On Politics: The Pope and the President

How many divisions has the Pope? That, of course, is the famous rhetorical question, probably apocryphal Stalin is supposed to have uttered when urged to consider the power and influence of the Catholic Church. I don't think Donald Trump has yet asked how many F35s Pope Leo has. But his extraordinary war of words against the Holy See represents yet another dramatic derogation from the norms of international relations and potentially a catastrophic political miscalculation. Certainly the general interest in and support for Pope Leo among Catholics, but even more strikingly beyond, has been pretty astonishing. How did we get here? Well, in the long background is the Francis papacy and more recently, the consistent concern of Vatican diplomacy, that the force of law is being replaced by the law of force. The US Secretary of War, as he likes to Bill himself, has declared the American war on Iran as divinely ordained and protected. And it is in this context that Leo's declaration in a sermon quoting Isaiah that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war set the acute phase of this conflict in motion, escalated by Trumpian threats of genocide, a number of Internet screeds against the Pope. Leo has since reiterated the Church's position on peace and said that he's not interested in debating Trump, Trump, who in the meantime shared an AI generated image of himself as Jesus. There are a lot of moving parts here, including the sizeable chunk of ardently pro Trump American Catholics, I think, the majority of whom voted for Trump in the last presidential election, a number of whom have been trying somewhat tendentiously to cobble together a just war defence of the slaughter in Iran. That's something that we'll talk about today. And then of course, There is also J.D. vance, Trump's Catholic convert vice president, who has at various points tried to correct the Pope on his theology or suggested a kind of separation between political action and religious conscience in which the Church should confine itself to the latter meaning, I suppose, exclusively the issues of sexuality and gender with which the American right is so obsessed. There are bigger questions here as well. What's the role of religion in a nominally secular republic? Is this century really as secular as once it seemed it might be? And is the Church headed for a bigger and more substantial conflict with the American tech led culture which glorifies fantasies of human or American omnipotence? You're listening to On Politics on the LRB podcast. I am James Butler, and joining me to talk about these questions are Massimo Faggioli, professor in ecclesiology at the Loyola Institute at Trinity College, Dublin, who has I Think, a forthcoming book on Leo, 14th, due this autumn. And Jack Hanson, associate editor at the Yale Review, lecturer at Yale, and who has written widely on the reception of this papacy, as well as Francis in American politics, as well as completing a doctorate on the relationship between speculative thought and Catholic modernity. Welcome both.

0:02

Thank you.

3:19

Thanks for having us.

3:19

Massimo, if I can start with you. What have I left out in that little summary that I started with? Why has it blown up so substantially, this conflict?

3:21

There's been a. A crescendo building up since January, when the United States becomes an international problem for the Holy see. So until 2025, there's a limited impact of Trumpism on the United States. And Pope Leo tells Jewish bishops to do something about that. They do. But starting January with Venezuela and then the threats against Greenland and then Cuba, and the Vatican realizes that this is something too big for the US Bishops who have moved also on that issue. And so there's been a crescendo. And the extraordinary move is even before Donald Trump's posts against Pope Leo is on April 7, when Pope Leo, at night speaking with journalists, invites American citizens to mobilize and to contact their representatives, which is something they never do in the Vatican. So that's the equivalent of the nuclear option for the Vatican, because that could be seen, or can be seen as interference in the democratic process and so many moving parts and on both sides, extraordinary actions and reactions.

3:31

At this point, there's something really striking about the willingness to flex that kind of diplomatic muscle to suggest that Catholics write to their representatives. It's very, very unusual, as you say, for a pope to do that. I mentioned, of course, at the start, that famous rhetorical question attributed to Stalin. But there has been, I think, a general sense that the papacy has at its disposal a kind of substantial diplomatic soft power which is pretty careful about using. I mean, I think anyone familiar with the history of, of the papacy will acknowledge the temporal power of the pope has diminished, you know, over the past 150 years. There's no longer the Papal States. There's no longer a substantial temporal dimension to the pope's power. But I think one of the things that's striking to me as someone who was, you know, raised in the church and someone who maintains an interest in, particularly in sort of Catholic politics, is how substantial the interest, in Leo's words, have been. I wonder if you could say, you know, Massimo, just because I know you've worked substantially on the papacy and the reception of, you know, the church's change in the 20th century. For listeners who might not be familiar about how that sense of the Pope's role has changed over that time.

4:49

Sure. But first of all, I would like to ask Stalin today what he would think, how many divisions the Pope has now that he's an American. So this has changed a lot of things. But back to our questions. Yes. So since 1870, with the loss of the Papal States, there's a reinvention of the papal authority. And it's not a coincidence that it's in that moment that Vatican 1, the First Vatican Council, proclaims the infallibility and the primacy of the Pope. So since then, there is a much more visible activity of the papacy as international mediator, as a moral voice. This has a very big moment. In World War I, in 1917, Pope Benedict XV calls the war a useless slaughter. And then World War II, there is afterwards the negative effect of the activity, but also silence of Pope Pius xii. And in the Cold War, the Holy See realizes that there a vacuum in terms of who can speak on behalf of the one human family in this very divided, polarized into world. And now we are looking at this post Cold War era where the United States is no longer an agent of stability. And this is a very different situation. It's not just about one policy issue, but it's a. An issue of how different political theologies interact. And paradoxically, the Vatican now is a bastion of an Enlightenment idea that there is a healthy distinction between religion and politics, which has gone in a certain direction in America, while in the Vatican, they have a more Kantian, 18th century, 19th century idea. This is one of the great paradoxes of this moment.

6:11

Jack, can you pick up on that? I mean, what is it like watching this change from where you are?

8:12

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with anything Massimo said, but I would want to add a different angle to it, maybe emphasizing what a distinct phase in papal history the Cold War represented, because it was no longer simply a question of stability or of identifying a locus for moral utterances. It was also the Vatican in general, and the Pope in particular came to see itself as kind of a civilizational guardian. They. They saw themselves as representatives not simply of the human family, but of the human family as epitomized by the West. And part of what has happened over the last 20, 30 years is that increasingly and rapidly over the last several years, that idea of the west is no longer tenable, for one thing, and beginning with Francis, no longer particularly desirable. And so part of what is happening, I think, is a different idea of the shifting landscape of what constitutes the global family. I mean, in Vatican ii, there began to be an increasing emphasis on the Church being a global entity, universal in the geographic as well as sort of spiritual sense. And to go back to your original question about what why this conflict has sort of blown up, as it were, is that we're seeing two different ideals of what constitutes power. We have, you know, in the United States and Donald Trump, a hegemon, a singular great figure. And increasingly, what we're seeing from the Vatican is a more dispersed, a more perhaps paradoxically democratic ideal. The Pope is speaking for people as opposed to ex cathedra.

8:17

I want to pick up perhaps another aspect of this, which is, Jack, I know when Leo succeeded Francis, you wrote on the distinctive choice of name. It's one of the things that I think is visible in Leo's pronouncements, which, you know, I'm not really an expert, but they seem much more precise and perhaps considered than Francis, who often spoke off the cuff. He's sort of deeply learned and he's deeply familiar, but, you know, with church history and particularly church social teaching. And that's visible in the choice of name, I think, which harkens back to Leo xiii.

10:01

Yeah. So Leo XIII is widely known as the Labour Pope, and Primarily for his 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum of Revolutionary Change, which is the foundational text for Catholic social teaching on labor and capital. And in Leo's first public. Leo XIV's first public pronouncements, he made clear that he considers our moment to be a second industrial revolution centered on the tech world and AI, and that his role as the Pope would be to act as a moral check on an increasingly extractive and rapacious tech finance international elite. Whether that's a sort of direct reference to Leo XIII or a sort of riff on the. On the. On the theme is a different question. I think Leo XIII's reputation is by turns sort of conservative and progressive, depending on which. Which moment you want to look at him. And I think Leo has become an increasingly radical presence on the global scene.

10:39

Massimo? I think one of the things that Catholic thinkers will say is that conventional political labels are never really that useful when speaking about a Pope. But I think probably for outside observers, Leo at the moment looks pretty progressive. Is that a reasonable way of thinking about him?

11:48

It is reasonable, but mostly because we look at what's happening in the United States, and so that is a frame of reference which is very important. So he's a different American Catholic from the average Trump voter who goes to mass every Sunday, but there's something specific. So he defined himself as a son of St. Augustine. And Augustine's political thought and theological thought is at the center of the debate, especially since the 1980s, 1990s, on what to do about modernity. And so here there are different kinds of Augustinianisms, So there's post liberal one and illiberal anti liberal one. He has started his papacy making clear that he hasn't made a choice for a revolutionary anti modern Augustinianism. He has rejected the interpretation of the City of God de civila today as an alternative to the present system. And so there's a paradoxical political theology in Leo that makes him difficult to frame him also because I think it was part of his strategy so far of reuniting the church, meaning he had to avoid some hot button issues. He has avoided the issue of women in the church. On LGBTQ questions, he has navigated a very cautious and both end. So this is particularly important now because the sec, just like Pope Leo xiii, is ideologically difficult to frame because he wanted to push back against communism, but also against capitalism. The same thing happens today because AI offers a quasi religious idea of technology, salvation idea of technology. So I think it's going to be more and more difficult from now on to frame Catholicism because they have realized that the battle on the sexual issues has been lost. And so this is what Pope Francis gave us, basically. And so that battle is lost and now we have another battle to, to fight, I think. And so it's going to be changing the role, I guess, in the next few years, especially.

12:06

Jack, perhaps you can just give me the context for American Catholicism in particular prior to his elevation to the papacy. People digging around in various records and seeing, well, this guy's a registered Republican, like, he's probably on the right of American politics. And. And so there were many voices, I think, conservative voices within the American church who thought, well, maybe this guy will be more on our side than Francis. At the same time, you had someone like Steve Bannon who said, I think prior to the conclave that elected him, this would be the worst guy possible because he's, you know, he's practically Latin American, really, rather than one of us.

14:40

I think one thing to bear in mind is just what a grip the question of abortion especially, but also of broader sexual politics had over the American Catholic Church for most of the 70s, all of the 80s and up through the 90s. I can't say that this is exactly what was guiding Prevost's voting But there was, at least when I was growing up, there was a sense that Catholics had to be, in effect, one issue voters. And insofar as the Democratic Party allied itself with pro choice politics, a Catholic couldn't in good conscience vote for them. Plenty of Catholics did. Of course, there was still a long, deep tradition of liberal Catholicism in the United States. But to the extent that Francis represented an end of that politics, I think it will be hard to sort of reconstruct without him telling us why Leo voted the way he did. As an American citizen, I wonder if

15:21

we can think perhaps a bit about the context for this war and perhaps the theological context for this war, which seems to me to have two dimensions. The first is, you know, as I said in the opening, this kind of quite, to me, quite alien form of evangelical Christianity which, you know, sees the war as divinely ordained and divinely protected. There are these sort of almost revivalist press conferences that Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, as he likes to be known, gives. And I find them, you know, distressing in a way that someone of my background undoubtedly would. So there's that kind of very distinctive Christian nationalist framing of the war itself. At the same time, certain American Catholics, those who are who find the Trump presidency congenial, have attempted to rebut the Pope or interpret the Pope in ways that are more charitable to them and said, well, you know, there is a thing in Catholic theology called just war theory, and therefore this war can be justified as just. And so there's quite a rapid leap from the existence of just war theory to declaring this current war on Iran a just war. Massimo, I wonder. You've mentioned the Pope's Augustinian background. Augustine is sort of obviously essential in some ways here for thinking about how a war might be just. I wonder if you could explain to listeners who might not be familiar with this theological concept what's meant by it, and perhaps also a little bit about the attitude of the post Vatican II papacy in general to war.

16:15

So just war theory relies a lot on Augustine, but then there's Thomas Aquinas. There's a whole tradition that builds up, and it says basically that a war is morally justified if it meets some criteria, meaning a legitimate authority wages war. The goal of the war, the proportionality of the means that are used for that war, the probability of success. And so there's a whole list of things. So just one theory remains very important until the Second World War and the nuclear age. So the use of nuclear weapons in 1945 starts within Catholicism, rethinking which leads in 1963 with the last encyclical of Pope John XXIII. It's his testament basically to that encyclical which says in our age it is unthinkable to apply just war theory to nuclear war. Now, after 1963, there is a big divide within Catholicism because European Catholicism decides that war is a thing of the past, meaning just war theory is a museum piece which leads to a certain position of European Catholics towards Ukraine, for example, while North American Catholicism, which is much more familiar with the experience of war in Korea, Vietnam and all of that, they remind much more attached to just war theory. That's why it has come back in these last few days, because it is something on which cardinals, bishops, debate and speak in public. They have said repeatedly that Iran war does not meet the criteria. It must be noted that they have done that in their other states. But Pope Leo hasn't said anything because the question is if he says something now, what if next time when China does something or Russia does something? And so he doesn't want to be caged in that. But the most notable thing is that now there is a huge divide between a European post 1945 thing. So wars are unthinkable, meaning just war is useless. And North America and us, they have to use that doctrine still. And Pope Leo is in the middle of two very different Catholic ways of thinking about war. And so as European who spent 20 years in the US I've seen this clash and this is something that is coming back and there's a theological uncertainty right now on what is the status of that doctrine.

18:03

Jack, I wonder if you could pick that up and tell me a bit more about the relationship both of kind of American Catholicism, which does seem to have this, as Massimo was explaining, this kind of much more sort of sympathetic relationship or finds in just war theory a basis for engagement with its own national politics. And that kind of, sort of rather strange strand of Christian nationalism which finds its expression in the sort of rather unpleasant crusaderish rhetoric of Pete Hegseth, something

21:15

that I would just add to what Massimo has said is that what I found strange over the past weeks that did remind me of the more right wing church in which I was raised, is that just war is treated not as the severe limitation on the ability to wage war that seems to be in the text. It's treated as the conditions under which war is sanctified. There's no hint of that in the catechism or even in Augustine. There's no sense that war is good under certain circumstances. Circumstances only, that it's licit or permissible, you know, under conditions of defense or and so on. And those conditions are quite severe. How it oversects with Christian nationalism is precisely on that point, to what extent these reactionary forces see Christianity less as a check on temporal power and more on the conditions on which it is waged with divine mandate, the sort of Deus Volt crowd appropriating medieval language to justify sort of modern warfare. There is a certain kind of anachronism to it, but it's also a very modern blending of different idioms towards a pretty distinct temporal political purpose.

21:51

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I've been thinking about while this controversy has sort of rattled on is how people, when I was, you know, a teenager and becoming interested in the world, talked about the way that the world was changing. And I think 30 years ago, it was very likely that you would be told, well, there's a pretty, pretty clear trend that the world is becoming more secular, that religion is retreating from the world. And that's an observable phenomenon, particularly in the west, but worldwide, you know, since the end, really since the beginning of the 20th century, but most pronouncedly, really sort of post 68, probably about 15 years ago. So we're talking, you know, post 9, 11. We've had the various wars that have happened since then. You might have been taught that religion is a powerful political force still, but especially in those extremist versions in which it becomes, you know, religion is used as a sort of basis for kind of political expression of one kind or another. Right. And today it seems to me that things are much less clear. Overall, I think anyone would advocate an untroubled version of the secularisation thesis, which is the thing that I've been saying here. But certainly it seems to me that secular critics might be onto something when they say there's something difficult and contradictory about the role of religion in public life, that it risks a kind of appeal to authority. And, you know, one of the shapes this could take is, you know, there is a sort of, you know, among kind of progressive Catholics in the US who you see on the Internet, there is a kind of sort of liberal ultramontanism. Right. Like my sole authority is the Pope, this Pope. Anyway, there is a kind of something awkward here about the role of religion in public life. Do you understand? Massimo, I'll ask you to take this up first. Do you understand why critics might be worried about the return of religion to the stage of public life?

23:09

Well, being worried is a healthy thing. When you handle religion, always it's something that has to be handled with caution. It is legitimately worrying because the argument coming, especially from those want to bring back in politics a militant religion, they make basically not just the old Durkheim argument, meaning for social cohesion, we need religion. I think now we have escalated to a Schmidtian, I mean, Carl Schmitt, meaning, look, there is no legitimacy in our constitutions, in our laws, there's no legitimacy. So the only way to restore order is to find some higher legitimacy, which is unquestionable by definition. And this is, I think, where the secular and the post secular, they coexist because there is on all sides, I think, a certain disenchantment. I mean, I was born in 1970 and I graduated in the mid-1990s. And the promises that were made in that decade, I remember them. And so there is a common, a shared sense of disenchantment. And so it's one of those cases when religion is a great agency of re enchantment, which can take a benevolent version, saying we should work for the one human family and restore peace and so on. And you can make the just war theory stick in that in some occasions, right? So the responsibility to protect and so on. Or they have the other version, which is pith hexade, which is the. Not just war, it's the holy war. And so that's another very different version. That's why the Vatican is so concerned, because they think that this is really dangerous for the whole of Christianity, the whole world. And so this is no longer a bilateral question. It has escalated to a global question.

25:11

Jack, I wonder if you can pick that up. I know that this is a subject of great interest for you, and I just wonder, you know, I mean, there's obviously objections that people make to the presence of religion in public life partly because there's a concern that on some level it can't be subject to sort of democratic debate if you have a sort of transcendentally guaranteed series of moral edicts that you have to follow. Ultimately, political discussion is secondary to that. But I wonder if you could also pick up on that question that Massimo is raising about someone like Schmidt. Schmidt, you know, you always have to handle with care, you know, interesting thinker, worrying guy. And some of the thought also pretty worrying in its own sense. But one of Schmidt's insights that I've always thought is both troubling and productive is his notion that our political concepts are, in one sense or another, secularized, theological ones. So our Sense of authority and sovereignty and so on, derive ultimately from theological language robbed of its kind of metaphysical foundation. And the attendant thought on that is that somewhere along the way some metaphysics is smuggled in, you know, under the hood, as it were.

27:31

I think that's the right place to start thinking about secularism in general. You don't have to be Schmidt to understand a certain process of de theologization. Weber made the same point. R.H. tawney, a whole slew of thought, well before the postmodern period was looking into the sort of especially Protestant Christian origins of a lot of the way we organize a secular community. And I think one of the conclusions that that archive comes to is that what happens in moments of disestablishment or a formal separation between church and state, the excision of ostensibly religious forces from public debate, plural debate, is that other forms of community take on a kind of sacral gloss. They absorb some of that religious energy. And I think that that accounts for a lot of what you see in American history, especially, you know, the first secular republic, in which immediately there proliferates infinite Great Awakenings, cults, sort of secular forms of devotion, from, you know, football to reality television to Christian nationalism. So I think what you see in a figure like Schmidt, or in the contemporary Christian nationalists, and at the same time the sort of lefty Catholics that you see, hopefully in places other than Twitter, but you certainly see them there is less of a turn of the religion to the public square and more the shattering of a consensus about what constitutes religion. Bringing faith, as it were, back into the political discussion is more an introduction of a rival faith rather than faith as such.

29:01

I am afraid that there's some or much that's true in what Jack said. I studied in these last 20 years the trajectory of some Catholic movements, and what I've observed is that they start as a revanche de Dieu kind of thing, so let's bring God back to the scene and so on. And I've seen in the most important of them that they become more and more not bourgeois, but adapted to the idea that we truly live in a multicultural world, in a multi religious world. So they are usually very shy in offering explicitly their own political theology, but in what they do, in how they do it. So there's a certain vanguard, that there is a return of a militant way of being religious, yes, but not militarized, because it's the force of history. It's what happened in the 20th century in Europe. But it's the fact that if you are A Christian in Asia, you just have to be a Christian, not proclaiming the gospel, but whispering the gospel, as Cardinal put it. Right. And so the effect of the global, I think, has tamed some of the belligerent instincts of this return. And I think America, North America, the United States is right now the great outlier. And it has become the big question where US Christianity is going to go and what this American Pope is going to do or to say about this.

30:46

I don't want to spend too long talking about J.D. vance, but I mean, he's an interesting symptom of Christianity, of lots of these problems, I think, and interesting to watch a man sort of convert to Catholicism and raise the concern of not one, but two Popes. It's a sort of impressive, impressive record. He seems to have landed on this position and it's a position I recognize, but seems in some senses unusual for a Catholic, which is essentially this sort of bifurcation in which essentially religion confines itself to these questions of probably largely personal propriety and ethics and allows the conduct of politics to be. It can concern itself with the formation of conscience, but can't make any kind of proclamation about what politicians actually do. That seems to be the sort of solution that he's landed on. Now, that doesn't seem a very sustainable one to me.

32:38

Me.

33:42

But am I right in reading Vance that way, Jack? I mean, is something else going on there?

33:42

I do, I mean, assuming good faith, which feels dangerous, I do think that something like that is happening, but I should say it's not unprecedented on the American right. I mean, famously, William F. Buckley published the phrase, which I think originated with Gary Wills in a private phone call. Matusi Magistra, no. So mother, yes, Lawgiver, no. And as a way for American Catholics to relate to the Vatican, this is also in the context of questions about dual loyalty, sort of old fashioned anti Catholic paranoia that does actually seem to be making a comeback. So it's not unprecedented, but I do think it's an interesting return of not simply disagreeing with the Pope, as it were, which everybody does in one way or another, as if anyone could do anything else. If you're thinking you're bound to have some kind of non overlapping opinions, if not outright disagreements. But he's, he's almost abrogating a certain amount of the papal authority to himself in saying, actually, Holy Father, you've crossed the bounds of your authority and this is my turf. Tom Homan said very similar things. Trump's borders are. He said you should stick to religion and I'll stick to immigration, as if the whole story of Christianity isn't organized around the spiritual significance of immigration.

33:48

Massimo, what do you take on that?

35:12

I really try to empathize to understand JD Vance also because I've seen former students and colleagues and every member of my family go through that kind of conversion. JD Vance is very particular because the awkwardness of his articulating his position, I think it comes from the fact that he's one body with two souls. And one soul is the old religious rite in a neo traditionalist, integralist, neo Thomist version. But then there's the other soul, which is the Silicon Valley made up political personality, which expresses a certain anti Romanism, which is the new version of what the KKK did to Catholic candidate for the presidency al Smith in 1928, with a gentler tone. Okay, but so here there is a very important example in that because yes, you have JD Vance, who tried really at the beginning of the second Rand to introduce himself as the theologian in chief of the Trump administration, the Ordo Amoris. And he has met every single time he did that. I mean Pope Francis first and then Cardinal Prevost and then Pope Leo and then it hasn't been a series of successes. And so that says something on his political future. Maybe. But this is really part of what's happening within the right, which is you have the old religious rite and the new techno neo pagan right. And it's much harder to make them coexist because they have very different views on what's being human, what's the creation, should we go to Mars and all of that.

35:13

This is another instance of it not being so much a return of religion as a disaggregation of a former quorum. The new and the old right now have very distinct ideas about what constitutes religion. And curiously enough, Vance himself seems to have the old version of the non overlapping magisteria Teal and his ilk. Do not think of that that way.

37:18

You're listening to On Politics on the LRB podcast. Stay with us and we'll be back right after this very short ad break you're listening to On Politics on the LRB podcast. I am James Butler. I'm talking with Massimo Fagioli and Jack Hanson about the papacy and Donald Trump. I mean, there's a curious question here about the status of religion in general for the new right in some sense because I was reading, as I'm sure both of you have as well, the very strange manifesto that Alex Karp put out via Palantir's social channels, which includes among its many kind of strange prescriptions, an injunction to his kind of fellow Silicon Valley types to move away from the standard old new atheist position about religion. It seems to me that it only returns for them as a kind of noble lie. Right. It's a mode of social control and social integration. But I wonder whether I'm being uncharitable, whether there is something perhaps more sincere and rather stranger going on among that section of what, Massimo, you called the sort of neo pagan New right.

37:40

So I think that what we see coming out of Silicon Valley in these last few years is a religious view of technology. The Catholics used to say, extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside of the Church, there's no salvation. And what they are selling is that outside of technology, there's no salvation for the environment, for your health. So they're investing money in immortality. So this is very different from the kind of capitalism that Max Weber talked about one century or more ago. It's something else. And so there's a literature that has emerged in this last decade on the weird re emergence of the strange religious ideas and fascination. This is something that goes together, I think, and coexists with the political messianism of Donald Trump. So here, America has always understood itself as a religious entity with the divine mission. I don't remember an American president calling himself Jesus or. Or pretending that this is. So this is something that can coexist with Silicon Valley now because it's very ecumenical in its own way. It's much harder to make it coexist with a more traditionalist, Neo Thomist or neo Augustinian view.

39:00

Jack, what do you think of that?

40:38

I agree entirely. And I think there was a lot of ink spilled about a sort of postmodern presidency, the post truth presidency, and old ideas that used to be confined to a certain radical theoretical left, you know, French post structuralism, that sort of thing about the identification of all social norms and human values with certain forms of technological production in the hands of somebody like Baudrida, this was a sort of liberatory gesture saying if the ostensibly natural laws about morality and ethics and politics are actually products of our own making, then we can remake them to be more equitable, to be more. More democratic, et cetera. What somebody like Karp seems to be saying is, yes, these are all technological productions and I'm in charge of the technology.

40:40

You know, the thing that has been on my mind actually, while all of this has been happening is a line that's attributed to Andre Marot, which I don't think is. It's not clear whether he ever actually said it in this form and it's not clear quite which adjective he used. But he said something like the 21st century will be religious or, or it will not be. Now the argument is whether he actually said spiritual or mystical or something like that. But there's a recognition there and, you know, it seems, seems at the moment to be a rather kind of prophetic vision of the 21st century, if we take as a given that there is, you know, a religious component to how politics is conducted. I think, particularly in the U.S. i think the question of Europe is a little more complicated. There's a much stronger distaste for religion in the, in the public sphere. There is no longer, you know, Christian democracy in Italy. It's no longer a kind of clear institutional expression of Catholic politics. Here in the UK there is Blue labor, which is, you know, occasionally evinces an interest in kind of Catholic social teaching, but usually sort of resiles to a kind of anti immigrant nationalism and kind of communitarianism. So I wonder what form, you know, this really might take. You know, it's a very difficult question to answer, but I throw one thing I think is interesting into the mix and I'd like to get both of your reflections on this question. You know, it's about the appeal. It's about the appeal that sort of Leo's kind of quite clear and consistent moral language and, you know, unflinching sort of disposition has. And, you know, like I said at the start, it's surprising. You know, I'm used. I grew up in a church in which, you know, as far as Catholic Catholicism impinged on political life at all. It was as a sort of prohibitory. You know, it's the period of kind of Humanae Vitae or the kind of John Paul II teaching on contraception, on in vitro fertilization, on abortion, on homosexuality, you know, all of these things. So as largely as a sort of reactionary cultural force, and that really does seem to have changed. I mean, the affection with which the pronouncements of the Pope are greeted in this kind of. Massimo used the word paradoxical earlier to describe the Church's commitment to a sort of secular ideal of democratic deliberation and freedom. But there also seems to me something paradoxical about the way in which these kind of clear moral pronouncements are taken up by or welcomed by people who don't necessarily clearly identify as with the Catholic Church at all, may feel very troubled by some of the church's other dogmatic positions. So what's going on there, Massimo?

41:29

There is an apocryphal saying that was attributed to Imam Khomeini, the founder of modern Iran, who reportedly said to Secretary Brezhnev, you know, that when communism is gone, we Muslims will replace you. And I think something like that happened not just in Central Asia, but also in the Western world and in Europe, where, if you want to look for an alternative to the technocratic paradigm, the neoliberal, I'm sorry to tell you that the Catholic Church is the best address that you can find to understand what someone else thinks about this. So here I think that one of the indirect gifts given by the Trump presidency to the world and to Europe is that Europe has to start thinking about itself in stark terms, as it never had to do. Okay? Because we usually in a dismissive way, talk about America as desperately religious, obsessed with religious and act of faith. The European Union or the idea of Europe was an act of faith. And it's very hard now to know where that faith is if we are all atheists on that or just agnostic or we're just looking for some other God. But so this is where I think it's going. And you're right. So I think that Pope Francis was very important to make bold gestures that the 20th century battles on the pelvic issues have been lost politically. And so, yeah, magisterially, I think there's a lot of value in teaching certain things okay, about the human body and so on. But politically, he signaled, guys, this is lost. And I think Pope Leo is aware of this. And I don't expect huge turns from that acknowledgment, and not for the sake of politics of the church, but for the sake of the credibility of the church or for believers of the gospel.

44:29

Just as a side note on the point of pelvic policy, I like that. I do think there's also a certain tacit recognition on just how controversial those issues were. In, for example, Vatican II on contraception, there were a number of commissions that recommended a more lenient position prior to Humanae Vitae that the Pope ignored. And so there's always been a contingent within the magisterium, within sort of, as it were, mainstream Catholicism that saw the hard line stance on contraception in particular as an unnecessary hill to die on, as it were. And so I think that political loss is also a kind of relief that we no longer have to keep fighting this fight that we were that the Catholics were never quite as United, a front on as they may have seemed, I think from the other side, why broader swaths of society are excited to see a politically engaged Pope is that I don't think I'm being sort of controversial if I say that the left is that kind of a historical nadir at the moment, that the left has never had less power or influence either domestically in the United States or increasingly globally. You know, the sort of post war social democratic consensus has collapsed. And if there is to be a reconstitution of the international left, part of what it's taking into account is that the Church as the object of critique par excellence, as the primary locus of inherited power, all the old left critiques of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, just don't adhere anymore. They're anachronistic. That's not what the Church represents in the modern world and the left in particular. But I think the broader critique of power is beginning to recognize that change.

46:51

And just on that question, I mean, one of the things that has interested me over the course of the past decade or so is to see the formation of something that looks like a coherent Catholic left and just, I mean, within the Church that's always been certainly the Church that as I knew it when I grew up as a good Catholic schoolboy was, was sort of very much not talked about. We were just after the period where Ratzinger, who would go on to be Benedict xvi, he was at the time enforcer at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had pretty much ruled liberation theology well out of bounds. And anyone associated with it had a rather bad odor about them. And certainly you see things now like kind of Catholic Worker chapters popping up, that there's a couple here in London, I know they sort of proliferate over the U.S. so there's something, something that has shifted there, I think, certainly. And whether that's, I don't know whether it's, it's a reflection of the kind of strongly global constitution of the Catholic Church or just simply a rebalancing after the strongly kind of anti communist disposition of a Pope like John Paul ii. But it's, it's, it's, it's intriguing to me that it's, that it is the case. I wouldn't want to overstate it. But is there a coherence to that view?

48:38

I think there is. So I think you are right. So it's both a rebalancing of the strong policies that were enforced, at least in theory, by Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul ii And so on. And there is the effect of the global. I think that the effect of the global on the political cultures of Catholicism is very real. But it's also in large part different from what was expected or was hoped in this sense that it is very much leftist or progressive on issues of the economy, of the environment, certainly not in terms of gender roles in ministry, intra Catholic models of governance and so on. This is a different kind of issue. And I think we have that in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, these two issues were connected. So if you are a liberation theologian, you are anti clerical and so on, it is no longer true. And this part of the eclipse of the Western European, North American boomer generation of Catholic, the new sensibilities are much more radical on social justice, much less interested on issues of gender balance and so on, by and large. And then you have different cases. But that's what I think has happened in these last few years.

49:58

I think that's right. I think rebalance is the way of thinking about it. And even a surge in a left perspective, it's against my nature. I will put in a word for Pope Benedict on this because in 2006, I believe he wrote a piece in First Things, the generally right wing American Catholic magazine, where he said, amidst some pretty harsh words for Marx and communism, he said that democratic socialism was the closest political formation to Catholic social teaching. So he, even Benedict, the sort of arch conservative, was keenly aware of the extent to which the post war political settlement had lost its way in. With the advent of financialization, for example, there's really never been any mainstream truck with that sort of capitalism in the church outside of the United States.

51:47

I actually think to put in another word for Benedict, who I would not want to overly praise, but was an interesting and cerebral and perhaps out of his own time pope, simply not of the right generation, but an interesting guy to read and an interesting thinker on papal thought. And it's really my last question for both of you. My last theme is about. So I think those of us who observe the papacy from the outside or say to a casual observer, it would be very easy to think that Leo has primarily concerned himself with the question of war and international diplomacy and related matters. But it, it seems to me that that arises as a result of this kind of broader concern which both of you have adumbrated about, this sense that modernity has become this highly mechanized, violent and extractive social order. That being the case, and I should say for listeners who don't necessarily keep a close eye on the publications of the Vatican. There has been a very, very interesting do document from the International Theological Commission recently on the question of technology and social media and these things which suggest some of the direction here. What shape might we expect the rest of Leo's papacy? Because we haven't mentioned this, but for a pope, he's very young, there's a lot of papacy left in him, all things being equal. So what shape might that take? I think, for those of us who are interested, especially in the kind of political influence of the Holy See. Massimo.

52:39

So I think there is a parallel here with Poplio xiii. So the social question, the industrial revolution. We know that he's putting the last touches on his first encyclical, which will have an important part on AI. But Pope Leo XIII became famous also because he warned against Americanism. And the paradoxical fact, again, is that we have a new Americanism. But now there's an American pope addressing that in a very strange way, because he happened to be elected at this moment. So. But I think his overarching concern is to restore unity in a church that many cardinals in the conclave described as too polarized. And the issue of peace was forced upon him in 2026. It was not that urgent in the first seven months of his pontificate. And this is what happened to Pope John, the 23rd missile crisis. We are in a similar situation, I think.

54:32

Yeah. Restoring unity, I think, is a nice way of thinking about it. It's also the sort of the unfolding of yet further implications of the Second Vatican Council and this doctrine of collegiality among the bishops. I think we're going to be seeing certainly an increasing political presence along the same lines of Pope Leo, but also of the bishops and cardinals, I think even more than Francis, than under Francis. You know, I know a lot of people were sort of thrilled and touched by Francis's daily calls to the Holy Family Church in Gaza and similarly dismayed when Pope Leo seemed not to take up that practice. But at the same time, Cardinal Pizzabala, the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, has become infinitely more present, both globally and locally in Gaza. So, you know, if the Pope has been slightly less vocal and present on Palestine, the church has not by any means. And I think, similarly, if for whatever reason, Pope Leo stops speaking quite as much on American foreign policy, I think we can expect much more from the bishops and cardinals in America.

55:49

You know, there are two fronts where I'm really interested to see where these interventions might go, because both of them seem likely to put the Pope on a kind of Conflict course or a collision course with kind of, if not the American government, certainly the dominant culture in the United States in particular. And those two are kind of the AI tech question, where you might see, or might we see, I think, as an open question, a sort of return to an articulation of a kind of Christian, Christian humanism, which seems to me that it would have kind of quite significant political ramifications. And then a question about whether the church continues the very strong ecological concerns which were visible in Francis's papacy. And I'm thinking here in particular, of the encyclical Laudato Si. Are we likely to see either of those things come to dominate?

57:02

MASSIMO I don't know if they will dominate. I think it will continue the emphasis also, because let's remember that he was born and trained in the United States, but he spent two decades in Latin America in Peru, which was the cradle of liberation theology. And so he's really a particular kind of first American pope. And so the language he uses when he talks about the poor and so on is not different from what Francis said. And so I think this will continue. This is going to be a problem for some political leaders or centers, because he wants this church to be, again and even more on the side of the poor. And this is always politically inconvenient or complicated. So I think this will be a big part of his pontificate.

57:57

And Jack, just a few the final thing for you. Do you see those pressure points in the relationship with the church, with American society and culture?

58:50

Certainly, but less as a direct intervention by the church per se, and more as the church not failing to recognize the conditions on the ground. It reminds me again of Rerum Novarum and Leo xiii, which people sort of treat as itself a revolutionary document. What it's actually doing is describing a revolutionary situation. And I think something similar is happening with the Church's perspective on the United States. It's not so much that the church is saying, okay, we've had enough of this, it's time to speak up. It's that the situation is creating such pressure that the church can't but speak up.

59:00

That I think is probably the right place for us to leave it. MASSIMO Jack, thank you so much.

59:37

Thank you.

59:42

Thank you.

59:43

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