What the World Needs Now From Pope Leo XIV
Whatever one may think of the Catholic Pope’s religious authority, the fact remains that the Papacy—also known as the Holy See—in spite of several centuries of decline in prestige, is an international institution that is difficult to ignore. There are good reasons, after all, why the heads of state from major global powers choose to meet with the Pope and with his representatives. In spite of lacking any significant military force or sizable territory, the Papacy exercises what the Americans like to call “soft power.”
With the election of a new Pope—the American-born Pope Leo XIV—the Holy See has an opportunity to wield this soft power in a way that enhances the freedom and human rights of individual persons. This is also an opportunity to change direction. This is important and necessary because during the twelve years of Pope Francis’s pontificate, the Holy See largely employed its power and influence to ill effect. Under Francis, the Holy See chose to chase popularity with global intellectuals and states while sowing disunity and confusion within the Church itself. At that time, the Holy See also chose to sacrifice the Church’s own independence—as with Francis’s China deal. In short, the Church became an instrument supporting the current and morally debased international status quo, rather than one that demanded its reform.
Pope Leo, however, can change this, and there are at least three key ways that he can do so. The first is to defend the family with force and clarity. The second is to foster peace among states and within them. The third is to both unify the Church and assert its independence from state power.
Defend the Family
The family exists today as the most important non-state institution, and as an institution that competes with the state. Even in our modern era, family ties continue to foster loyalties and affections among individuals, and direct those affections away from the state. As such, the family represents one of the last few obstacles that stands in the way of the state’s efforts to reduce every person to an atomistic individual with no binding or lasting relationship other than the relationship with the state. As the great French liberal Benjamin Constant noted, non-state institutions like the family “contain a principle of resistance which government allows only with regret and which it is keen to uproot. It makes even shorter work of individuals. It rolls its immense mass effortlessly over them, as over sand.”
More fundamentally, as a previous pope, Pope Pius XII, noted the family precedes the state and ought not be measured according to the needs or priority of the state. Tha
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