A while ago, sticking to his imposition of tariffs, President Trump evoked stirring political pronouncements. We are entering a ‘new era’ Sir Keir Starmer declared. It still looks that way. A Treasury Minister announced the end of globalization. Perhaps splitting into two trading networks is underway. But where is guidance for alternatives to the current hijacking of the global economy to be found? What is the relationship between the populism, nationalism and ‘patriotism’ that put this man in power again?
As a matter of fact, a new era began years ago. Communications technology was, and is, one of the driving forces transforming the economy. IT has had consequences for who profits and who loses, power relations, and our experience of social relations. US populism, a bizarre sub-species of extreme nationalism, Trump and Maga mania, are a further element. And the second coming of Trump is associated with seismic geo-political changes. The social experience and perceptions of many people living in democracies is easily summed up. They feel ignored by the dominant political Parties, believing “they are all the same” and that votes change nothing. They feel humiliated by an urban elite perceived as not so much a meritocracy as an oligarchy. Because of lack of control over immigration, for right-wing populists, jobs, culture and identity are put in jeopardy by foreigners/immigrants, ethnic minorities and Muslims. Reform picks and mixes its exploitation of these fears. For Left-wing populists, for example Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the primary rallying point is characteristically failure to tackle inequality and injustice. None of the sentiments above is news. There have been acres of newsprint and critical scholarly analysis spent on them. The problem is that the weltanschauung of populist extreme nationalism cuts the ground from under its critics. The reply is usually “they would say that wouldn’t they” - because “they” belong to the urban elite, an oligarchy, and are the beneficiaries of the status quo. They are responsible for and sustain these wrongs. Enter from both right and left the jokers and budding dictators around the world who alone, it is – naively - hoped, may bring about change. Inasmuch as the politics of the West still rests on the values implied in a culture of human rights or human dignity, there are ways into a conversation with extreme nationalists. Though damaged by sexual abuse scandals, the Churches retain the capacity to play an important part in this conversation because they are often felt to stand above a venal interest in the status quo. They still have a voice. The Acts of the Apostles describes how the early Christian community distinguished itself from the religion of the bounded territory and culture represented at the time by Judaism. It was a momentous decision, obviously debated, which only in the 20th. Century produced a truly global Church. It gave to Christian thought a tension between its universality and different national and cultural identities, and eventually a nuanced view of nationalism. The Church has praised a healthy love of country in encyclicals and papal speeches. And, during the last thirty years, the Vatican has spoken out against extreme nationalism. Pope Francis gave a typically strong speech to a plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, advisers to the Vatican, on 2 May 2019. “States become subservient to the interests of dominant groups, mostly for economic profit, who oppress – among other things – ethnic linguistic or religious minorities”, he said. They “stir up nationalistic sentiments in its people against other nations or groups”. This “confrontational nationalism that puts up walls”, he added, creates “aggressive currents against foreigners, especially immigrants”. He might have been describing the American State under Trump. As is characteristic of Catholic social teaching, questions about nationalism are set in the context of the common good. For Francis “the common good for its people [is] not possible by itself”. “The common good has become global and nations must come together for their own benefit”. Though he notes the tension between globalization which “seeks to eliminate and smother local identities” and globalization that embodies the Christian principles of reconciliation, unity and solidarity. It is the duty of Western democracies to navigate these tensions not intensify them. Pope John Paul II, whom most people would assume had a soft spot for Polish nationalism makes helpful distinctions between nationalism and patriotism. “True patriotism”, he told the UN General Assembly in an address on 5 October 1995, “never seeks to advance the well-being of one’s own nation at the expense of others”. It should be imbued with the “spirit of peace, respect and solidarity”. His conclusion was: “Nationalism, particularly in its most radical form, is thus the antithesis of true patriotism” – which he sees as implying the duty to love “our native land”. Like Francis, John Paul II doesn’t ignore tensions between the particular and universal in a global Church (for believers a tension resolved only in the Eucharist). American Catholics particularly would benefit from reflecting on his speech. Both speeches speak to our condition today. Trump’s blanket tariff coverage will, of course, have devasting effects on the economy of poor countries, and, by creating inflation, on the poor generally. There is one line in John Paul II’s General Assembly speech some 30 years ago that is particularly pertinent. “The international economic scene needs an ethic of solidarity, if participation, economic growth, and a just distribution of goods are to characterize the future of humanity”, he said. Such pronouncements in the public forum stem from a religious, not a political, motivation. Popes are public intellectuals addressing a global audience even if Catholics rarely hear their words from the pulpit. Most UK and European leaders are too wary or frightened of Trump to utter such sentiments – a stance presented as political prudence. AfD’s 21.8% of the vote in Germany’s February elections, though, was dealt with by an outspoken government. Reform’s performance in UK local elections suggests they will do better in the next General Election. Tacking into their populism is no way to respond to public opinion distorted by disinformation. In the USA itself, Trump and MAGA have reduced a worrying majority of Republican leaders to silence or sycophancy. This loss of nerve is a sign of, and magnifies, the growing weakness of democracies, a sign of the times that summons Church leaders into the public domain with words of wisdom.
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The new Pope is inaugurated in St. Peter's on Sunday. Then the great wave of public and media interest in the Catholic Church will subside. A few more people can now tell a pallium from a chasuble. A few more young men will no longer have to hide their admiration for the great gear worn by the Swiss Guard. And a few more detectorists will know not to look for the fisherman’s ring on the beach. Decline in Europe may now be slowing.
In the conclave, the Cardinals were choosing a person not a nationality, ethnicity or ideology. The appointment of the new Pope revealed two general features: Cardinals don’t leak – well, maybe the odd one did - and the experts don’t get it right, a single one did mid-conclave. The commentariat ruled out an American Pope. Leo XIV, a Peruvian citizen, presented himself in Spanish and Italian with hardly a word of English. A contrast to Pope John Paul II who had been well and truly a Polish Pope as well as a striking universal pontiff. Leo XIV’s American nationality will, though, probably pose him problems. President Trump initially has been unusually gracious. How long that lasts remains to be seen. The MAGA masses are already on the attack. Pope Francis outspokenly condemned Trump’s contempt for ‘losers’, his treatment of immigrants and the vulnerable. His successor shares his views though likely to steer a more diplomatic course. The crunch in relations with the Vatican will come over meeting Trump a possible invitation to the USA creating huge media interest, a request to visit the Pope a little less problematic. It is not hard to imagine how the White House would manipulate a papal visit. One way of saying ‘no’ to Washington would be to present declining as following Pope Francis who resisted return to his homeland Argentina. A visit to Peru would still be possible? The new Pope’s Chicago origins elicited massive and investigative interest. His two brothers must be a mixed blessing, immediately humanizing brother Bob but, you can be sure, a bit too gabby for the Vatican into the bargain. And, on cue, ambitious scribblers, religious or otherwise, joined in the ‘what’s he going to be like as Pope’ comment. The media is stuck on conservative and progressive as two binary categories applicable to Catholic prelates. The reality is there is nothing unusual about sharing an ‘option for the poor’ with an option for social conservatism, or what is commonly called ‘anti-woke’. You might call it normative for Francis and Leo. In that sense Pope Leo was indeed the continuity candidate for the papacy. Papa Leone is clearly a very interesting man, as at ease talking about the impact of AI on future work as the horrors of war, the plight of migrants and climate change. No-one has really been able to pin down his personality in a paragraph or two from details of his biography. Most have missed the full significance of his having worked as a North American missionary in Latin America. He worked in a rural area of Peru in his formative years as a young priest. Then in Peru’s historic third city, Trujillo from 1988-1998 as a parish priest and Augustinian seminary teacher. In 2015 he was appointed bishop of Chiclayo, a seaside town also in the North-West where he served for eight years. All this has been publicized. What is missing is the significance of this appointment. Three quarters of Peru’s population of 34 million is, at least nominally, Catholic. As an Episcopal Conference, the country has 75 cardinals, archbishops and bishops, plus 12 titular bishops who do not serve a particular diocese. As Bishop of Chiclayo he took out Peruvian citizenship. Looking at the 75 names in the Conference, Roberto Prevost appears like the only American one. The only other American name was the papal Nuncio, the Vatican’s State’s ambassador in Peru. To be recommended in 2014, an American, for a Peruvian diocese is some measure of his record as a priest. Missionary bishops are in the main a thing of the past. An American Nuncio perhaps had some anxieties as he passed on his name to Rome, though Pope Francis appointed him quickly. In many parts of Latin America, the USA’s role in propping up vicious dictatorships in the past has not been forgotten. Peru had less unpleasant memories, was far from America’s backyard, but also suffered from insurgency and military reaction to it. It was, typically, politically and culturally independent. And Gustavo Gutierrez’s seminal Theology of Liberation: Perspectives was published in Lima, Peru’s capital, in 1971. Its radical spirituality and Marxist economic analysis - of relations with the USA - caused consternation in the Vatican. The Peruvian love and acceptance of their Bishop Roberto is shown in the joy of his appointment as Pope. As the leadership of all Religious Orders demanded, his two terms as Prior-General of the Augustinians, meant extensive travel. The distinctive demands of a missionary vocation in different contexts and cultures would have become obvious. No-one had to tell Roberto Prevost that he was serving a global Church. He brought lay teams into the pastoral action of the diocese of Chiclayo following the Second Vatican Council’s vision of a united “People of God”. He was known for his easy manner and friendship, his concern for migrants, the poor and vulnerable, for the refugees arriving from Venezuela, and as a spiritual director. Leo’s first words ”peace be with you all” and his fatherly non avete paura, (“do not be afraid”), reflect the gravity of the global conflicts and problems he now faces. For how on earth do you lead 1.4 billion people today in their variety of cultures, societies and governance? Respected for his calm and as a listener, no wonder his emotion and tension showed before his address on the balcony. A missionary Pope, he will be carried by many prayers, his friendship with many, not least the cardinals who chose him, his Augustinian spirituality, and a faith honed by the people of Peru. Talking about spirituality can be individualist and airy-fairy. In contrast, the late Peruvian theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, gave a down-to-earth definition for Christians in his Theology of Liberation. “A spirituality is a concrete manner, inspired by the Spirit, of living the Gospel….in solidarity with all human beings…before the Lord”. We saw it at work in the papacy of Pope Francis and in the missionary work of his successor Cardinal Robert Prevost. This spirituality that arises from God’s compassionate option, predilection, preference for the poor, is revealed and called for by the Prophets of the Old Testament, in the New Testament and the teaching of the Church over the ages.
Three Gospel writers carry the story of the rich young man seeking salvation. Mark recounts how Jesus “looked at him and loved him”, giving him the counsel of perfection to unburden him from his wealth. He goes away disappointed seemingly rejecting an “inner detachment” to retain his wealth and continue his search. Gutierrez insists Christians need to pursue a search for “integral liberation”. From the Acts of the Apostles we know that the first Christian community sought to have all things in common. By the 4th century AD, after Constantine’s conversion, this commonality of the goods of creation, in today’s churchy language, the “universal/common destination of goods”, entailed a duty of the rich towards the poor. The Church Fathers, in Pope Paul VI’s words, proclaimed it “in no uncertain terms”. These early saints don’t make easy reading. “The bread in your larder belongs to the hungry. The clothes in your wardrobe belong to the naked…. The money in your vaults belong to the destitute”. This is St. Basil the Great of Caesaria (died 379). No less uncomfortable, the social teaching of the time makes short-shrift of our perception of charity. “You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his”. This is the Archbishop of Milan, St. Ambrose (died 397). No rhetoric this: priests could be rejected for the office of bishop if they were not seen as “lovers of the poor”. St. Augustine of Hippo, Algeria ( died 430) – converted by Ambrose – softened the teaching a little by focusing his strictures on superfluity as in “when you possess superfluity you possess what belongs to others”. St. John Chrysostom (died 403), Archbishop of Constantinople, had written a number of sermons on wealth and poverty in this vein; hording riches was “robbery of the poor”. And there were no get-outs: however bad a character, “the man who has encountered the shipwreck of poverty, do not judge him, do not seek an account of his life, but free him from his misfortune”. You can almost hear a contemporary discussion about street begging. Dwelling a moment on the theological principles and admonitions of the 4th century does not seek to induce a sense of guilt. It is meant to underline how utterly foundational right relationships with the poor have been – of course with varying emphasis - for Christianity across the ages. The vow of poverty in most Religious Orders remains a testimony to this teaching. So much has to be left out in a potted history not least the Franciscans and St. Francis who was so formative for Pope Francis. “Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease; or was it made to preserve all her children?” Could be Francis. In fact it’s Gerrard Winstanley in 1649 post-Reformation England, founder of the True Levelers. The option for the poor wasn’t suddenly ‘dreamed up’ in the 1960s. Church teaching about the poor shows the development that St. John Henry Newman outlined in his famous essay on doctrine. It was no accident that poverty returned mid-20th century to greater prominence in Church thinking. The Church globally was in intense competition with Communism for the soul of the working class. The worker-priest movement in France was one of several initiatives. They lost a protective ally when the then Nuncio, the future Pope John XXIII, was made Patriarch of Venice in 1953. Movements for peace and international development were not siloed like today. In the midst of the Korean War (1950-1953), calls for peace were growing. Amongst the public response in 1952, Harold Wilson -Labour had just lost the General Election - put forward a Plan for World Development which generated the NGO, War on Want. This was when, referring to nations non-aligned in the Cold War, the term Third World was first used. At the same time, the Brazilian Bishops Conference (CNBB) was coming into existence. Dom Helder Camara was its first general-secretary and began CARITAS Brazil, feeding the impoverished peasants of the North-East and working with government on a development plan for the region where he became Archbishop of Olinda-Recife. In 1955, the Latin American bishops joined together to form an episcopal Council, CELAM, through which ideas could quickly spread. Meanwhile 29 developing nations met in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss economic development, decolonization and peace. On 11 September 1962 in a radio broadcast, by way of a papal prologue to the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII described how the Church presented itself to the world, “how it is and how it wants to be as the Church of all, particularly, as the Church of the poor”. With a passion that characterized the Church Fathers, he spoke of “the miseries of social life that cry out to God for vengeance in the sight of God”. But nothing substantial on poverty came out of the Council. Why did the Pope’s words and the Council’s opening Message to the World that spoke of poverty, not result in a distinct Conciliar document? It wasn’t for lack of trying, not least by Dom Helder and an informal ‘Church of the Poor’ group who wanted the Council to take the scourge of poverty to its heart. The problem was the variety of perspectives that the delegates and periti brought to the table. Alongside Helder Camara’s big economic theme of ‘underdevelopment’ in the Third World were emphases of the European worker priest movement, the influence of Charles de Foucauld’s Little Brothers of Jesus, his asceticism and love of Nazareth, and the Vatican’s growing discomfort with its manifest wealth. There were just too many different clerical chefs in the kitchen. Gaudium et Spes, the last and hurried, document to be voted on, was influenced by the Latin Americans, and by Dominican Father Louis Joseph Lebret who played a major role in writing Paul VI’s subsequent 1967 Populorum Progressio. It did touch on the injustices of the global economic order. It also referred back to the Church Fathers’ requirement to come to the relief of the poor, adding “and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods”, the uncertain meaning of ‘superfluity’ having long since blurred the obligation. The document, of course, underlined the essential link between justice and the preservation of peace. But it all felt a bit last-minute. The Latin Americans went home with a determination to take action. The strength of Gaudium et Spes was to be a green light for the local Church to take forward the thinking and practice of a “Church of the Poor”. Meanwhile the theological implications of the Church’s option for the poor were being worked out in conferences around Latin America. In 1968, the second big conference of the Latin American Bishops took place in Medellin, Colombia. During it Gustavo Gutierrez presented his outline “Towards a Theology of Liberation”. Elaborating themes of structural injustice, conscientization and the search for liberation, the seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed with its central theme of conscientization was published in Portuguese the same year. Its author, Paolo Freire, had been Director of Extension Studies in the University of Recife in the early 1960s and briefly imprisoned after the 1964 military coup. Medellin and its option for the poor profoundly influenced what came out of Rome in subsequent years. Alongside individual sins, the Latin American bishops spoke of social, economic and political structures that did violence to people. Passivity in the face of injustice required an awakening leading to action to counter such violence: a popular mobilization and movement for change. The goal: to enable the poor to become more conscious of the causes of their predicament and to support them in seeking their own integral liberation. In the face of military dictatorships, death squads and rule by ruthless oligarchies, committed to solidarity with oppressed communities, the bishops weighed up advocating violent revolution. They came down against it in a hard-nosed estimation of its consequences. Gustavo’s Theology of Liberation: Perspectives was published - in Spanish, in 1971, in English 1973. It chimed in many ways with Paul VI’s contemporary apostolic letter to the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, Octogesima Adveniens that underlines the diversity of political contexts in which work for social justice takes place and the importance of reading the signs of the times from different perspectives, an elaboration of Cardijn’s “See, Judge and Act” approach in short. This was followed by Justice in the World from the 1971 Synod of Bishops of Rome. Like Medellin, it deploys the concept of structural injustice and conscientization but, unlike Medellin, speaks of liberation through development, a concept it critically appraises. It is at this Synod, in the words of bishops from around the world, that “action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world” are described as “a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel”. Not a barely tolerated add-on to the ‘real’ work of the Church. So what of today? Let’s be honest. We are not all cut out for more radical forms of solidarity with the poor. We don’t see a Dorothy Day when we look in the mirror. What can and cannot be done effectively differs in democracies and dictatorships. In democracies, the option for the poor can mean in practice advocating pro-poor policies to governments by dialogue, argument, organizing and modelling good, effective examples, and when necessary creative forms of protest. The distinction between religion and politics never has been and never can be real. Both are, and ought to be, about how we should live, what kind of society and world we wish to live in. So the spirituality of the option for the poor requires practicing the politics of a compassion for the poor that is God’s option. Action on behalf of justice, solidarity shown by confronting systemic injustice, including, because of climate change, towards future generations, trying to rebuild, these all form part of “the concrete manner…of living the Gospel inspired by the Spirit” - Gustavo’s definition of spirituality. They offer special opportunities for Grace to enter. And let’s be realistic. In the long march through the institutions Justice and Peace remain distant horizons. Action for justice meets so often with defeat. The opposition seems intractable. Fleeing Franco’s Nationalists, the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, an exile across the border in Collioure, wrote: "For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, all this will be clear: we lost the war. But at a human level I am not so sure: perhaps we won". Machado wrote his famous poem Caminante no hay camino during the first World War. “Traveler there is no path – we make the path by walking”. We see our path only by looking back. But following the life of our beloved Pope Francis, who modelled an option for the poor for all of us, we will surely emerge from our own troubled times one day on the Emmaus road. Middlesbrough J & P Commission Storey Lecture 8 May 2025 |
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