What Pope Leo XIV thinks about present politics

“He is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis,” influencer and Trump advisor Laura Loomer declared (howled, really) on the election of Pope Leo XIV. “Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to.

Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” It’s a ridiculous statement, but whether Loomer’s is the stupidity of ignorance, bigotry, avarice or ambition, or all of them, I do not know, though I’d bet on “all of the above.”

But she’s only an extreme case of a mistake even sane people will make, that of assuming that the pope’s politics will fit American categories and judging him by whether he agrees with their side. They won’t fit well and he won’t always agree. Leo will often disappoint and sometimes anger people on right and left. The right more than the left, I’m guessing, but maybe not.

Leo XIV will disappoint everyone because — this seems to surprise many people — he’s the pope. He proceeds from a tradition different from the one that evolved into American politics. Catholic thinking runs aslant to American categories and assumptions. (And no, JD Vance is not a reliable guide to it.)

The new pope took the name “Leo” after Pope Leo XIII, pope from 1878 to 1903, usually described as the founder of modern Catholic thought on social matters. “In our own day,” the new Leo said, explaining his choice, “the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labour.”

He invoked the previous Leo’s encyclical (a letter making a major statement) “Rerum Novarum,” published in 1891 and subtitled “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.” It might be helpful to those who are interested to describe something of what Leo XIII said there.

This is important to know: Both Leos’ thinking differs from modern American thinking because they believe that we live forever and that what we become in the next world determines what we should do in this one. As Leo XIII put it, “the true worth and nobility of man lie in his moral qualities, that is, in virtue... Virtue, and virtue alone, wherever found, will be followed by the rewards of everlasting happiness.” That belief conflicts with the American working assumption that only this world matters, and it makes what we experience here on earth both more and less important than it is in mainstream politics.

Less important, because we will be moving on. Leo accepts more inequality and more suffering than many of us would like, for example. More important, because what we do here decides what we move on to. He expects more of the well-off than many of the well-off (most of us) will like.

Leo XIII is concerned that “working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.” He notes that economic power is “concentrated in the hands of comparatively few.” He devotes the first major section of the letter to defending private property and very sharply criticizing socialism. He rejects the idea that capital and labor are “naturally hostile” to each other.

“Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order.” Of private property, he says, “The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.” Of socialism, he says, its “main tenet ... community of goods, must be utterly rejected,” partly because it will hurt the poor.

That part of Rerum Novarum might upset the left, though Leo’s description of private property might discomfort some on the right, because it’s not absolute. The next part, the bulk of the encyclical, will upset some of the right — not, to be fair, for what he says, but for what they assume it will mean in practice. It leaves no room for absolutising commitments like “maximizing shareholder value,” for example. The wealthy must not “look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person,” he insists.

They must not tax them “beyond their strength, or employ them in work unsuited to their sex and age.” Further, “the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down the workmen’s earnings,” because to pressure the poor “for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine.”