transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] I'm Christopher Lydon, and this is Open Source, tuning in on The Pope and The President, in what can sound like a historic showdown. Are we in the first rounds of an epic struggle between church and empire? Are we perhaps looking more nearly at two schoolboys sizing each other up? Will we get a moral test here finally around modern warfare without end? Paul Eli, welcome back to Open Source. You write wonderfully in The New Yorker about this very odd confrontation. The first American Pope is also a wartime Pope, as you write. His predecessor, Pope Francis, had observed a third world war in pieces all around us, as he, the Pope, was dying. And yet now, here we are in a war with Iran. Clearly, a new war of choice launched by an American president in coordination with the Israeli prime minister. And Pope Leo, still new to the job, seems driven to do something about this. He's not talking about strategic cards in his hand. He's speaking rather of a moral necessity to make peace. And you could wonder, isn't it about time? Does Pope Leo have a plan, Paul? Do you see, and does the Pope see his path forward here?
Speaker 2:
[01:22] Well, Chris, it's great to be with you. You know, a year ago, I was just back both from Rome and Chicago, where a new Pope had been elected, and then Chicago had exalted into that fact. And the story 11 and a half months ago was, who is this person? He's relative unknown. He wasn't prominent among the Cardinals. He wasn't prominent among American leaders of the church. 11 months later, we now have a Pope who's very distinctly in view. And the temptation is to suggest that he's come out of his chrysalis or whatever he's emerged. I would say rather that the themes that he introduced when he began his pontificate have been subjected to the pressure of events and have kind of withstood them. When he was elected, he came out onto the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, which popes do when they're elected, and their new name is announced in Latin, and a crowd has gathered in the piazza. Well, Pope Leo spoke a relatively brief address. He read from paper, so we know that he was choosing his words carefully. The account given in subsequent news reports was that he had slipped away early from lunch on the morning before the last vote, having a hunch that he was going to be elected, so he could write his remarks. So long way of saying what came out of his mouth was specifically his own words. And what did he say? He said the word peace or pache nine different times in relatively short address. So he introduced himself as the Pope of Peace. And I was writing literally on the spot for the New Yorker, and that was the piece I posted overnight, or they posted overnight, is the new pontiff of Pope of Peace? I think now 11 months later, we can take the question mark off that. The new pope is a pope of peace. And we've watched that dramatically developed over the past 10 days or so.
Speaker 1:
[03:14] Donald Trump has said that Pope Leo would not be in the Vatican if he, Donald Trump, were not in the White House. Can you imagine, Paul Eli, that Leo XIV is plausibly and was chosen to be the spear point of the world's resistance to Donald Trump and Donald Trumpism?
Speaker 2:
[03:33] I don't think so for a number of reasons. Number one, Cardinal McElroy, the Archbishop of Washington, when I put the question to him in September, said, look, Donald Trump did not come up during the conclave, not even in the remotest form or something like that. He categorically missed the idea. Now, we don't have to take him at his word, but the run-up to the conclave involved a number of candidates. In retrospect, we can see many ways in which Prevost made sense for the Cardinal electors. It had nothing to do with Donald Trump. One of the most interesting things that people told me when I was in Rome reporting right after the conclave and then one month later, was that the point of Prevost wasn't that he was a North American per se, it was that he was a person with experience on three continents, Europe, North America, and South America, but one whose primary language or first language is English, which is the second language for a lot of Asia and a lot of Africa. So many of these Cardinals whose Italian is not particularly strong, felt very comfortable dealing with Prevost because he's an Anglophone. Secondly, they've gotten to know him at the Synod that was held for a month straight in two successive Octobers, in 2023 and 2024. Let's not get lost in the specifics of it from a theological point of view, but in some respects, it was Pope Francis' way of saying, look, let's not have all these men get to know each other under the pressure of a 10-day encounter that leads up to a conclave. Let's find a way for them to get to know each other and figure out the future of the church in a more deliberate fashion. Let's bring them together, or many of them, for a month straight, two years in a row. That's what he did. Prevost was there for both of those sessions, got to know many people. And so when the time came to cast a vote, I wouldn't say he was an obvious or inevitable choice, but he was a very plausible and considered choice. Yes, President Trump muddled the waters at the end by posting an image of himself as the Pope. But we know this man. He thinks the world revolves around him, and the last 10 days, we've witnessed the consternation that he feels when it somehow emerges that the world doesn't revolve around him.
Speaker 1:
[05:45] It's still feeling incredibly strange to me, the whole thing. Start with the defining gesture of the last Pope, Francis. It may have been his washing the feet of others, as Jesus did, his gesture of humility, the suggestion of the leadership of servants. And now, the capsule of Pope Leo's first year may be this series of bizarre assaults from Donald Trump and his warriors, Pete Hayeseth and JD. Vance in particular. How did it come to this? And by the way, who's winning the contest so far? And does this contest have rules?
Speaker 2:
[06:22] Well, let's go back a bit. Pope Francis wished to strike a distinctive note of humility from St. Peter's chair as the Pope. Now, all the popes have been humble in different ways. The ones of our lifetime anyway. But for Francis, humility meant going out to the peripheries or the margins, where the people whose lives aren't recognized as important, are recognized as important. Francis, that meant going to a prison in Rome, and washing the feet of men, of young women, of Christians, of Muslims, and so forth. He did dozens of other gestures of that kind, right? He dies a year ago, a few weeks pass, and Leo is selected. Leo is himself presenting a papacy of humility in a way not dissimilar from what Francis was doing. How is he doing it? Well, the past 10 days, Pope Leo has been traveling in Africa, in half a dozen countries. The wish of that trip, his first major trip as Pope, I might note, was to begin his series of epithelic journeys, and let's hope there are many, by going to a place that's generally overlooked. By going to a place where people's lives are reckoned as sufficiently important by too much of the world. It just happened that the trip began a few hours after President Trump rage posted against Pope Leo on Twitter, which meant that, and here's the interesting twist that historians should have some fun puzzling over in years to come. It meant that you had an open press conference with the Pope as part of a regular ritual on the papal plane that happened to fall just a few hours after Trump had rage posted against Leo. What if Leo had been in Rome just doing the regular papal thing? Would he have replied? I don't know, but he was there, he was on the spot, he responded simply and eloquently, and not to sound too much like a pastor myself, but in a pious and even devout Christian way.
Speaker 1:
[08:18] The casting and the scripting of this conflict is just irresistible. Trump scattershot always, truculent always. The Pope, he said, is weak on crime. Trump says he's terrible on foreign policy, meaning, as Trump himself admitted, what he's saying is, I don't want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States. The Pope, by contrast, is a man of short phrases. I love your emphasizing his emphasis on the word peace. He also says, I have no fear in different contexts, no fear of Trump or of anything else. In Africa, he said, the world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants. This is very strong language, and it obviously falls on Trump. When Trump started talking theology at him, the Pope cut them short. And these are tough words. Woe to those, he said, who drag that which is sacred into darkness and filth. This is going to be a very ugly battle.
Speaker 2:
[09:19] It is, if you see it as a battle. So president had rage posted against Leo, weirdly using categories that had nothing to do with the papacy, to say that he's weak on crime is like saying he doesn't play hockey very well. You know, it's not part of the job description. Trump reached into his bag of cliches and just whatever came to hand, he hurled them at the Pope, whether they applied or not. As you say, he struck Lydon in a scattershot. Whether it made sense didn't perturb him. Several days passed, Leo spoke again to the press and he said, I have no wish to tangle with the president in this way. And then he added, the speeches that I gave the homilies in Africa for the past few days were written weeks ago. In other words, sure, they were addressed to tyrants around the world. They were addressed to the power that very rich people and oligarchs have in societies great and small.
Speaker 1:
[10:15] I wouldn't want to let it back away from those words and the Trump direction of them, would you?
Speaker 2:
[10:19] Certainly, he and the people who are helping him draft his addresses have Trump in mind, but they have Trump in mind, they have Putin in mind, they have various oligarchs of Africa in mind, they have people like Elon Musk in mind. They're speaking from a global place of moral authority to the situation of the world. So in other words, yes, Trump is included in that condemnation, but was it a response to something that President Trump put up on Twitter in the middle of a Sunday night tending into Monday morning? It seems pretty clearly not.
Speaker 1:
[10:55] Are you trying to talk us out of the contest being waged here? There have been popes and rulers, secular rulers for 2,000 years, often at odds. Is the one that you see as a precedent here, a model? I don't know all those battles. I think immediately of Henry VIII in England in a contest with the Vatican, which ended up in complete separation of the Church of England, a historic moment in the English Reformation. Is anything like that underway here, vibrating under all this noise?
Speaker 2:
[11:32] There's certainly a conflict. And the question is, how immediate is the conflict and how much intention is there on the part of the participants? On the part of Trump, the intention is clear. He even writes his own tweets. He set out to strike out against Pope Leo, and he did. And then he did it four or five more times in the days that followed. Was Pope Leo intending to strike out against Trump? No, I don't think so. I think he was trying to speak in a way that enables us to recognize that he's addressing a global situation at which Trump is a part, and right now a very dramatic part. But if we look back into the addresses of Pope Francis, or of Pope Benedict, or of Pope John Paul, we would find not dissimilar statements. So is there a conflict, is your question? It's a conflict that isn't driven by the protagonist. It's a conflict that's existed, let's just say, for the past 250 years, in which the Church has prerogatives that are in some ways at odds with the capitalist, warring, modern, and contemporary nation state. The philosopher Alistair McIntyre described that in terms of incommensurability. There's, on some level, there's an incommensurability of values between the ones that are being spoken by the Vatican and the ones that are being spoken by the Trump White House. These things can't be reconciled, so there's going to be conflict.
Speaker 1:
[12:52] Paul, under the heading of precedence for this moment, aren't we all looking over our shoulders, Pope Leo himself too, at the sorry history of the Vatican and Hitler in the 1930s?
Speaker 2:
[13:05] Nobody would look back at that time and be altogether pleased at the way Pope Pius XII and the Church carry themselves. It's a complicated history. It was compounded by habits of papal opacity and use of the royal we and so forth, that we're seeing right now how emphatically Pope Leo has moved away from that. He's still not taking a side. He's still not acting in a partisan way. But his use of language, the metaphors he's choosing and the force of which he's delivering them, don't have the kind of lofty and personality that so much of the language of Pope Pius XII did as if he's kind of floating above the World War. I think we're refreshed by that. The independence of the papacy from temporal powers is relatively new. And the history of the Church is long, and way back there, the Church was bound up with worldly powers in all sorts of different ways. The relative independence that the Church has now is something of the last 150 years.
Speaker 1:
[14:05] Tell us what we don't know about this measured man, a scholar, man of many languages. What should it tell us that he himself has been devoted literally since high school to not only Church but specifically to St. Augustine, the early Church father. I am a son of St. Augustine, he has said. Translate that.
Speaker 2:
[14:27] So St. Augustine is an immensely complicated character. He grew up in North Africa and Italy at the end of the 4th century and the beginning of the 5th. By then he was the bishop of Hippo. He was drafted to be the bishop by his people who recognized an extraordinary talent and person of holiness. He wrote endlessly his autobiography, The Confessions, is some people's idea of the first book of Western Autobiography. His later book, The City of God, which is a little more pertinent here. It's a thousand pages, but the theme is that the city of God and the city of man can't be reconciled in this life. So the city of God represented by the church and the city of man represented by temporal states, rulers, and so forth can't be reconciled in this life. So, the story of human existence is the struggle between the city of God and the city of man. And I prefer the term struggle to conflict because it doesn't suggest agency to the same degree. These things just don't fit together. And so Trump, as you said, is truculent and scattershot. But I don't know specifically what Robert Prevost learned from Augustine. Augustine has many, many, many books.
Speaker 1:
[15:42] And Prevost grew up in the Augustinian order of priests too.
Speaker 2:
[15:46] Right. So let's go back a bit. When he was 13, he left Chicago, suburban Chicago, to go to Michigan to an Augustinian high school, which was at the time called a minor seminary. It's where they would help young men to develop vocations for the priesthood. And more than half of them didn't go all the way to the priesthood, probably far more than that, wound up just either taking the high school degree or switching to other schools. But Prevost, right from the beginning, kind of clicked with the Augustinian way of life. He's been recognized as a prospective leader of the Augustinian order and a leader in the church since he was a teenager, basically. He's been thinking about these things for decades, and he's been applying them in different situations. So when he went to Peru, he's been there several times, but during the second and third of his stints in Peru, but especially the second one, he was living in Trujillo in northern Peru. And Fujimori, the elected leader of Peru, then abolished many of the aspects of democracy that had gotten him elected and turned into an autocrat. He eventually was removed from office. The people of Peru wished to bring him back from Japan where he'd fled and put him on trial for war crimes. And Prevost, standing before a microphone of a Peruvian television commentator, said, look, not only should he come back here, but he owes the people of Peru an apology for all the terrible things that he did to them. So long way to make a short point, which is that Robert Prevost is not new to this. He lived during wartime in Peru, and he's looked down the barrel of a gun, so to speak. And so to respond to somebody's post on Twitter isn't likely to scare him.
Speaker 1:
[17:26] I'm glad you brought up Peru. He has said that the Peru years, roughly the 90s, called the last decade in Peru, shaped him more than anything else. Fujimori and the Shining Path Insurgency CIA hand in all of it. What does he mean by that shaping from Peru?
Speaker 2:
[17:47] There are so many ways in which it shaped him, but I'll try to focus on the ones that are pertinent to this conversation. The first is what I just said. Peru is a politically unstable country with violence coming from both sides, state violence from Fujimori's autocratic government, and insurrectionist violence from the Shining Path. It's very difficult to thread that needle if you're a Catholic cleric down there, and especially if you're a North American. You can't take sides with the Shining Path, but you can't take sides with the government. But you've got to find a way for your people, the Catholic people of Peru, and your men, the men of the Augustinian order, to be able to go forth and live their lives. So it takes a lot of civil warfare and worldly tact. So in that sense, the man who we watched engage with the Pope and keep his head, was prepared for that by his time in Peru. Then secondly, he's a missionary. Missionaries have to speak in clear, direct language. Pope Francis was a Jesuit. He could sometimes be clear, but he sometimes could be more complicated than the most complex college professor. Likewise for Benedict. But Leo was a missionary in Peru. You have to speak clear, simple, and direct so people know what you mean. And we've seen him doing that in the past 10 days.
Speaker 1:
[19:02] That's a hard training politically in the church and the world those years in Peru. But what can have prepared him for the spectacular vulgarity in this war of words he's in now? With Secretary Pete Haig Sett's analogy, for example, between the US airmen who were shot down in Iran, comparing that with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Haig Sett said, shot down on a Friday, good Friday, hidden in a cave, a crevice all of Saturday and rescued on Sunday, flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday. That's Haig Sett, two reporters. He said, a pilot reborn, all home and accounted for a nation rejoicing. God is good. And I hear him saying, take that, Leo. It sounded like blasphemy to me, and I can't imagine the Pope wasn't deeply upset.
Speaker 2:
[19:56] As you say, Haig Sett chose to use religious imagery to characterize the war and to imply that this is a kind of holy war that God approves of. Now, if I've got the chronology right, Pope Leo the next day said that God does not hear the prayers of people who resort to war, and the invocation of violence falls on deaf ears. So we can't know for certain, but it seems no stretch to imagine that as a response to what Haig Sett had said. But more to the point, as an Augustinian, Prevost knows that this is the way of the world, the world of what Augustinian called fallen man, and the male pronoun, it sounds out of date now. But in the fallen, broken world, you know, feckless, weak, unprincipled, powerful leaders are a dime a dozen. And that is the way of the world. You're accustomed to it. And when a Pete Haig says comes along, you're not particularly surprised. Secondly, Pope Leo is an English speaker. It's not just that he's an American. He can read the crazy stuff that these guys are saying. It's not in translation. He knows the American idiom. He spent some time in the South Side of Chicago. He knows the way of street talk and the way of bullies and the way of braggarts in the American idiom. And I imagine this is all quite familiar to him.
Speaker 1:
[21:14] I don't want you to disappoint people who find this whole thing very exciting and very weird, very rare, but people taking sides. I notice it, well, Spike Lee at a Knicks game, wearing a Pope Leo shirt, for example. In the church I go to, there's a lot of interest in Pope Leo, and I must say a rising interest in Catholicism across the board, faith and practice. How does the kind of mean conflict between Trump and Leo not play into the larger story of the church?
Speaker 2:
[21:49] Well, let's see, and I'm glad you mentioned those incidents. I saw the photo of Spike Lee at the Knicks game last night wearing Pope Leo shirt. There's several layers in which we could discuss this. But the first is that the world isn't full of leaders who have clarity and the ability to express it right now. You know, a few weeks ago or a couple of months ago, President Trump tried to bully the leaders of Europe and Greenland and they weren't particularly articulate about it, but they stuck up to him. They didn't back down. And now it seems that the things that Leo is saying aren't specifically limited to a Catholic audience or a Catholic idiom. There's a kind of worldly common sense that says, war causes more problems than it solves. The weakest are the ones who are harmed first. Don't rush into these things. Global disorder that's caused by war is catastrophic on levels that the leaders who do these things don't understand. In other words, that's deeply rooted in the Gospels, but the Catholic way of speaking to public affairs isn't never meant to apply only to Catholics. And the Pope, he gives an address every New Year's Day, the address Erby at Orby, and also on Easter Sunday, to the city and the world. The Pope speaks not just to the city of Rome, so to speak, the Catholic Church, but to the world. And right now, Spike Lee, I imagine here's Pope Leo speaking a kind of common sense. And so do several million other people, and not just in this country. And at a time when the White House is a source of literally nonsensical statements multiple times a day, of course, we're refreshed and emboldened and relieved to hear some common sense, to see it on the front page of the newspapers and hear it in our media.
Speaker 1:
[23:32] Yeah, I think that's great part of the fascination. As you say, the world leaders have not rallied on the general question of Donald Trump. They have not rallied on the general question of illegal wars. And I think people sense in this man, somebody who would tell you your coat was on fire, as they say in Boston.
Speaker 2:
[23:55] So in Italy, Giorgia Maloney, who's the prime minister of Italy, after Trump and Netanyahu began their attacks on Iraq and southern Lebanon, Maloney, who was known to be the major European leader, who had the best, most friendly relationship with Trump, said to the parliamentarians and other leaders of Italy, this is a war that we neither condemn nor join. And she was ridiculed in the Italian press, and one wag compared her to Pontius Pilate, a person who split the difference, who couldn't say yes or no. And so we hear Pope Leo saying no. And that is a clarity that comes as a relief after all the nonsense that we've been subjected to for so long.
Speaker 1:
[24:39] We'll pass over the Donald Trump's self-portrait of himself, the AI image of Trump in flowing robes as the healing Jesus, or then he decided he was merely a doctor. But it raises the question with me, can we suppose that Pope Leo has a sense of humor about some of this stuff?
Speaker 2:
[24:57] Absolutely, because he speaks English and reads English, he read President Trump's post, and he tracked it pretty exactly. So Trump had said, I don't want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States, because I'm doing exactly what I was elected in a landslide to do. So then Pope Leo said, I have no fear neither of the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the gospel. And then he added in what seems to me to be a deliberate syntactical echo of the President's post. And that's what I believe I am called to do, what the church is called to do. So President Trump says, I'm doing what I was elected to do. Well, Leo replies saying, this is what I believe I am called to do, and what the church is called to do. And then he said a little bit later about Truth Social, President's social media platform. It's ironic. The name of the site itself, St. Amour. Who could have guessed? 2,000 years of popes, and now there's an American pope, and he's cracking wise. This is real South Side of Chicago idiom, right?
Speaker 1:
[26:03] Right.
Speaker 2:
[26:04] Say no more.
Speaker 1:
[26:05] By way of introduction of you, Paul, you cover so much ground, and we've done podcasts about your serious books, The Regeneration of Johann Sebastian Bach's incredible music, the undercurrent of personal religion in another book, in the American pop culture of the 90s, and that was a prelude perhaps. But let me just say, I know you for years now, Paul, as a searching modern, orthodox Catholic, associated as long as I've known you with the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University in Washington. I want to hear your own personal hopes for this pope, and for your faith, for your church. What's it going to mean to you?
Speaker 2:
[26:50] It's a great question, and I haven't been asked before, so I'm really glad that you asked. First of all, less than 10 years ago, the credibility of the men who lead the Catholic Church was at an all-time low because of the clerical sexual abuse crisis, and the covering up of it by the bishops. It was a particularly low moment. It seemed that such authority might never be regained. Oh, Francis did a lot to regain it. Some of the new people in the church leadership, the College of Cardinals, did a lot to regain it. I think a lot of us ordinary Catholics did a lot to regain it by sticking with the church but also calling evil activity for what it was, trying to be clear in both directions. So right now, we have a pope and we can't know for sure, but who seems like a particularly authentic and decent person. That itself is worth giving thanks for. We could have gotten some creep at the head of the church. We could have gotten a totally corrupt person, a person who would seek to curry favor with powerful governments and so forth. And there are many, many popes in the history of the church who've done precisely that. So the fact that we have a leader of the church whom, as far as we can tell, seems authentic and genuine and a good person. That sounds real simple, but I don't take it for granted for a moment. I'm relieved and grateful, and I'm proud in a way that at this moment in my own life, I'm 60 years old, that there's a person who's roughly a contemporary of mine, who is at the head of the church and whose values and approach to things, some seriousness, some humor, intelligent, but also able to speak plainly and directly, I hope, overlap to some degree with my own.
Speaker 1:
[28:35] I would say very much the same for the church where I go to mass. Intense interest in this thing, I think a lot of it is in the peace point. Who else in the world is speaking to the outrageous bombing, illegal war, viciousness? Think of Gaza, think of Ukraine. And I think there's a profound hunger for some word from this Pope, and I think he knows it too. But I'm also wondering, we hear a lot about Christian nationalism in the American mind these days, uncertainty about conservative Catholic opposition. What fit do you observe personally, Paul, between this Pope and a divided Catholic church in America? My observation is that that conservative wing, so-called, has been turned inside out and upside down. I'm thinking of yesterday's conservative Catholic Andrew Sullivan repenting profoundly now his enthusiasm for the Iraq war when it was happening under George W. Bush. On his sub-stack this week, I read Andrew Sullivan in ever eloquent Catholic prose celebrating Leo XIV and his inspired opposition to Donald Trump and the war in Iran specifically. It's amazing. Andrew Sullivan now hears in Pope Leo's voice for peace, he hears God speaking, literally, the Holy Spirit. He says this, that Leo's is also an authentically American voice, really does for a Catholic, make one think of the Holy Spirit at work in this dark period. Very strong language. The calm Catholic American voice exposes just how alien this president is to the historic Christian values of this country, how destructive he has been to the American experiment as a whole. And unlike the founders, how utterly disrespectful he has been to the opinions of mankind. Has America ever been this loathed in every country among friends and foes alike? For good reason, he suggests. I mean, where is the conservative Catholicism that Andrew Sullivan spoke of 20 years ago, 25 years ago?
Speaker 2:
[30:48] Well, first of all, I'm so glad you quote Andrew Sullivan. I think he's a friend and I admire him as much as anyone in the public sphere, period, full stop. He's brilliant, he's sane, he's measured. He can speak with anger, but can also speak temperately, and he takes the long view. And as you pointed out, he's not loathed to admit when he got something wrong, and he has said may a maxima culpa on his support for the first Iraq war, and here he is saying it one more time. Andrew is a conservative in the deepest sense of the word, and his Catholicism fits in with that. We could have a dozen programs about how the hard right in American politics and the deeply conservative, neo-traditionalist folks in American Catholicism had made common cause. I'm not sure I fully understand it. I do know that I find it disturbing and sometimes repulsive. I do also know that the church is itself a pretty conservative institution, so there's plenty of historical basis for their views. All that said, one of the things that, let's just say that Andrew Sullivan and Pope Leo have in common is that they're people who seem to have a keen sense of politics, but who don't try to subsume everything else to politics. And what we've seen over the past, let's say, much of the century in our civic culture, but especially since Trump came down the escalator, is everything else in life has been fit in to politics, as if politics and the contest of politics and the winning and losing is life itself, and it is not. And Andrew's here to remind us that politics is just part of a larger conservative culture which, if I want to sound old-fashioned, would be called Western civilization, which had politics as one dimension and religion as a dimension, and the arts as a dimension, and craft and care and family life and love for one's land and so forth as a dimension. And we have in the White House someone who has no understanding of any of those things. Power and money are it. I used the term earlier from Alastair McIntyre, income and insurability. What's going on now, and I'm finally getting around to answer your question, Chris, is that Pope Leo is making President Trump look small, and President Trump is small, and people are recognizing that and it's bringing them back to their deeper sense of what a human being singular and what we as a civilization are capable of.
Speaker 1:
[33:19] Yeah, I hear Andrew Sullivan is obviously saying that, but I know a lot of people thinking that. Say it again, Pope Leo. Say it louder. You're right. We've been waiting for a voice like that. Here's Sullivan again. He says, There is, we must begin to recognize a new Maga America in the world. Deeply hostile to Christian values and Western civilization. Theocratic, bullying, racist, violent, greedy, and imperialist. The Pope is reminding us that it remains our urgent and vital moral duty to expose, resist, and end this alien philosophy and fake religion.
Speaker 2:
[33:59] Again, it's beautifully said. So Edmund Burke, who's the founding father of European conservatism, he said something like this. Humanity doesn't need to be taught or told merely to be reminded. So from what's going on now is that Pope Leo is reminding us what the gospel sounds like. He's reminding us of what a sensible Catholicism that's rooted in the gospel and in the history of the church, and in the realities of post-war, modern global politics would look and sound like, and people are recognizing that because they're being reminded. And that's a very conservative impulse to just be reminded of what our civilization has developed and is capable of.
Speaker 1:
[34:39] Is there a hard right Catholicism in 2020s America, or the world for that matter, that the Pope is going to have to deal with? What does it want?
Speaker 2:
[34:49] It's a huge question. I think the Pope is the leader of the entire church. So from the beginning of his pontificate, he's been trying to deal with various dispositions within the church, and he had to do that in South America too. He specifically was appointed to the post of Bishop of Chuclayo in Northern Peru, in order to break a long run of control of the church by bishops who were members of Opus Dei, the deeply reactionary Christian movement, Catholic movement. So he's done it before, and in all sorts of ways, he's been trying to address the concerns of traditionalist Catholics since he became Pope.
Speaker 1:
[35:29] The main issue being what?
Speaker 2:
[35:30] It's hard to say. Many people would say the use of liturgy that has Latin aspects. Others would say that it had to do with papal costume and other things of liturgy. Others would say just a wish to make them feel included. It's very complicated. So what's next? The obvious question is what's next for JD. Vance? And how JD. Vance comports himself and relates to Pope Leo in the next few years is going to be pretty consequential. I can't predict how it will happen, and I don't mean to say that I think that Vance's approach to Catholicism should be anybody's guide, but I think we have to watch Vance because he's in the fray, he's an intelligent person, and he's very prone to change himself. We've watched that all through his career. And so how he relates to Leo is going to be a big story going forward.
Speaker 1:
[36:21] Also, JD. Vance has a book coming out in June titled Communion, Finding My Way Back to Faith. He is law school bright. I wonder if he is church bright, theologically bright. He's no match for the Pope. Let me raise another issue that seems to be out there, waiting for attention, and that is migration and immigration. It's been an ugly subject under Donald Trump and his ice. But do we have a new champion of a more constructive approach, a way to think about immigration in this world?
Speaker 2:
[36:57] In Pope Leo, you mean?
Speaker 1:
[36:58] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[36:58] Pope Leo's position is really consistent with that of the previous popes, and with the archbishops and cardinals who have taken the more definite position in the United States than he has. Cardinal Cupich in Chicago, Cardinal Tobin in Newark, Cardinal McElroy in Washington, bishops in Texas and elsewhere. But the first thing to be said, and maybe the last thing to be said, is that a person who's in the act of migration is a person, first of all. A life as valuable as yours or mine, or President Trump's, or Vice President's advances. And if you really take that seriously, a lot of policy options flow from that. The second thing to be said, and this is where the incoherence, apart from the just sheer brutality of the Trump and Netanyahu war in Iran comes into play, war is the mother of mass migration. The instability caused by war is what forces them from their homes. We had a million people leaving their homes in Lebanon because of the strikes carried out by the Israel Defense Forces in Southern Lebanon just over a few weeks. A million people. War forces people to migrate, so it doesn't make any sense if you wish to live at migration to start a war's hither and yon. It just doesn't add up.
Speaker 1:
[38:10] Paul, I find it an immensely exciting time, despite the uncertainty about what's coming, but we're finally talking. We have a figure in the world's conversation that stands for reason, stands also for moral outcomes and moral behavior. I think he's made an enormously encouraging debut, and I can't wait to watch it develop with JD Vance and many others, and with you, Paul.
Speaker 2:
[38:40] It really is exciting. You know, the attraction for many people to Catholicism is its age and the fact that you could find a precedent for everything. And it's important to know the past, Santiano-wise. It's important to keep in mind, as Faulkner said, that the past isn't even past in some respects. But it's also important for us to recognize when we're in an authentically new situation. And I think with a North American Pope, a truculent and scattershot president, and a major war that the US and Israel are committing in Iran and Lebanon, following on what Pope Francis called the Third World War in pieces, we are in a pretty unprecedented situation. It's terrifying and it's also exciting to watch.
Speaker 1:
[39:27] Yeah. Paul Eli, thank you so much for your work of all kinds. And thank you for joining us in a first approach to a very, very promising new voice of Robert Prevost known now as Pope Leo XIV. Paul Eli, thank you.
Speaker 2:
[39:43] Thank you, Chris, and I hope we can carry on the conversation.
Speaker 1:
[39:47] Paul Eli is a prolific non-fiction writer at the intersections of classical music, religion, and pop culture. He's a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine, focusing on the Catholic Church. Here at Open Source, we count on listener support. If you haven't done your part yet, please go to radioopensource.org/donate, and pitch in to keep the world's first and longest running podcasts going strong. And leave a comment. We're proud to be a founding member of Hub and Spoke, a Boston-based collective of independent voices in podcasting. Check the range of our interests, technology to politics to history and art at hubspokeaudio.org. You'll be glad you did, and thank you.