The New Pope, Catholic Social Justice & The Future of America and the GOP
There are a lot of tea leaves being read about the election of Pope Leo XIV. We explore the legacy of his namesake and its very real application to America today.
As you may have heard, we have a pope. Cardinal Robert Prevost from Chicago has taken the name of Pope Leo XIV and now holds the keys that Christ once entrusted to St. Peter himself and has been passed on through the generations.
What should we expect? As for myself, I’ll be happy enough if the new pope undoes the restrictions his predecessor imposed on the Latin Mass and just allows people like me to function, instead of living in fear that some vengeful prelate will shut our community down. Like with the U.S. presidency, I’ve reached a point where I’ll count it as a win just to have someone in charge who doesn’t think I’m garbage. There are some optimistic tea leaves in that regard.
From the standpoint of guiding the Church overall, I hope the new pope will finally do something about the clergy who covered up abuse, get justice for the victims, and do a real investigation on the extent that Church-affiliated institutions are involved in human trafficking. As to the tea leaves there, I’m in “wait and see” mode.
Part of the tea leaves that everyone on social media is parsing include the name a new pope chooses for himself. The decision of the now-former Cardinal Prevost to honor Pope Leo XIII, who was Vicar of Christ from 1878-1903 was surely notable and from my standpoint that is a major positive.
Pope Leo XIII was particularly devoted to the Blessed Mother, and he composed the Prayer to St. Michael that is said after every Catholic Mass. I won’t go too far into that because I don’t want to spoil a video that will soon be upcoming where John Tuturice and I add to our video collection with an exploration of Leo XIII’s legacy.
But there is one aspect of that legacy that fits directly into something we often focus on here in this space and is timely in terms of some unfolding news. That would be the teaching of what authentic social justice is.
What Leo XIII Taught About Social Justice
The term social justice has gotten a bad name among those who consider themselves to be some hue of conservative. It’s become associated with scapegoating police officers, stoking racial divisions, and even outright socialism.
But Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum, is considered the foundation of what authentic social justice in the Christian sense actually is. I’ll explore it in more detail with John, but here’s a Cliff’s Notes version:
*The striving and the right to own private property is something to be affirmed, and Leo XIII explicitly repudiates socialism as being contrary to human nature.
*At the same time, unrestrained capitalism is condemned. The pursuit of private property and profit, while good, aren’t a license to do anything you want. To that end, the right of workers to form a union and for a social safety net that can step in to protect vulnerable people are also affirmed.
*Leo XIII calls for the working classes and wealthy to live in solidarity with each other, free of both envy and exploitation. He cites religion as the primary connecting tissue that can make that happen.
*The former pope also pointedly warns wealthy employers that if they do not follow their Christian conscience and treat people right, they will leave a vacuum that other movements (i.e., Marxists) will exploit.
This are teachings that all, be they Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, or simply anyone seeking truth, can embrace. In fact, if you want to understand them, while I suggest reading the encyclical and hope you’ll watch our upcoming video, if you understand the moral narrative behind the classic movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, you understand the essence of Rerum Novarum. You have the Bailey family trying to help everyone own property—to get a piece of the action in a true free-market sense. All the while they’re battling the unrestrained capitalism exemplified by Old Man Potter.
Leo XIII, Modern America, and the Republican Party
To understand the teachings of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum is to understand the rumblings that are going on today in American politics and specifically in the Republican Party.
Consider two major developments that are currently in the news…
*The tariff battles have authentic social justice at their heart. The “unrestrained capitalism” that was embraced by the Bush-era GOP said that if a multi-national corporation wanted to relocate abroad, pay pennies in wages and ship back to America, undercutting family-owned businesses…well, that’s the free market. Tough break. The Trump policy affirms the desire and obligation people have to work, be gainfully employed and seek to build wealth, but seeks to protect workers from exploitation.
*Just yesterday, Trump announced a new executive order aimed squarely at the pharmaceutical industry. The E.O. seeks to prevent Big Pharma from selling drugs in America at a higher price than they sell the same drug abroad. The “unrestrained capitalists” of the GOP are annoyed (in fact, this had to be done by EO because there was not support in the Republican Congress to put it in the upcoming tax and budget bills). The Trump policy simply takes the modest stop of preventing vulnerable American consumers from being the victims of price-gouging.
Those are just two examples that are relevant right now, but they underscore the ongoing internal GOP civil war that the rise of the America First movement, more populist than conservative, has triggered.
Leo XIII’s warning to the wealth-holding classes—the holdover Bush Republicans of today has no small pertinence as well. What happens if the “unrestrained capitalists,” condemned by the late pope, succeed in their objective of holding onto control of the Republican Party once Trump leaves the stage? What happens if the future of American politics is today’s Democratic Party against the last vestiges of the Bush-McCain-Romney Era?
We got a pretty good look at that in the presidential election of 2012. Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee. His prior record included time at Bain Capital where his job was essentially to gut American businesses and ship their jobs overseas to enhance profits—something that sounds a lot like “unrestrained capitalism.” Having succeeded in wiping out people’s jobs, he was then caught on a hot mic writing off “the 47 percent” of people who needed some type of government benefit to survive the world he helped create.
His opponent, as you surely recall, was Barack Obama, with his thinly disguised Marxism—the exact type of candidate Leo XIII warned would gain popularity if the unrestrained capitalists didn’t watch themselves.
You know what happened. Obama won virtually every battleground state. He turned out the disaffected voters who felt left behind by the political system.
Those voters were dismissed by most Republicans as hopelessly dependent on the government—lazy even. But it turns out that wasn’t true. When the GOP nominated a candidate who pledged to restore opportunity to their communities, to prevent them from being ripped off, those same voters not only pulled the lever for Trump, but they often gave the benefit of the doubt to other Republican candidates down the ballot.
Of course, that only goes so far. Some of that benefit of the doubt began to disappear in 2024, with GOP Senate and House candidates routinely running 4-5 points behind Trump and pointing towards future battles that must be won.
Pope Leo XIV and the Future
There’s a lot on Pope Leo XIV’s plate and what I’ve written about here ranks well down the list of things that should command his attention. There’s a crisis in the Church on everything from liturgy to evangelization to governance to finance, and a whole lot more. I’ll refer you to the writings of Phil Lawler, both now and in the future, for informed commentary on where we might be going with those most important affairs of Holy Mother Church.
But an authentic interpretation of Catholic social justice does matter, and the new pope’s selection of a name is a tea leaf that it matters to him as well. Getting this right—the balanced view between private ownership and free markets, combined with appropriate regulation—will decide whether we have an economy that can be prosperous for everyone, or if we’re going to slip into some kind of hellhole. Here’s hoping the new pope does his namesake proud and makes clear what social justice is and is not.
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Rerum Novarum might be a better title in English as "On Social Revolutions."
We are quite far from the time of Leo XIII and we moderns tend to read such documents wrong. As an example, the idea that there is a right to private property is very liberal because it is not directed at property owners or the wealthy, but rather the landless -- the poor worker (being mindful that poverty is not destitution) has a right to the fruit of his labor, ie a just wage, but also has a right to own private property -- he is not simply to live his life in workhouses (cough China cough) -- but has a right to be able to own land that belongs to him privately (non of this communist / eccoist stuff) that he can freely choose to work as he wills (constrained of course by the Hierarchy of the Good and Augustian's ordo amoris).
The Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed human life by opening up both the possibility for wealth creation among the lower classes (as Rush used to say, growing the pie rather than redistributing the pie) but also the real possibility for unspeakable dehumanization of man and debasement of nature.
No one really listened to Rerum Novarum and we got WWI and WWII which can be seen as the rotten fruits of what the document warned against.
You have a certain sense the "now what?" of the mid 20th century and its dead-end answers -- new age, hippy, yuppy, progressivism, spirit of VII ism, papal peronism, neo-conservatism, futurism, feminism, etc.
Perhaps Leo XIV will be able to chart a course from here. His interest in the Mass Media (or probably better said the New Media Revolution) and AI Revolution is intriguing. (I hope that he is well read enough to be on topic).