HABEMUS PAPAM!

A new Lion to guide the world out of this morass

His Holiness appreciates Brazilian okra & chicken stew

I confess I didn’t dare expect such a good choice in the Conclave. My expectations were pretty low, as a matter of fact. As Pope Francis managed to assemble a College of Cardinals with a much greater number of non-Western Cardinals, I was hoping that the most evident traps in which most of the Western Church has fallen would be kept out of the path. If Western Cardinals insisted on ideological thinking, therefore on a ridiculous division between supposed “conservatives” (in fact Right-Wing Modernists) and “progressives” (in fact Left-Wing Modernists), as if the Church were a Western parliament, at least none of the opposing Western Modernist factions would manage to get one of their own elected.

It happened, and much more. After Pope Francis succeeded in extracting the Church from the claws of Modern thinking — the first Pope in 500 years who refused to play by the rules of Modernity! —, it seems his successor will not only do the same, but even, perhaps, do it better.

I was in the midst of a very busy day when I got the news of his election. The first two things I could see while running to and fro were his chosen papal name and his national origin. His name immediately filled me with joy. When a newly elected Pope picks a name, it’s usually a reference to a past Pope, whose work he intends to continue. Well, the last Leo, XIIIth of his name, was the first and main codifier of the social teachings of the Church. He saw the horrors of Industrial-Revolution Capitalism, just as Karl Marx did, and, drawing from Moral Theology, gave them the moral answer the Church had to provide. Marx, we all know, tried to do the same. The fact, however, that the only places on Earth where the same awful labor conditions of 19th-century England can still be found are in countries ruled by a Communist Party shows pretty well that Marx’s answer was completely wrong.

The social teachings of the Church are not an ideology such as Capitalism or Communism, but a set of guiding rules that allow a society to avoid the traps in which ideologues always fall, organizing itself in a manner that is proper to its own culture. The forms of government, for instance, shall obviously agree with a country’s culture. It would make no sense to have a monarchy in Switzerland or a Republic in Spain or Brazil. The social teachings of the Church emphasize that power in a society shall reside on the lowest possible level; the family has to have more power than the neighborhood, which in turn shall have more power than the city, and so on, until the highest stage of governance will be the one with less power. Small properties and small businesses need to be protected (the author of “Small is Beautiful - Economics as if People Mattered” wrote his book as an agnostic economist, and later converted when he realized he had only rediscovered by himself a few of the principles of the Church’s social teaching). The poor must be protected against the abuses that the power of money allows the rich to perpetrate. And so on.

I wrote the only textbook on the social teachings of the Church in Brazilian Portuguese, by the way, so I think I can say I know a little about it, and I love it. A friend of mine told me that when he learned of the new Pope’s name, the first thing he thought was “wow, Prof. Ramalhete will be ecstatic!” And indeed I am.

When Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum (“On the New Things”, namely Capitalism) in 1891, the world was undergoing an intense transformation. Modernity, which had started with Luther’s revolt in the 16th century, had finally reached the stage in which technology allowed the centralized mass production of goods. Thousands of small artisan shops, in which whole families worked together, were replaced by gigantic factories in which humans became “human resources”. Just other forms of resources, together with water, fuel, minerals, or cotton, to be exploited by the powerful.

It soon became evident that, as Chesterton wrote, “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” Artisans were capitalists (or, in Marx’s terms, “bourgeois”, as they owned the means of production — tools, etc.), but when their many small shops were replaced by a huge factory, the thousands of small capitalists were replaced by a huge one. And then, as he also wrote, “Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.” Soon afterward, State Socialism and big business got together and engendered Fascism — which, by the way, is the form of government “Communist” China has nowadays. They learned the hard way that state ownership of the means of production means killing the golden-egg-laying goose.

Well, now we are also going through a very intense transition. Almost 60 years ago, May ‘68 marked the moment in which Modernity entered its final phase, called Post-Modernity or Hyper-Modernity. Its main characteristic is what is called “the end of the Great Narratives” by which ideologies tried to simplify the real world so that it could fit into narrow minds. One hundred years ago, it seemed the future was ideological. Even Chesterton tried to make an ideology out of the social teachings of the Church, which he called Distributism. He meant well, but his social and political environment blinded him to the fact that ideologies are the problem and cannot be a solution.

That’s what Pope Francis stated, over and over. Ideologues, however, unable to understand that the world can (and should!) be seen without ideological blinders, tried to make him fit into an ideological field, and thus completely missed what he was saying, and repeating, over and over again.

Ideologies, however, are now in a very different phase. In what may perhaps be the only sentence ever uttered by Marx with which I wholeheartedly agree, History indeed repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. We are now in the heart of the farce phase. Hitler and Krupp together were a tragedy; Trump and Musk, whom the left tries to depict as the former’s heirs, are a farce.

Of course, there are some who will say that Trump is rather more “like unto a leopard [at least in the color in which he paints his face, as a legitimate heir of the Picts], and his feet were as the feet of a bear [quite small, that is], and his mouth as the mouth of a lion [always bellowing and trying to find something to eat]” (Revelations 13:2), but I think it’s an exhageration. He’s just a character in a farce, a painted-face clown fumbling with the levers of things he cannot understand.

Farces, however, have tragic components. Unraveled ideologies, having lost their core, are still dangerous. It’s all a farcical mess, after all. The Communist Party of China presides over a Fascist system. The leader of the German racist far-right is a lesbian whose partner is a lady from the Far East. The leader of what used to be called the Free World is the above-mentioned Orange Man. All of them, however far from what used to be the core of their ideologies, are nevertheless still dangerous.

“Danger” does not only mean dictatorships, concentration camps, gulags, and Gestapos. It can also mean systems in which injustice becomes so widespread that a man who murders a CEO is hailed as a hero by his generation. It can also mean societies that are so far in the grip of what the late great Pope Saint John Paul II called “Culture of Death” that people simply don’t marry and don’t have children. It can also mean such a level of artificialness in daily life that the natural, and obvious, difference between man and woman becomes a contested issue.

In this social and political environment, nothing is stable. Anything can happen. We cannot know now what will come, just as St. Augustine couldn’t know what would come after the decadence of the Roman Empire, which he witnessed and described. That’s why a new Pope Leo is necessary.

And, furthermore, Leo XIV is an Augustinian friar. I am not exactly a fan of that other famous Augustinian friar, a German called Martin Luther, but a strong Augustinian base is the perfect recipe for another Pope Leo to offer a vigorous moral guiding voice in a time of breakneck decadence, such as that of St. Augustine.

Now, the other interesting point is the absolutely unexpected national origin of the new Pope. He, like Francis before him, is a Pope from the periphery. He was born and raised in a decadent city in a country that may be said to be the most successful Masonic social experiment. “[T]he only nation in the world that is founded on a creed”, according to Chesterton (again, yes; I’m a Chesterton fan). That creed, however, is a thoroughly Modern creed. A completely ideological creed. A creed according to which greed and pride are virtues, not sins. A creed that is antithetical to Christianity, having led that nation to the uppermost heights of financial success, at the price of its soul.

In his native land, the term “Christianity” refers not to traditional forms of Christianity, as the Catholic Church or the Oriental schismatic “Orthodox” Churches. Quite the opposite, in fact. A “Christian”, in the US, means a follower of a bizarre folk religion born out of outlandish bedfellows: a corrupted second-hand form of Calvinism, mixed with African spirit-possession religions, with a quite strong seasoning of Mammon-worship. From that standpoint, many of their preachers say Catholics are not Christians. As always, the truth of any proposition depends on the operative definition of its terms; in the sense they give the word “Christian”, I am glad not to be counted as one of their co-religionists.

The future Pope Leo XIV soon emigrated, though. Forty years ago, he left his homeland to go to yet another periphery: Peru, a land in which a strong Spanish Catholic influence reordered the ancient, well-organized Inca civilization. A land, however, that was far from a paradise: while he was there, the murderous delusions of a mad ideologue led to a horrible civil war in which barbarous beheadings marked the territorial conquests of a fanatic guerrilla movement which stated that “For us, human rights are contradictory to the rights of the people, because we base rights in man as a social product, not man as an abstract with innate rights.” He could clearly see and thoroughly understand how ideologies deny the dignity of man, made conatural of God by the Incarnation of the Word.

In his native land, dehumanization was made palatable by earthly riches and pleasures. It was easy to forget that the poor and the rich are equal in dignity when the poor could forget his indignities in front of a color TV, drinking or smoking something that led him into a false bliss. In Peru, there were no artificial paradises, only ideological Hell, and the resistance of a society based on the Catholic Faith.

He became a Peruvian citizen ten years ago, and divided his career between tending to his Peruvian flock, first as a priest and later a Bishop, and governing his religious order from Rome. Pope Francis eventually put him in charge of defining what priests would become Bishops; it’s no trivial task.

Along with the normal studies of Philosophy and Theology all priests must undergo, he has a Math degree, and is a specialist in Canon Law, the law governing the Church.

So, from what we can see, he’s a man with a strong logical and legal mind, whose life was governed by the teachings of Saint Augustine, and who picked the name of the greatest Pope who taught about how society should be ordered. He is also a migrant, in a time in which so many good people leave their homelands, willingly or unwillingly. He knows what it is to be a stranger, and he knows what is needed to adapt and become a part of a new society, a new culture, a new world. Curiously, I noticed in the inaugural Mass that he has almost no accent when speaking Spanish and Italian, but his Latin shows his American roots. I speak Hebrew with a strong French accent, so who am I to judge?…

Unlike his predecessor, who lived all his life in Argentina and didn’t have first-hand knowledge of decadent ideology-enslaved Western societies, however, Leo was born in one of them. He was born in a periphery of Christianity that became the center of the Modern world without ceasing to be a spiritual periphery, a territory that until 1908 (yesterday, in terms of Church history) was considered mission territory and therefore a responsibility of the Propaganda Fidei, the Roman dicastery devoted to the propagation of the Faith. Their lack of success in that task can be easily seen when we notice that the word “propaganda” was adopted into the English language, meaning “ideas or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, a government, etc.”

In other words, while Pope Francis probably saw American and European politicians as madmen, Pope Leo can understand them, follow the paths that led them to their ideas, hold their hands, and lead them out of their ideological illusions. In a way, it’s a path he already walked up when he left his homeland and became a citizen of a different polis, a different culture, a different social organization. When he went out of his original cultural environment, in steps that led him first to the greater Spanish form of religion and culture (mixed with robust Pre-Modern Peruvian Native culture), then to the Rome headquarters of his Order, from which he could see the whole world, governing thousands of priests living in 47 different countries. He then went back to his adopted land, was granted citizenship, and worked as a Diocesan Bishop, before being called by Pope Francis to go back to Rome and see who was fit to become a Bishop like him.

I simply cannot conceive of a better person to step into the sandals of the Fisherman, of a better man to continue, and go much beyond, the work of his magnificent predecessor. Even more than a “new Francis”, he intends to be a new Leo, a new lion, teaching the world the way out of postmodern misery.

May Saint Augustine, Pope Francis, and Pope Leo XIII guide his actions from Heaven. May Almighty God guide his hand. May the Blessed Virgin Mary keep him in her tender prayers.

HABEMUS PAPAM!