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Much has been made of Pope Leo’s time in Peru and his closeness to the late Pope Francis from Argentina. Being first American Pope has been no less newsworthy. But his impact on the USA is proving more important than his outreach to Latin America. He has deplored the cruelty of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and expects the US bishops unitedly to follow his lead championing the human dignity of migrants. On 12 November the US Catholic Bishops Conference issued an urgent Special Message on Immigration reflecting the Pope’s concerns.
It looks as if he is not, like his – significantly chosen - namesake Leo XIII, going to wait years before producing a 21st century equivalent about the dangers of the “New Things”, (Rerum Novarum, 1893) brought about by the industrial revolution. Most strikingly despite its benefits, he promises to tease out the present dangers of AI lurking in San Francisco’s Silicon Valley. “A clear and present danger” is an American legal term used to define when free speech may be limited because of a threat to public safety and national security. It might apply to Trump since he won last November; he is now entering the second year of his second Presidency. As do St. Paul’s words to his missionary companion Timothy: “The love of money is the root of all evil”. Growing economic and social changes caused by the digital revolution and AI, routinely described as the ‘new industrial revolution’, are a present, though less clear, danger. An important outcome of the original industrial revolution was that a dominant land-owning class had to come to terms with the power of the new industrialists and entrepreneurs. A progressive extension of the franchise was the result. An oligarchy with its pretensions of class and nobility saw its power reduced. Not so in today’s tech revolution which has given a new oligarchy spectacularly greater wealth and unaccountable political power. The ‘information economy’ has relied on technological innovation. But cyberspace is unlike the space in which the 12-year old Dickens worked in a blacking factory, Fordist assembly lines, billboards and football stadiums - other than that they were, and are, where money is made, quite literally in the case of Bitcoin. The unaccountable lords of silicon valley, the main hub of AI, are along with Trump, the main protagonists in the compelling story of democracies entering a new epoch. How the political and the socio-economic are put together, combining to create a new political economy, is the $64 trillion question. The Greek economist and former politician Yanis Yaroufaxis in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, (Penguin 2024), makes an entertaining crack at explaining how the tech giants make a fortune out of our addiction to small bright screens with their pictures and information, hoovering up masses of data in order to influence our behaviour. It is a prodigious and worrying development. Hybrid cars run on petrol and electricity. In the US political life runs on money and social media. The tech oligarchy offer both of them in exchange for proximity to, and influence over Government. This relationship is analysed in BBC 1’s November 3rd Panorama programme, “Trump & The Tech Titans”, revealing the malign consequences of the US Supreme Court’s 5/4 ruling in the crucial 2014 case, McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission. The five Supreme Court judges declared unconstitutional 1971 legislation which had capped political donations over two years towards federal electoral campaigning. The issue was deemed to be one of freedom of speech, bearing no negative impacts on government and offering no opening for corruption. A case which opened the way for floods of corporate and private money to enter and shape American politics. Panorama documented how the extraordinary wealth of the tech titans had been the lubricant for their entering the circles of power. Their wealth is unprecedented: Elon Musk is worth c. $497 billion, Larry Ellison who owns Tik Tok, CBS and CNN, c. $320 billion, and Peter Thiel, around 100th in the global wealth table, at c. $23 billion, is a founder of PaypaL and Palantir. All are donors to Republican party and close to the Trump administration. The US tech giants are far from a homogeneous group. Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang and, particularly, Bill Gates do good things with their money. But Musk in early 2025, looking increasingly deranged by money and power, offered an extreme version of Obama’s ‘yes-we-can’, yes we-can-do-anything-we-want. Ellison was and is a great promotor of AI and a key payer in the Stargate Project, a new company intending to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI. Thiel founded Palantir Technologies with its current CEO, Alex Karp ($2.3 billion). It handles $billions in Pentagon contracts for military software. Trump & The Tech Titans is particularly thought-provoking in its examination of Thiel’s relationship with JD Vance, the hillbilly kid from the Appalachians who since 2011 fulfilled the American dream partly thanks to mentoring and financial support from Thiel. He also became a Catholic in 2019. Vance, at first anti-Trump then post-2016 pro-Trump, was endorsed by Trump for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022 with the help of $15 million from Thiel. Much of Vance’s campaign money went through the Protect Ohio Values super- PAC (Political Action Committee), and Trump’s Save America PAC, PACs having become the standard way of funding political advertising since the Supreme Court Ruling in 2014. Thiel’s background is evangelical. This September, remarkably, he gave a number of lectures on the Anti-Christ who heralds the end of times, (not, however, by using facial recognition software). The Anti-Christ will apparently present as an evil tyrant who seeks to get control of science - and presumably AI. Trump seems not too bothered by what the oligarchs think and believe while he invests in their more lucrative enterprises like the cryptocurrency business. He reportedly seems equally unconcerned by the distinction between what is in the national interest and his own financial interest. What the Panorama programme tellingly intimated is that we should be worrying more about Vance than about Trump. Since before 2016 when he was denigrating Trump, Vance has made a 180 degree turn, and now holds to the whole of Trump’s extreme right wing agenda. He could even do another 180 degree turn. The tech titans – and the Republican Party - may well feel their money, influence and future are better invested in Vance than in an aging Trump. For Trump to run in 2028, he would need to tear up the clear constitutional limitation enshrined in the 22nd. Amendment that no President can serve more than two terms. No-one knows how important abortion remains for American voters since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. But the danger of Vance, the Catholic kid from the Appalachians, is that he could pull in a large US Catholic vote behind him. Vance with the power of his backers – yes power not ‘agency’ - could leave AI relatively uncontrolled and normalise fascist-leaning populism. He is a clear and future danger to democracy. The Church in America is entering an interesting time.
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In a world riven by conflicts in which religious identity plays a significant part interfaith dialogue is not an abstract idea. Pope Leo in a speech to representatives of world religions and members of the diplomatic corps, Walking Together in Hope, celebrated the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate signed near the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Subtitled ‘Declaration on Relations with Non-Christian Religions’, it came from Pope John XXIII asking Cardinal Bea to present a treatise to the forthcoming Council transforming centuries of Christian antisemitism into friendly dialogue with Judaism. Following Pope Paul VI’s creation of a Secretariat for Non-Christians in May 1964, the interventions of bishops from Muslim countries at the Council contributed to making Nostra Aetate a mandate for wider, more inclusive, inter-religious dialogue.
Though the bishops in the Middle East remained influential, Africa was arguably the most important testing ground for the Church’s commitment to interfaith dialogue, and on a visit to Uganda in 1969 Paul VI made his first address to a Muslim audience. In West Africa Christianity had moved inland from the coast after the mid-19th century to meet Islam from North Africa along a wide belt south of the Sahara. At the end of August 1965, Paul VI appointed Father Francis Arinze Archbishop of Onitsha, in predominantly Catholic Biafra, just before war broke out with the Federal Republic supported by the Muslim-majority North. From 1984-2002, Arinze led the Secretariat for Non-Christians, then, became President, as it was renamed in 1988, of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue (PCID). The Society of Missionaries of Africa MAfr, known as the White Fathers, had to compete with Islam. In 1972, they fielded an Arabic scholar, born in Walsall, Father Michael Fitzgerald, now Cardinal, as a consultor for the Secretariat for Non-Christians, bringing expert advice from his time in Tunisia, Uganda and Sudan. From 1987-2002 he worked as its Secretary then as successor to Arinze as President of PCID. Pope Benedict XVI made him Nuncio to Egypt in March 2006, downgrading the PCID and combining it with the Vatican body for culture. It was ill-judged. He separated them again and, in 2017, the redoubtable Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran took over interfaith relations. That November, King Abdullah Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia visited Benedict. Faced by an internal threat from Al-Qaeda, the King was, on the face of it, promoting tolerance of diversity and dialogue with other faiths. His endeavours came to fruition in 2012 with the launching of the King Abdullah Interfaith Centre (KAICIID) in Vienna, a joint venture with the Austrian and Spanish governments. Alongside UN Secretary-General Ban-ki-Moon and religious leaders from around the world, the three Foreign Ministers of Austria, Spain and Saudi Arabia attended, forming the Council of Parties, its governing body. Cardinal Tauran, mentally as sharp as a razor, physically already bearing Parkinson’s disease with fortitude, spoke briefly. The Vatican would remain a ‘founding observer’ with the Council of Parties until Saudi Arabia permitted churches to be built. The Church’s caution is well-founded. Unsaid is dialogue can also be manipulated for political ends, even when all those involved are acting in good faith. Authoritarian regimes are often concerned about their public image. Set-piece sessions, government-sponsored Institutes of Interreligious Dialogue, not inadvertently, can give the appearance of tolerance and openness in a political system based on repression. This was a lesson I learned from participating in several delegations to Tehran, 2000-2006, for dialogue with Shi’a scholars, under Anglican Church to Foreign Office auspices. Our interlocutors discussed post-modernism, youth’s indifference to religion, western feminism, the ‘last times’, eschatology, the Virgin Mary, conspiracy theories about 9/11. One told us - through a struggling translator- about his conversation with ‘a pop-singer’ in Rome - correctly translated ‘Ratzinger’. We were taken to the extraordinary underground Shi’a archives in Qom, and to meet Grand Ayatollah Hossein Mazaheri in Isfahan who gave his condolences for a recent terrorist bombing in London. A visit in February 2006 was ill-timed, coinciding with the delayed reaction to the September 2005 publication of 12 cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Muslims were deeply offended by its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. Our delegation was informed in an announcement by a Hujjat-al-Islam, an honorific title one below Ayatollah, that the Danish Government were ordering the cartoons be sent to all schools in Denmark. It was a glimpse of how conspiracy obsessions and political manipulation worked in Iran. Most of those we met, including – later - President Khatami who initiated the dialogues, had honorable intentions. But under the then new President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hidden hand was all too visible. Such is interfaith dialogue at high institutional level, necessarily formal, a distinctive aspect of diplomacy. Erudite papers are given. Church officials scrutinise final joint statements, a comma out here, a semi-colon in there. Mutual understanding and new relationships may grow during meals and after sessions. Without dialogue taking place at a more grass roots level much of the high-level effort by the Churches would be limited in impact. Institutional dialogue doesn’t appear as Pope Leo’s focus in his address on Nostra Aetate: rather, dialogue inspired by encounters in everyday life creating a particular texture of society and the common good. Interfaith dialogue is not transactional, but a lifelong commitment in a world of diversity: listening, explaining, understanding, finding shared goals. In Pope Leo’s words in Walking Together in Hope: “dialogue is not a tactic or a tool, but a way of life — a journey of the heart that transforms everyone involved, the one who listens and the one who speaks”. In 2014, I undertook peace-building work in the UK with a group of 15 Muslim Nigerians and 15 Christian Nigerians from the northern States. Relationships at first were tense. This was not surprising. Leaders of large Pentecostal Churches were speaking informally for the first time with their Muslim neighbours, one or two of whom were radical in their views, against a background of discrimination, and sometimes violence, against Christians. A visit to Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra’s mosque in Leicester broke the ice. A meal together, then we sat around the mosque on the carpet and Ibrahim gave a moving welcoming speech. One of the Pentecostal leaders got up and whispered something in his ear. Ibrahim, surprised, came over and told me he’d asked for a Qur’an. We instantly agreed he should have one. Ibrahim placed the Qur’an in the Pentecostal leader’s hands respectfully outstretched, palms upwards. Suddenly conscious what he had done so publicly, he blurted out: “I was born a Christian, I have lived as a Christian and I will die as a Christian [pause]. But I want to understand”. And sat down. Days later, in a closing ceremony at Westminster Abbey, in front of the group assembled in the Jerusalem Chamber, a leading Muslim woman asked for a Bible. I rushed out and bought a King James Bible in the bookshop; a touching moment, she received it in the room where the Bible’s final edit pre-publication took place in 1611. Two groups “walking together in hope” when, in Leo’s words, “hearts open, bridges are built and new paths appear where none seemed possible”? I hoped so. At least for a while. |
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