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. That is, the family is “natural” and not an adjunct of the state. He writes:
[T]here would be danger lest the primary and essential cell of society, the family, with its well-being and its growth, should come to be considered from the narrow standpoint of national power, and lest it be forgotten that man and the family are by nature anterior to the State, and that the Creator has given to both of them powers and rights and has assigned them a mission and a charge that correspond to undeniable natural requirements.
Not surprisingly, totalitarian states and the revolutionary Left have long sought to abolish the family, redefine it, or otherwise reinvent it in an image more suitable to the needs of regimes. From the French Revolution to the modern Left of today, the natural family remains under almost constant attack.
For his part, Pope Leo is off to a good start on this matter. At his May 16 audience with the Holy See’s diplomatic corps, Pope Leo stated in no uncertain terms that “It is the responsibility of government leaders to work to build harmonious and peaceful civil societies. This can be achieved above all by investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman.” Leo then quotes his predecessor Pope Leo XIII, recounting, like Pius XII, that the family has precedence over civil governments. The family is, according to Leo XIII: “a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society.”
On this matter, Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis was timid and often contradictory. He often sacrificed clarity in an effort to pander to global elites and win friends among members of the press. Pope Leo, hopefully, will be different, and stick to his own comments in which he stated: “For her part, the Church can never be exempted from speaking the truth about humanity and the world.”
Promote Peace
There are few greater threats to the family than war. Some will argue that wars are inevitable, but even in those cases—assuming the “inevitable” cases even exist—the proper response always is to seek ways to both shorten wars and lessen their severity. This, of course, has always been the point of international law—such as the Geneva Conventions—designed to make wars less terrible, even when they occur. The longer wars last, and the more the belligerents ignore the rights of noncombatants, the more disastrous will the outcomes be for families and individuals. The greatest beneficiaries of wars have long been states, which can use wars as a means of extending the state’s despotism both in time and space.
A primary goal of Popes must always be to encourage negotiations with warring parties and to offer forums and resources for rapprochement. This, of course, has a long history within the Church itself, dating philosophically at least as far back as Augustine’s just war theory, and later coalescing as a mass movement in the form of the Peace and Truce of God movement of the early Middle Ages, which worked to limit feuds among nobles in the Middle Ages.
Pope Leo would do well to continue this tradition, and he has already signaled an effort to do so. He has condemned the war crimes committed by the State of Israel against innocents in Gaza, and he has offered Vatican City as a venue for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. He should continue on this path. Indeed, in doing so, he follows the lead of Pope John Paul II who vehemently opposed the American invasion of Iraq, ostensibly justified by the Bush administration’s lies about “weapons of mass destruction.” Indeed, Pope Leo has also signaled an affinity for John Paul’s efforts in this regard. At his May 11 address, Leo stated “never again war,” a phrase employed by John Paul against the American war on Iraq, and other conflicts.
In contrast to this, the “diplomacy” of Pope Francis—if it can be called diplomacy at all—was not so much focused on alleviating the costs of war as it was focused on promoting a certain ideological agenda. Under Francis, calls for peace tended to be vague, non-specific and generally served as a vehicle for Francis to push “social justice” and environmentalism.
Assert the Church’s Independence from the State
In his history of political thought, historian Ralph Raico—following Lord Acton—notes that the idea of freedom in the West owes much to the fact that the West’s political institutions were formed during a period of competition between Church and state throughout the Middle Ages.
As Raico notes, Europe was formed out of incessant conflict between civil authorities and Church authorities, each of which sought to assert its own prerogatives against the other. AThis conflict established the idea that some institutions are simply not subject to the authority of states and—more importantly—that states are limited in who and what they can legally or morally dominate. In many ways, then, Church and state—at least in the West, in contrast to the Caesaropapism of the East—are natural enemies. The byproduct of this conflict paved the way for other institutions—cities, guilds, nobles, etc.— to assert their own independence from the state as well.
Clearly, the modern Church enjoys only a tiny fraction of the independence it enjoyed prior to the rise of the modern sovereign state, but it is essential that Pope Leo continue to assert the Church’s independence overall.
Most pressing in this matter is a repair of Pope Francis’s disastrous China policy which granted far greater control over Church prerogatives that was thought acceptable under Francis’s predecessors. As noted by the heroic Cardinal Zen, Francis essentially threw in the towel on maintaining Church independence from Beijing.
Leo needs to assert the Church’s independence once again in China, and in so doing engage in the same battle for independence that characterizes—as with, for example, the investiture controversy—centuries of Church-state conflict.
This general attitude also ought to be expressed not just in explicit assertions of independence, but also in a policy of refusing to allow the Church and the papacy to be caught up in the minutiae of modern domestic policy conflicts in the world’s current states. Moreover, no state ought to be treated as indispensable or exceptional. It is good that Pope Leo gave no special attention to J.D. Vance during Vance’s recent visit to the Vatican, nor has Leo pledged to visit the United States any time soon. The Papacy is uniquely equipped to send this message since the Holy See predates every state on earth by many centuries.
It is far too early to know the details of how Pope Leo will address these matters, but in these three areas he can do much to confront the nearly untrammeled powers of modern states which have done so much to destroy the freedoms and the dignity of families and individuals across the world.
Image credit, CC BY-SA 4.0, The Pillar, via Wikipedia. Image cropped.
