Pope Leo XIV and the Lesson of History

Nearly a year after assuming the Apostolic See at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV met with American Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the first meeting between him and a senior official of President Donald Trump's administration, amid an atmosphere of mounting tensions fuelled by mutual declarations on the war against Iran and immigration policies.

The first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church demonstrated firm and classical positions of the Church in promoting the values of peace and dialogue, and had to face the criticism of President Trump, who claimed that he "exposed the Church, Catholics and peoples to danger", holding that the Pope's positions suggested he "saw no objection to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons". Leo hastened to deny these accusations, reaffirming the Church's rejection of nuclear weapons and dismissing Trump's statements as "inaccurate".

Throughout his journey across the African continent, Leo displayed great wisdom and measured caution, clearly unwilling to engage in a polyphonic duel with the American president. He exercised his freedom of speech with the goodwill of righteous men, addressing all matters generally but particularly those in which certainty is lacking and where doubt remains as to America's resort to power politics, thereby reminding the world of the Catholic Church's conviction in the supremacy of spiritual authority over temporal power. Two themes ran through all the stops of his visit, from Turkey to Lebanon, through Algeria and on to the Mediterranean port of Marseille: peace, and the rejection of a war that has returned to hammer at the eastern and southern gates, borne along by an unbridled Trumpian fortune that destroys, in the manner of Machiavelli in his day, the familiar landmarks of the world.

The Church therefore holds itself apart from another bias to which commentators are prone, that of conducting itself according to the morality of the political man, and more decisively still, from proclaiming that the true enemy of the classical intellectual and theological heritage of the Church is silence, or the declaration of neutrality on the values of pluralism, democracy, the common good and its credible representation, far more than relativism in political positions or in consciousness. The Pope thus cuts through with his rejection of the very idea of war, invoking the beatitude of the peacemakers, and in his condemnation of any attempt to isolate the pluralist dynamic of Europe, animated by its demographic vitality, from the rest of the planet, as well as in his denunciation of the extractive and unjust methods practised at the expense of peoples in their entirety. He addresses them, at best, individually at times, on the question of peace, for every human being carries within him a part of virtue and wisdom, and when they gather together, they form a single man with multiple feet, multiple hands, and multiple senses, in the manner of Aristotle measuring this "moral competence of the people".

In Algeria, in the presence of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the Pope urged "those who hold power in this country to strengthen a vibrant, dynamic and free civil society", five years after the suppression of the Hirak movement for democracy. "Do not be afraid of opposition. Do not stifle the visions of youth", he was to repeat later in Angola. In Cameroon, before General Paul Biya, who has held power for more than four decades, he also expressed his consternation at a world "invaded by force, held in the grip of a handful of tyrants and corruption". He further denounced "the hidden face of the environmental and social destruction wrought by the feverish race for raw materials and rare earths", which fuels wars and interference across the African continent. He also warned against "the perverted use of artificial intelligence to fuel polarisation, conflicts, fears and violence bearing down on the belonging and social, political or community identity of minorities, unable to bear the weight of closed intellectual systems".

In Lebanon, the Pope bore witness to a profound fatigue and a sense of "no way out" in the face of what appeared to be the imminent resumption of war. He did not conceal his anger at the Israeli war, nor his bitterness at Hezbollah's decision to plunge into it, affirming to his clergy and to the Christian community in particular that their rootedness in the East represented a genuine mission in the very logic of religious and political existence. He knew that the suffering of the population had been relegated to second place in favour of major geopolitical calculations. He measured the depth of the anxiety felt by the Lebanese people, and by Christians in particular, when certain events in Syria and the region took on an almost catastrophic dimension. For the risk of communal tensions and fractures extended beyond the cleavages between different religious communities: it ran through each one of them.

These messages inscribe Leo XIV in continuity with Pope Francis, with the determination not to let them be extinguished by the turbulence of the world. They make themselves heard and resonate in his raising of his voice and in the manner in which he addresses those who hold political power, without deference or complacency, and without yielding to Trump's repeated provocations, Trump who did not accept being called to account by the successor of Saint Peter over his wars in the Middle East, and attempted to defuse matters with mockery of "the Pope's weakness", going so far as to post on his social network Truth Social an image bearing a Christic iconography in which he appears as a thaumaturge, clad in the white robe and red mantle of the Redeemer.

The Pope thus found himself in the position of his predecessor John Paul II, who in 1978 had launched his celebrated phrase "Be not afraid" during his inauguration Mass, a message of hope carried by the former Bishop of Krakow, in a Poland that was to know the earthquakes leading to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Forty-eight years on, that call finds its echo in the one raised by the American churchman, who declares that he feels no "fear" before the American president nor before his Vice-President J. D. Vance, who saw fit to give Leo XIV a lesson in theology, in an external political posture devoid of credibility, marked by illogic and incoherence in the face of the acceleration of history and the overturning of the world under the weight of multiple and entangled crises since "the Trumpian ascent".

These positions are not isolated, as Europeans discover their own isolation according to Hubert Védrine and will have to embark upon a "conceptual revolution" by "abandoning the pretence of being the centre of the world", within a near-chaotic system taking shape according to the great French anthropologist Maurice Godelier, who calls for a "moral rearmament" in order to "better respond to those who persist in thinking about surpassing the West or fighting it".

For four cycles of Western dominance over the world's destiny since the sixteenth century have come to an end: the reassertion of the United States on capitalism and democracy since 1917, the world order of 1945, and finally globalisation, which began in 1979 and closed in 2022 with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A new age of empires is taking shape today in an unstable and heterogeneous geopolitical world, where violence frees itself from the institutions and rules that sought to contain it, and where peace becomes impossible whilst war is omnipresent. Democracies are in retreat and face an existential threat under the effect of American liberalism's drift towards injustice and inequality and its convergence with the principles of authoritarian regimes, leaving Europe encircled between the vital threat posed by Russia, China's economic dominance, the pressure of a Turkey mobilising Islam to rebuild the Ottoman Empire, and the hostility of the South nurtured by the colonial past.

The Church does not find itself disarmed or weakened for all that. It has not succumbed to the illusions of the end of history, nor to the sway of large markets, nor to the politics of force that remains the monopoly of the great powers in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the genocide perpetrated in Gaza, the unilateral initiatives of the United States aimed at overthrowing regimes in Venezuela and now in Iran, all operations undertaken without seeking the slightest semblance of international approval, as with the weaponisation of trade, technology and even migration flows, increasingly used as levers of coercion against competitors or in service of their own geopolitical interests. A portion of the world chooses silence and ambiguity rather than defending international law, seeking to avoid any confrontation, and thus slides towards appeasement. This is an error, by the standards of the Catholic Church