.
