"Workers" Pope Leo XIV Will Never Be Progressive Enough

A brand new fossil, but a fossil nonetheless. To buff its image as a stale obsolete institution, the Catholic Church has chosen an American for a Pope, as if doing so would modernize the Church in substance and would bring back the millions of younger Americans who are leaving the Church - and religion for that matter - in droves.

It is sad to see these thousands of faithful attend the election of the Pope at the Vatican as if it were a rock concert or a political nationalistic rally. The substance is not there because there is no substance to begin with. There never was a substance. What difference in a world of wars, hatred, racism and man-made hunger and environmental ravage can a Pope bring? Nothing, beyond the marketing, a.k.a. false advertising!.

Francis, we are told, was all humility, modesty, and love for the poor. Instead of living in the 48-carat Apostolic Palace, he chose to live in the 24-carat Casa Santa Marta next door. We are supposed to feel grateful and humbled by such decisions. But couldn't he have done something about the unfolding genocide in Gaza? We are still debating today why didn't Pope Pius XII do something to stand up to the Nazis and confront the Holocaust. 

It therefore seems to me that Popes are incapable, incompetent, inept, unwilling... of doing and steering things in the right direction, primarily because they are more focused on self-preservation, an admittedly egotistical objective given the grandiose claims that Christianity has on God, Jesus, and the entire biblical plot. If you are the Vicar on Earth of the Son of God, the maker of the universe, you must be able to do something. Otherwise, what's the point of the entire 2000-years-old performance? But alas, all that a Pope can do these days is provide a sentimental appeal, perhaps nostalgic of our earlier ignorance, to millions of largely ignorant faithful around the world, and in so doing, give people a false sense of hope and deviate them from the real hard challenges of this life. Someone said that "hope is not a plan". And the Church has no plans; only hope. 

I am reminded of Mother Teresa who saw her mission as maintaining the sick and poor people alive in their conditions of filth, illness and poverty, promising them the phantasmagoric healing of the afterlife, when she could have done so much more with her fame and money to provide actual medical care and combat poverty and illiteracy in this world.

How can any institution whose core competence is based on absurd mythologies from the Bronze Age remain relevant in the Electronic Age?

Just as the Church is always 500 years behind normal human societal development, it will take many more sluggishly "progressive" Francises and Leos and hundreds of years before the Church catches up with reality. By the time the Church admits its failure at recognizing change, so much time would have elapsed and more changes would have come about. The Church is never in phase with the society it belongs to. 

In that sense, the Church is not a "leader" institution. It took it hundreds of years before it admitted that the earth is round and is not the center of the universe; it still has not fully conceded to the ironclad fact of Darwin's evolution by natural selection, opting instead to utter its typical jesuitic formulation that evolution by natural selection "is not incompatible with the Church's teachings". Which means in normal human language that the Church has decided not to fight evolutionary theory, its worst enemy, but to coexist with it, because it knows from precedent (Galileo, for example) that science always ends up correct while religion is continuously sliding - or is stuck - in the primitive abysses of human history and civilization.

Some would argue that the excessive caution and inertia of the Church at recognizing change are what made the Church last for nearly two millennia. But this is an incongruous argument, because the point of the Church is not to preserve itself, for however much self-preservation is essential and desirable, it remains a self-centered egotistical enterprise that is universal to any entity or organism, and in the case of the Church it is a deviation from the ultimate mission: To seek and prove the Truth that is claimed in its founding myth. Unfortunately for the Church, the latter has not only failed to materialize, it is in continuous regress as the centuries go by.

Just like Francis, Pope Leo XIV is a bit of shimmering chrome slapped on top of an otherwise rusty decaying hulk.
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The new American Pope, Robert Francis Prevost, Leo XIV, is a textbook example of the New World's hybridization of many ethnicities, though his genes are mostly rooted in Africa and the Caribbean with a hint of French, as his last name suggests, perhaps an ancestry going back to the diddling between a French slavemaster and his African slave, like many Haitians. He holds both US and Peruvian citizenships and was born in Chicago. For the white protestant supremacists of the US, he is a bit of a "darkie"; worse: He's a Papist darkie.

His mother is Mildred Martíne. Her parents, Leo’s maternal grandparents, were Joseph Martinez from Haiti or the Dominican republic, and Louise Baquié from New Orleans. In official records they are listed as Black or creole or mulattos. They lived in the city's Seventh Ward, a traditionally Catholic melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.

His father, Louis Marius Prevost, had vague French and Spanish (some say Italian) roots and served in the Navy in World War II. 

Given this background as a descendant of Americanized Caribbean Africans, who was accultured to Latin America through his 30-year stay on Peru, Pope Leo XIV may be a 21st century "Leo Africanus". The novel by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf, "Leo Africanus" (or Leo the African), tells a lifestory embodying the melding of many cultures in one cross-Mediterranean migrant during the 15th century, a Jew who became Muslim then became Christian as he circled around the Mediterranean from Spain through North Africa, Turkey and finally in Rome.

In [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153496.Leo_Africanus], the novel is summarized as follows:

"I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages."

Thus wrote Leo Africanus, in his fortieth year, in this imaginary autobiography of the famous geographer, adventurer, and scholar Hasan al-Wazzan, who was born in Granada in 1488. His family fled the Inquisition and took him to the city of Fez, in North Africa. Hasan became an itinerant merchant, and made many journeys to the East, journeys rich in adventure and observation. He was captured by a Sicilian pirate and taken back to Rome as a gift to Pope Leo X, who baptized him Johannes Leo. While in Rome, he wrote the first trilingual dictionary (Latin, Arabic and Hebrew), as well as his celebrated Description of Africa, for which he is still remembered as Leo Africanus."

 

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Who is Robert Francis Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV, and howwill his political views shape his papacy?

The earliest clues suggest Leo could champion inclusion and openness to change — like his predecessor, Pope Francis.

Andrew Romano 

Fri, May 9, 2025

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of the United States was selected Thursday by the papal conclave to succeed Pope Francis and lead the Roman Catholic Church. The new pontiff, who has taken the name Leo XIV, is the first American pope. But what else do we know about him?

Prevost is an Augustinian, meaning he belongs to a Catholic order known for its commitment to community and sharing. He is the first Augustinian pope, according to the Vatican.

Pope Leo's rise through the Catholic Church

Prevost attended secondary school at an Augustinian seminary and officially joined the order in 1977, when he was 22. In between, he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Villanova University. Five years later, Prevost was awarded a Master of Divinity degree from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and he traveled to the Augustinian College of Saint Monica in Rome to be ordained. Prevost later received a doctorate in canon law from Rome’s Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Prevost went on to spend much of his adult life abroad. While preparing his doctoral thesis, he was sent to the Augustinian mission in Chulucanas, Piura, Peru. He returned to Peru in 1988 and spent the next 10 years leading the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo; he also taught canon law, served as an ecclesiastical judge, and led his own congregation. He eventually became a naturalized citizen there.

From 1999 to 2014, Prevost worked in Chicago, where he first led the city’s Augustinian Province and then served two six-year terms as head of the Augustinians. Like other cardinals, he has been criticized for his dealings there with priests accused of sexual abuse.

Prevost returned to Peru in 2014; Pope Francis soon named him bishop. Until Francis’s death, Prevost “held one of the most influential Vatican posts, running the office that selects and manages bishops globally,” according to the New York Times.

What kind of pope will Leo be?

In his first remarks after being chosen as the new pontiff Thursday, Pope Leo outlined his vision for the Catholic Church.

"We have to seek together to be a missionary church. A church that builds bridges and dialogue," he said, according to an English translation of his remarks, which were mostly in Italian. He also called on people to "show our charity" to others "and be in dialogue with love."

Leo paid tribute to the late Pope Francis as well, saying, "Let us keep in our ears the weak voice of Pope Francis that blesses Rome. The Pope who blessed Rome, gave his blessing to the entire world that morning of Easter. Allow me to follow up on that blessing. God loves us. God loves everyone. Evil will not prevail."

The fact that Leo, like Francis, hails from the Americas — and spent decades in Francis’s native South America — suggests a degree of continuity. The conventional wisdom ahead of this week’s conclave was that an American would not be chosen as pontiff. Does this mean Leo will champion greater inclusion and openness to change, like his predecessor? The earliest clues suggest he might.

What are Leo's political views?

While “often described as reserved and discreet,” according to the Times — a stylistic departure from the more gregarious Francis — Leo named himself after Pope Leo XIII, a turn-of-the-20th-century modernizer. Leo XIII was known as the “Social Pope” and the "Pope of the Workers” for his writings on social justice, fair wages, safe labor conditions and trade unions.

Along similar lines, Prevost resurfaced on X in February of this year — after a long absence — to repost an opinion column from the National Catholic Reporter about how Vice President “JD Vance is wrong” because “Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.”

The column criticized Vance for interpreting a medieval concept known as ordo amoris to mean that “you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.”

“A lot of the far left has completely inverted that,” Vance complained in January.

Yet the column insists that “Jesus never speaks of love as something to be rationed. He speaks of love as abundance — a table where there is enough for everyone.”

This is “what the gospel asks of all of us on immigration,” Prevost wrote on X when he later reposted another story critical of the Trump administration's treatment of migrants.

Most recently, in April, Prevost shared an X post that questioned the Trump administration's deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

"Do you not see the suffering?" the post read, quoting the story it linked to. "Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”

Prevost joined X (then Twitter) in 2011. Throughout Trump's first term, he shared tweets.

On the other hand, it’s unclear whether Prevost (now Leo) will be as accepting of LGBTQ Catholics as Francis was. In a 2012 address to bishops, he lamented that Western media and culture had fostered “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel,” citing the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.”

Since then, he has been quiet on the subject.

Newly elected Pope Leo XIV appears at the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, Thursday. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of the United States was selected Thursday by the papal conclave to succeed Pope Francis and lead the Roman Catholic Church. The new pontiff, who has taken the name Leo XIV, is the first American pope. But what else do we know about him?

Prevost, 69, was born in Chicago on Sept. 14, 1955. His father, Louis Marius Prevost, a school administrator and World War II naval veteran, was of French and Italian descent; the family of his mother, Mildred Martinez, originally hailed from Spain. In addition to English, the new pope speaks Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese; he can read Latin and German.

Prevost is an Augustinian, meaning he belongs to a Catholic order known for its commitment to community and sharing. He is also the first Augustinian pope, according to the Vatican.