Being pope in an irreligious age

In his masterful work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he wrote in the late 18th century, Edward Gibbon had it that “the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people to be equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

Much the same can be said about attitudes towards religious beliefs today. With the exception of a handful of militant sceptics determined to sweep away all vestiges of pre-modern thought, few “philosophers” make much of an effort to persuade devout evangelical Christians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims or Buddhists that they should abandon their particular creed because it is irrational. Most prefer to agree with the “magistrates” – people who occupy positions in government – that they serve a useful purpose by reconciling people to their lot, while some have even come to the conclusion that the marked decline in religiosity that has taken place in recent decades in Europe and the United States has left a dangerous void and that attempts to fill it with political concoctions such as Communism or fascism have had terrible consequences.

For someone like Robert Francis Prevost, the North American with strong Peruvian connection who has just become Pope Leo XIV, awareness that for most people (even those who say they are Catholics) the doctrines he must preach are hazy concepts they will judge in accordance with secular criteria, poses a daunting challenge. From the moment the cardinals chose him to succeed Jorge Bergoglio, most of those who are doing their best to size him up have been far more interested in his alleged willingness or reluctance to move with the times than in what it may be presumed he sincerely believes.

As was bound to happen, they want to know if he is on board with the globalist, “progressive” agenda many assumed was favoured by the Argentine pontiff, or whether, like the German Joseph Ratzinger, Prevost will be something of a traditionalist. It would seem that, in the view of Vatican insiders, he can be relied on to be rather less of a populist than Francis turned out to be but a bit more flexible than Benedict XVI, and that was why he was elected to the post.   

One big question that overshadows others has to do with the Pope’s relationship with his compatriot Donald Trump. Those who loathe the US president and all his works fervently hope Prevost will soon start attacking him with ecclesiastical fury for having put an abrupt halt to illegal immigration across the southern border, doing away with DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) practices in government offices and going after the pro-Hamas activists who for well over a year have been raising hell on Ivy League university campuses; Trump and the men and women surrounding him see them as anti-Semitic thugs.

Were Prevost to do what Trump’s foes have in mind, he would put himself at odds with most North Americans who, by and large, are against open borders and appalled by the influx of millions of individuals of unknown provenance, dislike measures that are designed to privilege specific racial minorities and despise the academics and administrators that in their view have lowered standards and made their country’s top universities openly hostile to the United States. Trump and his MAGA followers are certainly not the only people who want to see all that progressive wokery rolled back; plenty of moderate Democrats agree that, when Joe Biden was in office, the party they support went too far in the wrong direction and that, to win back power, it will have to reverse course.

Like all his predecessors since Leo XII, who over a century ago tried to confront “the modern world” by devising a “social doctrine” that he outlined in a well-remembered encyclical which took into account the problems arising from the fraught relations between capital and labour, Leo XIV faces a most difficult dilemma. If he gets the Church to update its teachings in an effort to keep up with a rapidly changing world, it will run the risk of degenerating into just another presumably well-meaning body with little to distinguish it from the dozens of NGOs that already exist and compete for funds, but if he emphasises its attachment to what he must believe are eternal truths that his forerunners have sworn by for millennia, it will be derided for being hopelessly out of touch.

As Prevost surely knows, unless the Church he now leads is thought to be based on something that is far more solid than notions that happen to be fashionable nowadays and which in elite circles are assumed to be positive, it will continue to shrink, as it has done, with startling speed, in once notably pious countries such as Ireland and Italy. People, including atheists and agnostics, who are worried by the gap that has been left in the lives of their communities by the fading away of belief in an all-knowing and all-powerful deity that takes a keen interest in everything everyone does or merely thinks, cannot expect to get worthwhile answers from a pontiff who talks much like a talk-show performer or a politician who is determined to impress listeners by constantly reminding them that his sentiments are benevolent.

In the view of most Vatican-watchers, the fate of Leo’s papacy will depend on his ability to deal with high-ranking clerics who have been accused of committing sexual offences, but while there can be no doubt that their behaviour has done much to bring the Catholic Church into disrepute, from a historical perspective its relationship with Islam is a far more serious issue. Unlike Christianity, which is being swept away as the sea of faith retreats without much of that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” once heard by Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach, Islam is on the rise again. Though there are those who think that, like Christianity, sooner or later Islam will be pulled to pieces by nitpicking scholarly critics who, despite the murderous efforts by believers to stop them, will find enough contradictions, interpolations and non sequiturs in its sacred texts to make them even less persuasive in the eyes of the brighter among the faithful than they already are, but before this happens it could well have acquired a dominant position in Europe where, without many people finding it disturbing, churches and chapels are regularly closing their doors or being converted into mosques.