Trump and the Pope
A fascinating power dynamic
A “spirit of revolutionary change” was reshaping the world economy, Pope Leo XIII wrote in 1891.
“The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable.” He cited: “the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science,” “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses,” “the prevailing moral degeneracy.”
The “momentous gravity” of the crisis, the Pope wrote in a letter entitled Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), “fills every mind with painful apprehension.”
“Some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class…”
The urgency of the Pope’s language and the universality of his approach bring to mind a very different document of the 19th Century: the 1848 Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels. It spoke of “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” and declared, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
This is not to suggest that Leo was a communist. His encyclical squarely condemned any form of socialism and defended private ownership of property. But he was a keen observer of the world he lived in, including of the moral challenge posed by a vast gulf of inequality between rich and poor.
What’s in a name
The new pope, elected last week to succeed Francis, chose to honor Leo XIII by naming himself Pope Leo XIV. Robert Francis Prevost is the first pope from the U.S.
A low-key supporter of Pope Francis who grew up as a White Sox fan in Chicago, Prevost spent years as a missionary priest in Peru, where he obtained dual nationality. He made connections throughout the Catholic Church due to his role heading the Vatican office tasked with selecting and leading bishops. This background helps explain why the conclave selected him as the next pope.
But it’s not difficult to imagine that at least some of the cardinal electors had the world political situation in mind when they voted for the new pope, even though some cardinals later denied such a connection.
In a little more than 100 days, President Donald Trump has drastically reshaped the role and image of the United States, in the service of “America First.” His administration has chopped foreign aid aimed at helping the poor and sick and instituted a showy deportation policy that sent migrants to a notorious El Salvadoran prison — and is in talks to send others to Libya and Rwanda. Trump’s tariff regime threatens to fundamentally disrupt world trade.
What better way to signal disapproval of the president’s actions than to choose another American with distinctly different views to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics?
J.D. Vance
One of the last world leaders to visit Pope Francis was U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 but was out of sync with the pontiff’s views on social justice.
As Ed Kilgore wrote for New York magazine, Vance had appeared on Sean Hannity’s show in January and explained that “his relative lack of charity for immigrants was rooted in the early church concept of ordo amoris (rightly ordered love.).”
Vance said the notion was “that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” He accused the “far left” of inverting that, to prioritize hating citizens of your own country to “care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”
But in a February 10 letter to U.S. bishops, Francis completely repudiated Vance’s view. “I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” the pope wrote.
Nations are free to defend themselves against criminals but, “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”
“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan”, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
And the pope was not alone in his criticism of Vance. As Politico reported, “A series of posts under an account for Robert Prevost — now the Bishop of Rome and newly anointed as Pope Leo XIV — shows the Chicago-born Cardinal reposting an op-ed criticizing Vance on his interpretation of his faith, and the strict immigration policies that Vance along with President Donald Trump have touted.”
The last Pope Leo
The papacy of Leo XIII has to be viewed in the context of his predecessor’s reign. Pope Pius IX was chosen in 1846 at the relatively young age of 46, and not surprisingly, became the longest-serving pope in the church’s history. His tenure lasted nearly 32 years; Leo served 25. (By contrast, in the last 57 years, the church has had seven popes.)
Pius IX led the church during the extraordinary series of popular uprisings that swept Europe in 1848, and, in 1860, lost control of nearly all the Papal States, the main source of the church’s temporal power.
He presided over the Vatican Council that affirmed the infallibility of the pope when speaking ex cathedra (from the chair) on matters of faith and morals. He had earlier invoked that infallibility when he proclaimed that Mary, the mother of Jesus, had been conceived without original sin. (The last time a pope has spoken ex cathedra was in November, 1950; Pope Pius XII proclaimed that Mary’s Assumption into heaven was church dogma.)
Pius grew increasingly conservative over his reign, and in 1864 said that it would be wrong for the Pope to “reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” When the Italian army conquered Rome in 1870, Pius refused to recognize the secular government based in the city and portrayed himself as “the prisoner of the Vatican.”
Upon the death of Pius in 1878, the cardinals elected the 67-year-old bishop of Perugia, who took the name Leo XIII. In his policy and image, he came across as a milder leader of the church. In a colorized film clip on YouTube, the frail pontiff smiles and waves at the camera.
Leo was passionate about social justice, writing, “the first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making. It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.”
Yet apart from supporting the general notion of unions and urging employers and governments to respect the rights of workers Pope Leo XIII had little to offer in the way of detailed social policy.
As Thomas J. Reese wrote in Inside the Vatican, a book published in 1996, “Pope Leo responded to the industrial revolution with his social encyclicals trying to find an alternative to unbridled capitalism and state socialism. The church still lost millions of working class people because it lacked practical pastoral and social programs that could reach them. Centuries of ministry to peasants and nobles in an agricultural society did not prepare the church to deal with urban laborers and the middle class.”
The Pope and Trump
Now begins a potentially fascinating dynamic involving two of the most powerful people in the world.
In potentially pitting a religious leader against a secular one, it has faint echoes of the tension between the first Polish pontiff, John Paul II, and the Soviet leadership over Moscow’s repression of freedom in Eastern Europe.
“On Dec. 16, 1980,” said Msgr. Pedro Lopez-Gallo, “John Paul II wrote an unprecedented personal letter to Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, urging full respect for the integrity of Poland and the rights of his people, and signalling his non-negotiable support for Solidarity to whom he sent immense amounts of financial help.”
The issues are completely different today, but two different visions of the world are again vying for dominance.
As Tyler Pager observed in the New York Times, “while two Americans now sit in positions of enormous global influence, Pope Leo XIV may offer the world a different view of U.S. values from Mr. Trump’s America First approach, which he has executed through stiff tariffs, imperialist musings and vast cuts to foreign aid.”
In terms of personality, Pope Leo seems as cautious as Trump is reckless. He may prove to be more conservative than Francis on church doctrine.
But in his first remarks from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, he didn’t hide his goals. “We want to be … a Church that moves forward, a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close above all to those who are suffering.”
Fabulous, Rich !
especially worth the price of admission, this fabulous video of Leo XIII !!!
film clip on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IVQ-1t92hA
THAT was AMAZING! Where do you find the time for the research? I don't know about your personal faith but this is what we call: God's Work.