I am not a Catholic, but I know a great many people who are. My wife was brought up as one. As she says, you never quite recover.
But, Catholic or not, a new Pope, who leads one billion people, matters.
So does his choice of name. Cardinal Robert Prevost has chosen to be Pope Leo XIV. Everyone assumes that this means that he intends to be a successor to Pope Leo XIII.
Leo XIII was Pope from 1878 to 1903. His best-known legacy is a Papal encyclical of 1891, entitled Rerum novarum, which means "of revolutionary change".
I suspect I am in a minority for having actually read some of this, admittedly not recently. I suspect it was twenty or more years ago now. I did so because this work, if not revolutionary, is definitely worthy of the effort.
It rejects both socialism (in the form of ending private property) and capitalism in its nineteenth-century (and neoliberal, as a consequence) form.
It defends the rights of workers.
It requires fair pay.
It defends the right of workers to organise in trade unions.
It accepts that there is a mutuality of obligation between employers and workers, rarely noted by employers in the modern workplace.
It defended fair taxation, whilst saying:
The right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from man; and the State has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good alone, but by no means to absorb it altogether. The State would therefore be unjust and cruel if under the name of taxation it were to deprive the private owner of more than is fair.
I disagree with the claim that private property is natural. I do agree that the state has the right to control its use for the sake of the public good. I see no reason why the state should want to eliminate it altogether. But I stress, I see what I wrote in the Taxing Wealth Report as entirely consistent with the last sentence. The aim was to be fair when the system of tax we have is not.
What seems likely is that we have a Pope who quite profoundly disagrees with the White House. He directly criticised J D Vance in February.
I am not sure he is a liberal. His attitude towards LGBTQ matters is open to doubt. But I suspect he is not right-wing. That's something. If he advanced Catholic social teaching, that would be good.
He's someone to watch.
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Well, let us hope so.
Maybe the Catholic church – or even just some of it – recognises the real evils amongst us.
One evil being the propensity for those with private property to keep acquiring it. The other is the worship of money – a real huamn-value free zone.
“worship of money”.. would that be…….a new prayer for out times:
“Our market which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy perfect competition come.
Thy will be done in earth,
as it is in neo-lib utopia
Give us this day our daily arbitrage.
And forgive us our pulling a fast one on the other fellah,
as we forgive those
that pull a fast one against us.
And lead us not into wokery,
but deliver us from lefties
For thine is the market,
and the power, and the neoliberalism,
forever and ever.
Amen.
I say James pass the Bolly would there’s a good chap – nothing like a good prayer to work up a thirst.
Did you write that?
Very good
Yes. The shade of Voltaire overcame me.
Very good
The 1891 encyclical’s view that ‘the State has the right to control [private property’s] use in the interests of the public good’ reminded my of the excellent discussion in Thomas Piketty’s ‘Brief History of Equality’ of private property ownership as a collection of rights and obligations that change over time, and indeed from place to place – and specifically of the German 1949 constitutional position that private property ownership is legitimate only insofar as it ‘shall… serve the public good’ (Article 14). Piketty explores how constitutional conventions in other countries that veer more towards ‘absolute title’ inhibit effective land reform and highly successful industrial models like the German and Scandinavian ‘mitbestimmung’ systems.
Differing cultural understandings of the meaning of property ownership are of course notorious in colonialism – and in the early evolution of capitalism – ‘enclosures’ being ideologically sanctioned by the nascent ideology of capitalism, replacing older conceptions of land ownership, with different rights and obligations – a struggle still ongoing in ‘privatisation’, or property developers building shopping malls over what were public squares and roads, or housing on village greens.
Thanks
He will certainly be the right person to criticise Trump and Vance given that he is a US National
He is actually a Peruvian citizen.
He successfully applied for Peruvian Nationality after being assigned, in the 1980’s, to a parish at the Province of Chiclayo, in the north of the Republic. His “Certificado de Inscripcion” is doing-the-rounds on Social Media all-round South America, at the moment.
Apologies. He retains his US citizen status: he’s a dual-national of the USA & Peru…that’ll teach me not to take my (Peruvian) wife’s word for it!
When someone says that property is natural, I immediately think of John Locke. A quick look online suggests to me that the similarity is only surface level. Leo was more inline with Thomas Aquinas, that emperors/kings have no right to conquest territory. Might does not make right.
I think you are right: Aquinas was the influence
Your wife is right. I was bought up Catholic and, even though I rejected it outright at the age of about 13, I cannot see a man wearing a cassock or women wearing a habit without being overcome by a red mist. I admit that I cannot think clearly or rationally when it comes to all and any religion and will not, cannot listen to anything any Pope might utter. I know my feelings are unreasonable rigid but that’s the effect Catholicism has. My view of all religions is very much in line with Bertram Russell’s and that “Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion has gone hand-in-hand”. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian
Much if not most of the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the bible represent a sound philosophy, even for a non-religious person like me. The problem is that many of those professing Christianity want to cherry pick. My favourite is in Matthew 19:23 – the rich man and the eye of a needle. You won’t often (ever?) hear that chosen for a church sermon. The worst of course are ‘religious’ leaders whose favourite seems to be ‘thou shalt kill’. Power does indeed corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Trump was corrupted long ago of course and now Starmer is infected.
Let’s hope the new Pope is a force for good and speaks truths to the powerful. Whether they listen of course is another matter.
My grandmother comes to mind at this point. Her Christianity was austere to coin a phrase and she held all Roman Catholics as guilty of something she called “Spanish practices”.
As a small boy I never really got to the bottom of these Spanish practices but many nice to do things were included!
I would like to know his position on Palestine. We knew very little about how Pope Francis felt and what he did until after he died – when some of the facts escaped the Media’s grasp and seeped out (before being swiftly blotted out). It seems now that either (a) Pope Leo has no position; (b) that he shares that of Pope Francis; (c) he is a full-on supporter of genocide and the West’s complicity in it; or (d) like so many of our “centrist” politicians he thinks it is “complicated” and will blether on about this rather than do anything. But all this is because our reprehensible media are busy covering up what is happening.