The Church has chosen Prevost as Francis' successor. The baton passes
from a Jesuit to an Augustinian. In search of unity, the Catholic Churchdraws on its monastic orders, the profound thinking of its theologians
and its experience, to provide solutions to current problems. Even if
the secular world has tried to give a political reading to the choice of
the new Pope, thinking of a response to the decline of the US empire,
Trump's policies and so on, in our opinion, the choice was necessitated
above all by profound internal reasons. The brief but tumultuous
pontificate of Francis has opened up crisis scenarios on several fronts
that the new Pope is called to resolve and to do so he needs to present
himself as the one who recomposes the unity of the Church, in the
continuity of the papal magisterium and recovers tradition, innovating.
The name
When the pontiffs choose a name they are very careful to recover the
characteristic traits of their predecessors and intend to send an
intelligible message to the entire ecclesia, precisely through the
assumption of the name, so that the lines of action are clear and
visible, hypothetical and predictable. Of his 13 predecessors, the
current Pope intends to recover above all the function performed by Leo
XIII presented as the Pope of the laboratories for his encyclical "Rerum
Novarum", but in reality profoundly conservative. If you look closely,
Leo XIII was a great restorer, a fighter against liberalism as well as
socialism and anarchism, a supporter of the centrality of the social
doctrine of the Church, made up of a compromise between capital and
labor, a rejection of class struggle, collaboration between capital and
labor, a substantial return to order, an order characterized by the
preservation of the exploitation of man by man, but, considered,
softened by charity and Christian solidarity, so as to ensure that
excessive inequalities were not the cause of that profound rebellion, of
that revolutionary palingenesis invoked by the masses. In that
historical phase, the Leonine response to the development of the
productive forces and to the changes in society resulted in a
substantial failure: it proposed a society of small and medium-sized
companies spread across collaborative shareholding in a world in which
gigantic oligopolies triumphed and asserted themselves. The result was
the prevalence on one side of fascism and Nazism and on the other of a
wild capitalism that needed to ally itself with Soviet communism to
defeat fascist totalitarianism.
It took two world wars for ordoliberalism, inspired by Catholicism, to
find a way to assert itself and impose its order on Europe; now that
that cycle seems to have come to an end, the Catholic Church is faced
with the global rise of the "theology of prosperity" which constitutes
one of the greatest dangers it must face, because it undermines and
corrupts from within the founding principles of Christianity, as it was
read and interpreted by the Fathers of the Church. The danger is great
because this vision of the world has established itself, with the Trump
administration, at the center of the residual imperial power, of an
empire, the American one, certainly decadent, but dangerous precisely
because it is dying. By assuming the name of Leo XIV Prevost seems to
want to send the message that he, like his predecessor, will be able to
innovate in the wake of continuity and restore order by ensuring stability.
The new challenge
In assuming that name there seems to be a new challenge that would make
her wrists tremble: that of wanting to reformulate a new and different
vision of economic and social relations, which profoundly innovates the
social doctrine of the Church, which gives it peculiar characteristics
of originality compared to the message of other Churches and religions,
which takes into account the spread of artificial intelligence and work,
with the issues connected to the ecological transition, to the debts and
credits of States, to debt relief, to the problems posed by global
finance seen in relation to the growing poverty of all.
It seems that Leo XIV wants to respond in a new and original way to that
cry that comes forcefully from the peripheries of the world in which he
served during his teaching, responding to the questions of the social
doctrine of the Church, on work, on the justice of wages, on the
relationship between private good and common good, on the nature of
business, on the nature of capitalism, on the vocation of the
entrepreneur, on peace, and many other issues such as the environmental
question, placing himself in the wake of the encyclical of his
predecessor. But to do this he must acknowledge that today capitalism
has moved from the factory to finance, from work to consumption, that
the "spirit of business" has invaded the world and conquered souls, the
nihilism of goods has deserted souls, imposing meritocracy as a value
and the leadership of financial capital has imposed itself, becoming a
religion and replacing Christianity with its new dogmas. The awareness
of all this will inevitably lead him to clash with that vision typical
of tramping for which technology and the fusion of man and machine
decide everything, for a world where the oligarchy takes on changing and
multifaceted aspects of absolute dominance in the diversity of political
regimes and dominant institutions. This task seems more urgent than
ever. All the more so because today another declination of social
doctrine is looming in competition with the Catholic Church and its
worldview, not only the technocratic one but also that of orthodoxy,
supported by a symphonic relationship between State and Church, which in
turn presents itself as the true guardian of traditional values, ready
to compete on a global level for the control of consciences, but above
all for the management of society. In the globalized world, orthodoxy,
both in the version of the third Muscovite Rome and its social
catechism, and in that of the reborn second Rome of Constantinople, seat
of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which is jostling to assert itself; both
of these entities present themselves as antagonists with respect to the
Catholic vision. While the clash is taking place on European soil
between these two entities, plastically summarized in the war in
Ukraine, the Catholic Church is called to operate on the global
dimension of the world, having to face and resolve the problems linked
to its international dimension as a universal Church. Also on this side
it is therefore necessary to give a clear and unequivocal answer.
As regards this last aspect of the pontificate of Leo XIV, what the
pontiff will say and do in his probable trip to Nicaea, on the
anniversary of the Council 1700 years ago on the relationship with
Orthodoxy, will be important.
Unity
In any case, the Catholic Church's response to the challenge to which
the vastness of its expansion calls it is that of unity. A unity to be
expressed through the rediscovery of collegiality, enhancing synodality
in the Church which passes on the one hand through the strengthening of
the function of the management of the Curia and on the other through the
accentuation and enhancement of the role of the Episcopal Conferences,
implementing a decentralization in relations with the States which
passes through the stipulation of collaboration contracts, not
necessarily through Concordats, which increasingly characterize the
relations between civil and religious authorities. This choice is
necessary to recognize and enhance the different sensitivities,
depending on the geographical areas, traditions and customs, in a world
where the Catholic Church is increasingly a global institution. On the
other hand, this orientation responds to the increasingly widespread
tendency of States to contain the autonomy of the Churches, given that
in times of growing nationalism each State wants its own Church and
considers secularism increasingly outdated, favoring the affirmation of
a sort of symphonic relationship read in a Catholic key.
This tendency is evident if only one examines in detail the legal acts
produced by the relationships established by the individual episcopal
conferences with the States in which they exercise jurisdiction,
evidence of a fragmentation of the relationships between States and
Churches, aimed at strengthening the control of the executives over the
life and political choices of the people.
The finances of the Church
Among the most serious problems that Francis has had to face is
undoubtedly that of the management of the Vatican's finances which is
intertwined with the lobbies present in the Curia and in particular with
the one that covers up paedophilia. The reckless investments of Carol
Wojtyla and Marcinkus, their relationships with the Banco Ambrosiano,
the manipulations of the IOR, have produced a crisis in the Vatican
finances that the German Episcopal Conference with its payments has not
been able to fill. At the time, to cover the deficit, fundamentalist
organizations such as the Legion of Christ and Opus Dei offered to cover
up the deficit, asking for and obtaining in exchange the cover for the
filthiness that many of the prelates who were part of it practiced
towards minors, covering up the criminal behavior of prelates of high
and low rank. Francis has attempted to save the Catholic Church from
this humiliating drift, willing to pay the price of the collapse of the
Vatican finances due to the lack of resources of many. Today the Holy
See's deficit seems to oscillate between 70 million and 1 billion euros.
It must be said, however, that the disorder is such that it is almost
impossible to census what the Church's actual assets are, especially if
one considers the incalculable value of the real estate properties it
owns in Rome alone. Nor is there any clarity in the properties of the
dioceses and parishes, nor what resources are attributable to the
central structure of the Church or rather pertaining to its
articulations. What is certain is that the support that should come to
Peter's Pence from the dioceses of the United States, even if
impoverished by the large penalties paid to close the cases for
pedophilia, should be able to recover the deficit, making up for the
decreased contribution coming from the German Episcopal Conference whose
finances are burdened not only by the weight of the economic crisis in
Germany, but by the reduction in the participation of the faithful.
Compared to Francis, Prevost has the advantage of having worked for
years on the appointment of bishops, having the opportunity to deepen
his knowledge of the intermediate fabric of ecclesiastical power in the
territories and can therefore reasonably count on a network of trusted
men, spread across the territory, perhaps capable of ensuring greater
control between the center and the periphery, certainly functional to
mending the existing fractures in the episcopate; furthermore, his
positions as a moderate centrist, as a prudent innovator, can ensure,
also thanks to the energy that comes from his young age, to remove those
obstacles that have so far stood in the way of a work of cleaning and
rationalizing the functioning of ecclesiastical structures, or at least
this is what the cardinals who elected him are counting on.
The political Pope
Certainly, as has been underlined, the new pontiff could only follow in
the footsteps of Francis in invoking peace, as have all the pontiffs
since the loss of temporal power, and therefore after Leo XIII, once
they ascended to the chair of Peter.
A first element of discontinuity is constituted by the position of the
new pontiff on the war in Ukraine, its causes, responsibilities,
consequences, geostrategic, which in many ways excludes Vatican
diplomacy from peace negotiations, while there seems to be continuity
with regard to the position on Gaza and the Palestinian question.
However, it is to be believed that the pontificate of Leo XIV will be
characterized by interventions on the theological and magisterial level,
having as its objective the pacification of consciences and the
theological, spiritual and experiential aspects more exquisitely
religious of belief. Unless the horror deriving from the genocide of the
Palestinians is not enough to raise a cry of horror of the reigning
pontiff and the condemnation without appeal of the murderers.
Gianni Cimbalo
https://www.ucadi.org/2025/05/25/re-leone-xiv/
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