Perhaps we have underestimated the importance of the Pope being  an American speaking a language which well over a billion globally understand.   Many young people around the world learn English as a second language.  And there is something immediate and arresting when Pope Leo writes or makes speeches in our own language about matters of great importance.

There is also the sense that, with Trump and his courtiers in the White House, having the best of America in the Vatican is providential,  essential rather than incidental.  Trump manages to personify much that is worst in the USA.  Leo’s authoritative counter to Trump’s words and policies provides today’s youth with hope for the future and in the possibility of change.

It is not that the Pope and Vatican News have suddenly become demotic, reducing their vocabulary to the popular English cultivated by The Sun – sometimes Oxbridge -  journalists.  There is no fear of long words and sentences and they clearly and accurately express important ideas. There is no talking down to youth or diluting the Christian message for take-away consumption.  The language and embeddedness in previous papal teaching found in Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is both traditional and typical of the broad expansive themes in the encyclicals of recent Popes.

In the three weeks following its publication we have had much learned commentary on AI and Catholic Social Teaching.  But what stands out in this encyclical?   There is a clear acknowledgement of recent historical humanism that shares many of the Church’s values,  with a willingness to name names and be concrete and specific.    “Certain events make it clear that history can also change when individuals truly take the dignity of everyone seriously: the civil rights movement in the United States of America, closely associated with the testimony of Martin Luther King Jr., or the end of apartheid in South Africa following the release of Nelson Mandela and his decision not to surrender the future to hatred.  In different contexts, many courageous and generous women have also stood out, including Saint Laura Montoya, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Dorothy Day, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Maria Montessori, Elisabeth Elliot, Wangari Maathai, Benazir Bhutto and countless others from every continent whose commitment has contributed to making history more humane”. 

This embrace of those who have struggled against injustice extends to what Leo calls “authentic culture and art” which  “preserve this spark, resisting the normalization of evil”.  As a result, he suggests certain works have taken on an almost prophetic significance: “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be seen as a desire for unity; Guernica as a denunciation of dehumanization; Schindler’s List as a call not to consign the past to oblivion”.  This is not someone who thinks a global Church needs to deny its European past.

Citing Beethoven and Nelson Mandela presents an insurmountable criterion for both artistic and moral excellence.  But Leo partially lets us off.  “The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien….”, he writes – [approvingly] -  “described our responsibility in this way:  ‘It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.’   The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.’  This feels comforting and reassuring, fresh, relevant, addressing us and our potential rather than a consistory of cardinals. 

Most importantly, Magnifica Humanitas shows a clear understanding of the preoccupations and anxiety of youth in the UK simply expressed.  It is not only that Gen Z (born 1997-2012) today look unlikely to have “a clean earth to till” and a climate to foster food security in the future. “For young people, job insecurity is particularly devastating.  As the Bishops of the United States of America have recalled, work is not merely a source of income but a crucial sphere in which identity is formed, friendships and relationships are forged, practical responsibilities are learned and one’s vocation is discerned. When access to work is hindered by high levels of unemployment, inadequate systems of training or structural barriers, many young people find the path to their human and professional fulfilment blocked”. 

Older Catholics find themselves in the unusual position of discovering their Gen Z grandchildren looking to Popes for leadership, direction and hope but rarely darkening the door of a church.  Francis gained their respect putting his weight behind countering climate change, manifesting in different ways his concern for the Palestinians, and, overall,  for his spontaneity and  accessibility.  Leo has also won many hearts by following Francis’ lead on these issues dear to youth,  notably by his condemnation of the Israeli and American wars in the Middle East.  Very few are likely to tackle a 42,000 word encyclical but very many are likely to appreciate Leo sharing their concern for their future. 

Magnifica Humanitas ends with the sub-title The Song of Hope: The Magnificat.  Perhaps the Peruvian side of the Pope coming to the fore, the Latin American theme of liberation having the last word?     It took me back to vespers with the Dominicans at their Mayfair priory, Johannesburg in the midst of the anti-apartheid struggle in the mid-1980s: one of the rare times when some of the mighty were being pulled down from their thrones.   Leo provides encouragement  today,  particularly pertinent for the older generation in this threatening time: “ With the same faith as Mary, let us become ‘weavers of hope’ in our world, sharing who we are and what we have, so that the presence of Jesus may grow among us and his Kingdom take shape”. 

True, becoming ‘tessitori di speranza’ rolls off the tongue better than ‘weavers of hope’.   But the reality is that there are a lot more potential weavers who are English-speaking than Italian. 
 
 
 
 
 

You bump into the past quite often in Berlin.  There’s the  curated remains of the Wall, the vast architectural hymn to militarism of the Soviet war memorial in Treptow, and the disorientating claustrophobia of Daniel Libeskind’s building housing the Jewish museum.   To contemplate the confession of the Nazi horrors and the sufferings of war, spend time in the Kaiser Wilhem Memorial Church, near the Zoological Garden. 

Few tourists visit the Bonhoeffer-Haus in the western suburbs of the city.  Just an ordinary, prosperous-looking detached, house but full of the memory of an extraordinary German pastor.   Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled with Christian ethics  finally giving his life in their pursuit.  

Bonhoeffer encountered Black theology’s biblical themes of liberation while at Union Theological College in New York, 1930-1931, worshipping at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.  He lived his own words: “silence in the face of evil is itself evil”; two days after Hitler came to power in 1933 he broadcast a warning against the idolatry of a Fuhrer cult – and was cut off.  His condemnation of the Nazi euthanasia programme and persecution of the Jews was no less vocal.  He later wrote most of his classic book, “The Cost of Discipleship” (Nachfolge), in an underground Lutheran seminary at Finkenwalde in North Germany. 
 
In one of several attempts to assassinate Hitler, a group of German  officers in the Wehrmacht High Command Centre (by the Tiergarten) hid a time-bomb in the cellar of Bonhoeffer-Haus.  An unsuspecting officer not party to the plot carried it on board a plane carrying Hitler back to Germany from his forward military headquarters in Smolensk on 13 March 1943.  The Bonhoeffer family had friends round celebrating their father’s 75th birthday.  They nervously awaited the coded phone call indicating all was well.   A difficult evening.  No phone call came.

There was a sadness about Bonhoeffer’s frugal attic bedroom and study with his little desk by the window, and the books around the walls of his friend and confidant, pastor and theologian, Eberhard Bethge,.  After publication of Nachfolge in 1937, Bonhoeffer had scant time left at home.  By 1938 he had a sizeable Gestapo file and on 11 January was banned from Berlin. He was arrested in April 1943 and executed in Flossenberg concentration camp two years later, a few weeks before the end of the War.  His study felt like a memorial to him.

 “Lest we Forget” is easier said at the Cenotaph than in the partly bomb-damaged Kaiser Wilhem Gedachtniskirche with, today, its cross of nails from Coventry Cathedral.  Yet, the church provides a deliberate, and remarkable, contrast between its former worship of power, illustrated by the mosaics on the roof and walls showing a procession of Hohenzollen princes, the Kaiser in glory with his first wife, the Empress Augusta Victoria,  and the church’s contents, display cases and peace message.  Under the same roof triumphalism versus an informed contrition and a memorial for the millions who died. 

Next door is the new Evangelical church (the EKD was formed in 1948 by a federation of Lutheran, Reformed and United Churches) which presents a counter, Christian, understanding of power.  In memory of   Protestant martyrs killed between 1933 and 1945, there is a beautiful 12th  century crucifix with a plaque quoting John 1:5.4: “unser glaube ist der sieg der die welt uberwunden hat” (And the victory that conquers the world is our faith”).  Alongside is a 1942 charcoal sketch of Madonna and Child drawn at Stalingrad by the Protestant Pastor and military surgeon, Kurt Reuber, a friend of Albert Schweitzer, with on one side the defiant “Licht , Leben, Liebe” (Light, Life, Love), against the darkness, death and hatred of war.  A man literally drawing support from his faith in extreme adversity .

Berlin remembers martyrs executed locally in Charlottenberg at Plotzenzee prison where 3,000 were killed. They include those sadistically hanged for complicity in the famous 20 July 1944  plot to assassinate Hitler at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in the Polish woods using plastic explosive in a briefcase.  In subsequent purges some 5,000 were murdered.  The bombed remains of Plotzensee prison were converted into a memorial centre attached to the site of the executions.  Not far away is the Protestant Church of Atonement, inaugurated in 1964, with its wall in the forecourt inscribed with Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Plotzensee leading into the church’s atrium with its inscription Golgotha. 
Ecumenical memorial services take place every January.  Further west, built in white brutalist style and consecrated in 1963, is the Catholic memorial church, Maria-Regina Martyrum. The crypt contains an inscription to Blessed Bernard Lichtenberg.  Like Bonhoeffer, he was outspoken in his condemnation of the Nazi killing of the disabled and mentally ill.  “I, as a human being, a Christian, a priest, and a German”, he wrote to the Minister of Health, “demand of you, Chief Physician of the Reich, that you answer for the crimes that have been perpetrated at your bidding, and with your consent, and which will call forth the vengeance of the Lord on the heads of the German people”.   Rector of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral from 1938 – from Unter den Linden behind the State Opera House - he prayed daily for  persecuted Jews at Vespers, and was arrested on 23 October 1941 dying on 5 November 1943 after falling ill in Gestapo custody.  He had just been committed to Dachau.  In 2004, he was honoured in the Righteous Amongst Nations at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem for his unyielding opposition to the Nazi regime and support for fleeing Jews. 

Berlin raises a question: for how many generations, should guilt and shame about the past be encouraged?  It is understandable if German youth do not want to be burdened by a past they did not make.  For the younger generation the best comparison in the UK might be how distant slavery seems in our own past and in the making of Britain’s wealth.  Perhaps an answer lies in the difference between guilt and shame: guilt created by a sense of responsibility for wrongdoing, how we see ourself; shame created by belonging to a community, more a painful sense of how others see us as a result of our wrongdoing.   Psychologists seem to approve of guilt and disapprove of shame.  But there is crippling survivor guilt.  And fear of shame and blame can be a powerful restraint.  German young people should not feel guilt about the Holocaust.  Though there is something healthy and salutary in a communal sense of shame, at being reminded of the unspeakable events in Europe eighty to ninety years ago.

What better approach to the past than spending time in the Bonhoeffer-Haus with its excellent pastor and guide, and absorbing the message in the Kaiser Wilhelm Church in Berlin ?  But these are merely the limited experiences of a British bystander who barely remembers the sounds of the sirens and being evacuated from London. 

The past is another country.  Irrespective of nationality, we cross several countries into our present one.   And a little history, painful and shocking as it is, should –  with emphasis on should - make it easier not to repeat the enormity of the horrors in the years 1933-1945.
 
 
 
 
 

 
The Pope is back safely from his visit to four African countries.  Little was said about the danger to him when in Bamenda in Cameroon in the midst of a civil war, or Equatorial Guinea where Putin’s Africa Corps (the old Wagner Group) look after its murderous President.  During his visit to Nigeria in 2003, President George W. Bush travelled protected in his heavily armoured Cadillac, The Beast. The airport café might have been mistaken for a Secret Service refectory at the Department of Homeland Security there were so many protection officers waiting.   The popemobile looks very vulnerable on visits by comparison.

In five visits, Pope Francis visited ten African countries before his death, and Leo will probably do much the same.   Accompanying journalists  know that 20% of the world’s Catholics live in Africa and the inequality and poverty in their different countries, hence papal attention, but few of them have much idea of what Church life is like when huge crowds aren’t attending huge stadiums for masses or thronging the streets as the popemobile drives past.   Though Leo’s emphasis of his Augustinian heritage in his Algeria visit to Annaba (Hippo) where St. Augustine had been bishop, was distinctive.  His focus on Christian-Muslim dialogue was more expected.  There was no public mention of Algiers great missionary bishop, Cardinal Charles Lavigerie – probably because of his anti-Muslim statements in the late 19th century.  It was a  missed  opportunity to praise the work of the Society of the Missionaries of Africa, the White Fathers, while at the Basilica of Our Lady of Africa.  They surely deserved it.

Having lived in Malawi and Nigeria, done research in Rwanda and spent  1978- 1989 in and out of southern Africa, I can say with some confidence that ‘Africa’ names the continent but describes little else.  The Sahara might as well be a vast sand ocean dividing two continents.   In sub-Saharan Africa, cultures in different States are just as different as those between Germany and Spain and Norway.  More so when Islam is considered.  Politics similarly,  from tyranny and military dictatorships to struggling democracies.  Yet there is something recognizable as the ‘African Church’.  What is it exactly?

The first thing that comes to mind is liturgy.  A significant number of African Catholics express joy and hope in their worship - in a very attractive way.  Unlike Europeans, but like Muslims in prayer, they are at ease expressing worship with their bodies rather than just standing, kneeling and sitting down.  We seem to have got rid of prostration on Good Friday, or it may just be the clergy are too old to get up again unaided.

At midnight mass in Lome in the mid-1970s, I sat next to a Togolese lady wearing a fabulous Kente dress and spectacular headgear.  In the heat, and after what seemed a very long time before we were through the sermon and intercessions, I heard considerable noise outside the cathedral.  Tuning in with my Nigerian antenna,  it sounded to me like a protest.  I quietly asked her if it was a riot.  No, she said, it’s the offertory procession.  And it was.  Drums and dancing, a swaying line of women appeared.  Then there is the blessing of the fire at the Easter Vigil.  In the UK, it is usually an anxious scene with the priest trying to light a few bits of wood in a bucket while the congregation freezes, and the lighting of the paschal candle seems temporarily in jeopardy.  I remember going to Limbe Cathedral, Blantyre, Malawi  one Easter Saturday evening and seeing a huge bonfire from about three miles distant.  And the Poor Clares down the road used to celebrate a danced mass.

In Zimbabwe, there was considerable thought given to christianising traditional transition rights, for puberty and ceremonies for the dead.  In the 1970s there was full expectation in parts of central Africa that ordination of viri probati, men of proven Christian virtue, would soon take place.  Missionaries were training them and their wives with this in mind in Likulesi, Malawi.   This, of course, proved an inculturation too far.

In the 1980s. this openness carried over into politics.  During the struggle against apartheid for example,  there was something very moving in seeing the Red Flag go up behind Archbishop Denis Hurley during a funeral for a prominent ANC member.   He would have preferred not but his presence said something about where the local Church’s heart lay culturally.  Christians and Communists were at the heart of resistance.  The Bishops Conference was open to everyone from the Grail to black miners.   I remember a lively but respectful debate at one of them over Marxism between Cardinal Owen McCann of Cape Town with two miners in full underground gear. 

Since the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci in early 17th century China dialogued and adapted to Confucianism, politics and culture has remained a bone of contention in evangelisation.  Even some modest  forms of inculturation to African cultures did not have universal approval.  Some bishops, a little too Romanised, banned drums in church as a pagan atrocity. 

Such attitudes could knock on to the African diaspora.  The Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments from 2002 to 2008, now 93, used be a popular invitee of the Nigerian community at St. Ignatius’, Stamford Hill, London.  There was one snag though, in full Prefectoral dudgeon, he let it be known that he would not come if there were girls on the altar during his mass.  The young Jesuit dealing with the visit was having none of it and boldly negotiated.  Like all good negotiations a compromise was reached: the girls could be on the altar as long as they didn’t move.  Although I knew Arinze, travelled with him and enjoyed his company, I never told him this was the ruling for women in the Strip-Clubs of the 1950s.

Treatment of, and attitudes towards, women, Sisters, homosexuals, in several African countries has remained a disturbing bone of contention.  Though bishops holding views contrary to the dominant European values have remained on the whole loyal to the papacy.  The Anglican Church has not experienced the same loyalty to Canterbury.  Popes are luckier.

Popes must find it very difficult having to go through formal receptions by brutal dictators.  Yet they seem to enjoy visits to African countries. It is perhaps because they encounter there an infectious joy and hope, reflecting their own, expressed in the liturgies over which they preside, as well as the sense of a Church perhaps not often dramatically militant these days but still vibrant and growing.
 
 
 
 
 
 

                                   
 
“[Leo] wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.  If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican….Leo should get his act together as Pope, use common sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a politician”. 
Donald Trump 12 April 2026.  

As neither a cardinal nor a catholic, someone believing a fantasy of this kind that you are personally responsible for the appointment of a particular Pope would normally suggest a level of narcissism indicating mental illness.  That is unless you are deliberately trying to create such an impression.  Which of these applies to Donald Trump is a dilemma posed for those who have to deal with the the President of the United States.  The celebrated  American political scientist Timothy Synder, now wisely a professor in Toronto, believes we should think more in the direction of Trump performing, rather than being, a full-blown uncontrolled narcissistic sociopath.  You ask yourself is the accompanying mocked-up picture of Trump dressed as a Christ-like figure lighting the world and healing a sick man 'only' intended as some kind of  blasphemous joke?  After this ramble against Pope Leo, I’m not so sure.  

Trump’s other persona, the foul-mouthed Mafia boss, perhaps came in useful for property dealing in New York’s school of knocks.  It is increasingly the role adopted in what passes for Trump’s diplomacy.  Fall into line, pay your protection money or we burn down your restaurant.  Quite persuasive when taking over territory - at least in movies.

Trump’s Truth Social ramble last Sunday,  was something of an outburst foretold.  But had the Pope been Filipino, he would also have been reacting to the wars around the world, criticizing warmongers and calling for peace.  An American Pope could not ignore an American war thwarting diplomatic negotiations that were making progress, chosen and justified with the misuse of Christian scriptures, and prayer.   And it is hardly news that the Holy Land is in the Middle East and Christians are suffering alongside everyone else.

In one way, this is a comforting sign that the regime thinks American Catholics may heed the Pope’s words.  Also, whilst the Trump minions are playing at their version of Christian Nationalism, Vice-President Vance cannot handle his relations with the Church in the same way as JFK, strict separation of State and Church.  As the number one contender for the 2028 Presidential elections perhaps Vance and his Catholicism is deliberately being put on the line by Trump.  Vance has to do two incompatible things things.  Pretend Trump has a reasonable position, appealing to at least some element of the Maga masses, and not further alienate a Catholic constituency that might vote for him at some point for President.  In the event he took the chance to demonstrate before the Maga masses in Georgia his ignorance of just war theory and to lecture the Augustinian Pope on being careful with his theology.  St. Augustine, of course, elaborated the evaluation of the conditions for a just war.   

These developments pose the Pope and the American hierarchy a growing problem.  US Catholics are not immune to MAGA mythology.  There is the question of the balance between the imperatives of truth and the quest for a healthy unity.  The Pope is, of course, simply making timely theological interventions marked by his Augustinian formation.  And by comparison, he is far less American in his pastoral experience than John Paul II was Polish in his.
 
Pope Leo has no intention of engaging in dialogue with Trump though he ‘doubled-down’ in his response to journalists’ questions on the plane to Algeria on Monday.  “I do not think the message of the Gospel should be abused in the way some people are doing”, he told them. “I will continue to speak out loudly against war, to try to promote peace, multilateral dialogue between states in order to seek the right solutions to problems....  The message of the Gospel is the message of the Church, blessed are the peacemakers.  I do not see my role as that of a politician”, a point he made several times.  It is some commentary on the life of a modern Pope when a visit to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea, with their multiple problems, coincides with verbal abuse from the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.  May be return safely. 

A speech last Thursday in Bamenda , a war zone in Cameroon, gave Pope Leo another opportunity to 'double down' on his message. ""Blessed are the peacemakers!" he said. "But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth."  President Biya would not have liked his equally pointed further comment: "The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters."  If there had been suspicions Leo was the soft, more diplomatic option after Francis, here was a fearless voice saying what had to be said. The gloves have come off.

In response, Trump hasn’t changed his tune but his language.  He told journalists on Thursday he was “all about the Gospel”. He wants the Pope to speak out.  But remarkably for the man who pulled out of the 2015 international agreement, being honoured by the Iranian government, that had ended any pursuit they might have had of developing a nuclear bomb, he claimed that the Pope said Iran can have a nuclear weapon.  As usual a completely false claim as the CNN anchor interviewing him pointed out.  He had a right to disagree with him. Indeed he does but some conception of truth might help too.

Maybe the message will get through to the White House that the successor to Peter preaches the Gospel and speaks to a global Church, not only to a particular country.   It's in the job description and scarcely  esoteric knowledge.  But there is one thing for which we should be grateful to Trump this week: with some 20% of the American population identifying as Catholics (some 75 million), and with even only 1% of these voting in the midterm elections  reacting angrily to Sunday’s outburst with traditional loyalty to the papacy, changing their vote from Republican to Democrat as a result, he has just handed over the Senate and Congress to the Democrats.
 
 
 
 

​There is a danger in this time of peril, general sense of helplessness, and fear of diversity, in seeking sanctuary in groups of comforting sameness.  It may be in ethnic identities seeking recognition, small political movements, or finding solace in religious piety.  Each of these options offer more rewards than generalised apathy.  They may in their different ways counteract secular promotion of individualism.  But none separately is able to bring about radical changes, resist fundamental injustices and domination by the powerful wealthy minorities contributing to Britain’s decline.

Democracies are supposed to govern on behalf of the people.  But real power lies in oligarchies of wealth who control economic life; the top ten richest in the UK are together worth at least £200 billion while 4.5 million children are living in poverty.  Possibilities for redistribution are limited. The market closes off means for seeking the common good and progressive economic change by raising the cost of borrowing to punishing levels.  Nobody seriously tackles the off-shore tax havens.  Faith in the ability of governing political Parties to bring about change for the better is waning.  And the superpowers deploying their vast military power have the last word.  

It doesn’t have to be like this.  Achieving change requires diversity, strong structured networks, alliances of different active organisations.  But potential change-makers plough separate furrows not understanding each other very well or working together effectively. 

Respected Popes and the Catholic Church worldwide  are able to draw public attention to the need for  radical change beyond its membership.  But, at least in theory, Popes ‘don’t do politics’ and UK political Parties ‘don’t do God’.  Or to be more precise those on the Left striving for social and economic change ‘don’t do God’.

Hubris is to think that describing, understanding, the life of the Catholic Church is easy.  Ditto for the world of politics.  People who go to Party Conferences, attend constituency meetings, knock on doors, distribute electoral leaflets, stay up all night as election results come through, to differing degrees know what political life and culture is like and have visions of changes it might achieve.  But in our secular culture, most of those politically active or are politicians have negligible knowledge of Catholicism, or any other religious beliefs, and most who have leading roles in the Church have negligible experience of how politics works.  When each address the world, and often when they speak to each other, they usually speak with two different purposes in mind, under different constraints, what can be said and done, what cannot, and what needs saying and doing.

Yet, they share a common purpose, the vast majority of those who are politically active seek to make a better world as do committed Catholics.   Catholicism and the politics of the Left both share concern for the poor and the vulnerable as key moral motivations for action.  If this isn’t apparent, more and better work needs to be done to communicate Catholic Social Teaching; too many Catholics aren’t aware of it nor understand the demands of a ‘preferential option for the poor’.  Some theology faculties do have outreach.  Professor Anna Rowlands at Durham University for example runs sessions for Members of Parliament, and St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, engages with those working for social justice.

A number of misconceptions and stereotypes need to be overcome.  Catholics do not fall necessarily into neat binary categories such as left and right wing, traditional and progressive.  You can be what is called socially conservative, but economically radical.    Views on beginning and end of life, on some forms of identity politics, come as a surprise to those who might only have noticed a Catholic’s Left economic positions. 

Ash Sarkar’s Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War, Bloomsbury, 2026, is a comprehensive exposition of the cluster of political positions she considers represent today’s Left concerns – with a whole worried chapter, for example, on feminist caveats about trans-identity access campaigns.  The book’s central theme is how social media, Press, Radio and Television promote an identity and culture based politics, “steering resentment towards culture and identity”, playing on victimhood and “subjective experience”, diverting politics from society-wide action to counter poverty and from effective resistance to injustice.  She highlights the widespread, interracial, and violent civil unrest in Britain 2011, how after it the White Working Class came to be viewed as the latest symbol of social decline, from “salt of the earth to scum of the earth” as Sarkar puts it.  What was once a hope for peaceful ‘mass action’, opposing government policies that leave poverty a permanent fixture, turns into a compulsion for monitoring “what people say”, policing “the boundaries of our own moral purity” – conducted increasingly and powerfully on-line. 
Sarkar’s thoughts on escaping the “digital mouse-trap” chime with Christian thinking and particularly Pope Leo’s concerns.  “Nobody was made a better person by spending time on-line”, she writes, but by “relationships built through purpose, trust and experiences…community with other people as the highest source of good”.

Listening last month to former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, launch his latest book Solidarity: the Work of Recognition Bloomsbury, 2026, was a ‘lightbulb’ moment in the midst of his famous intellectual obscurity.  He spoke of recognizing difference, “shared vulnerability”, of the need for “rebalancing as collective beings”, and “reciprocal engagement” in which “each acquires a history in which the other is constitutive”.   He and Sarkar were advocating much the same thing: solidarity as shared, structured, political activity for justice, peace and the common good – political with however small a “p”.  Though within Rowan Williams’ theological framework, (I hope this is what he meant) , solidarity is our God-given natural mode of being in society, presumably disrupted by sin, so meaning restoring relationships to which we need to return to discover true communion.

This raises the question of what is to be done to combat different forms of injustice, what resistance looks like in a world permeated by distraction, inadvertent misinformation, as well as calculated disinformation.  The Czech author Vaclav Havel in a 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless memorably spoke of “living in truth”.  He saw Communist States were held together by lies. “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie”, he wrote from prison to his wife, “ then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth”.   He believed small acts of truth-telling mattered.  So, of course, does Pope Leo.
​
In November 1989, after 41 years in power, the Communist Government in Czechoslovakia collapsed in 11 days after a popular uprising. Vaclav Havel became President.  Things can change in unforeseen ways.
Sarkar’s message to the political Left is also unexpected: we must not “make sameness the condition of solidarity”.  Anyone who supported the struggle against apartheid would endorse that. Resistance to the regime brought together many diverse religious and political groupings.  Catholics might also ponder her other not-so-small truth: “We can’t achieve anything while minoritising ourselves”.  With 1.43 billion believers globally, this comes as sensible advice for the Church in this country as well as for the Left.
 

“The abuse and manipulation of God's name to justify this and any other war is the gravest sin we can commit at the present time”.
 Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Patriarch of Jerusalem, 17 March 2026.
 
What do Peter Hegsmith, US Secretary of Defence, Naim Qassem, secretary-General of Hezbollah, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security, have in common?  They all believe that military force is there to fulfill their version of God’s will.  Deus Vult, God Wills it. That their use of force does not conform to the laws of war does not seem to bother them.  Their own might is always right because it has a divine purpose whether inspired by Christian nationalism, extreme forms of Islamist thinking or Zionist Judaism. 

Modern warfare  has become an exercise in increasing the distance between those perpetrating the killing and the reality on the ground.  ‘Collateral damage’ sounds like storm damage - to a building.  But those words frequently indicate dead and maimed children, women and other non-combatants.  Political leaders, military chiefs and nuclear scientists,  called ‘high value targets’,  are “taken out”, not assassinated.  With them often die their wives, children, and friends; it has been reported that Israel calibrates the number deemed acceptable against the estimated importance of each target.  ‘States have “capabilities”: the vast array of technical resources capable of overwhelming an enemy not their capacity to resolve conflict diplomatically.  Vague euphemisms, the ‘cuttlefish ink’ Orwell described  in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, are spurted out daily trying to obscure what television news reveals thanks to courageous war correspondents. 

At the opposite pole from military euphemism is the word ‘terrorist’, covering a multitude of sins.  The once functional definition of terrorism - violent actions by a sub-state actor to achieve political goals by instilling fear in communities is increasingly inadequate.   States themselves can, and do, terrorise their citizens.  Iran is an obvious example.  Sub-state actors become a part of a government, or at some point take over the State itself.  If terrorism simply means violence to achieve political aims there is no moral reason not to accuse brutal States of ‘terrorism’   Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton 1997-2001 pointed out – at a later date - that the United States has often had "limited success when declaring war against nouns”.

Slovenly use of language creates a pernicious loop with what Orwell called ‘foolish thoughts’ and with what we today call ‘spin’.  This loop characterises the arsenal of disinformation and propaganda used to quieten citizens’ moral concerns about today’s wars.  Had he not been a “Christian atheist” confronted by totalitarianism, Orwell might have added how misuse of language and poor theology links to ‘foolish thoughts’ about war and God’s will.  Christian nationalists are a good example.

Just war theory, both Islamic and Christian, makes the distinction between combatants and non-combatants.  But the nature of today’s weapons,  modern warfare, the relationships within civil society created by Islamist dispensations, or implanted in other religious communities by propagandists, makes distinguishing actual combatants more difficult.  Today’s war in the Lebanon makes it almost impossible.   If a war is God’s Will, it seems, the Divine Will overrides moral restraints.

Trump and his circle convince themselves with their own misleading language.  Given the information available to his Intelligence agencies, the US Administration’s misconception about  likely reaction to their attack on Iran is startling.   Iran obviously had been long preparing for war and would prove a resolute opponent, drawing in Hezbollah, yet the White House didn’t anticipate blocking of the Straits of Hormuz.

Hezbollah’s origins lie in the war between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel’s 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon targeting refugees and the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) militia.  Lebanon had fallen apart into a civil war between ten different religious communities and their militias, segregated along sectarian lines. 

Export of its 1979 Islamic revolution was the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran lead by Ayatollah Khomenei.  Hezbollah initially saw itself as an integral part of this new dispensation.  In 1983 it placed bombs by the US embassy and marine barracks killing 241 Americans.   The Ta’if Agreement mediated by Saudi Arabia and brokered by the Arab League, designed to end Lebanon’s civil war, was signed in 1989:  Hezbollah was recognised as the sole militia responsible for future resistance. 

Modelled on Iran, Hezbollah created a multi-layered pyramidal structure for governance: a Majlis Shura al-Qarar, a consultative council of seven primarily clerical members, Sheik Naim Qassem amongst them, elected every three years by a convention of some 250 Hezbollah top cadres.  There are executive, political, judicial, jihad/security and the parliamentary work, councils. By 1992 Ayatollah Khamenei, successor to Khomenei, was recommending Hezbollah adopt a policy of Infitah: participation  in Lebanon’s elections.   They maintain on average ten deputies in Lebanon’s parliament and are guaranteed two Government Ministers.

According to Joseph Daher’s Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God, Pluto Press 2016, Hezbollah developed organisations for health, education, seminary training,  orphans, and emergency aid.  Islam compliant loans, zakat tithing, donations and discount cards aided the poor.  An extensive education system plus a TV network, radio station and publishing outlets inculcated the principal of Iltizam, religious commitment and adherence to strict Islamist practice including the duty of supporting Hezbollah. 

Houses were rebuilt after bombing raids honouring the slogan ‘reconstruction, resistance and rebirth’.  Disciplined lives became prosperous lives; a Shi’a middle class grew. The vision was a pure society uncorrupted by the West, an Islamic milieu, hala islamiyya, a ‘resistance society’ against the Zionist enemy. The provision of public services and charitable outreach, a  ‘combination of consent and coercion’, in Daher’s words, encouraged Lebanese Shi’a acceptance of Hezbollah’s authority. 

Southern Lebanon, predominantly Shi’a, dotted with small towns with some ancient Christian villages, now under Israeli attack, has an agricultural economy.   Its people are farmers plus well-off entrepreneurs, landowners and Hezbollah local government officials.  There are possibly 60,000 fighters including part-time reservists and a UN peacekeeping force reduced to 7,500 mandated to secure a buffer zone south of the Litani river.   A significant Shi’a community lives in the more mixed northern Beqaa Valley.

It is easy, especially in war time, to interpret attempts to understand a party to a conflict as support for that party.   Support is clearly not the intention of Daher’s Hezbollah.   Nor is it mine.  But for several reasons, including future negotiations, ignorance is not bliss as  the Middle East today demonstrates.
With its armed wing, trained by the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah poses an intractable problem for Lebanon’s army and government.  Its rocket attacks provide Israel with their perennial justification for prolonged invasions of Lebanon and the bombing of “Hezbollah strongholds”.  Over one million people, 18% of Lebanon’s population, have had to abandon their homes as the invading Israeli Defence Force (IDF) pushes further into the South again.  In Dahieh, a densely populated southern suburb of Beirut,  controlled by Hezbollah residents cannot easily be sorted into combatants and non-combatants.  Bombs hit buildings which collapse burying people under rubble In Dahieh as in Gaza  The death toll is already above 1,000, 10% children. 

An infinite gulf exists between the Will of a loving, merciful and compassionate God and the will to power that States, and non-state actors, exert in war.  It cannot be bridged - least of all by euphemistic language, ignorance and disinformation.  On his right biceps, Peter Hegseth has a Deus Vult tattoo.  A  chant from the First Crusade, it marks the clear and present danger of Christian Nationalism.
 
 
 

Anger and apathy, Bankers and BREXIT, Corruption and COVID, the ABC of Britain’s decline, has determined our recent history.  The Venerable Bede wrote in the 8th century that history should record the “evil of wicked men” to avoid sin, while describing the “good things of good men” to encourage virtue.  James Macintyre’s insightful and balanced  Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose, Bloomsbury 2026,  falls into Bede’s ‘good men’ category encouraging virtue even though as the work of a journalist this biography is ‘a first rough draft of history’, and Gordon Brown remains a consequential figure.

Whoever is Prime Minister, the moral and the expedient often clash.  Gordon Brown’s  political misfortunes arose from tipping the balance towards morality and social justice. Like Angela Merkel and Theresa May, his father was a Protestant Minister.  Rev. Dr. John Brown served as Church of Scotland Minister, from 1954 in Kirkcaldy for 13 years, revered enough by Gordon Brown to present a book of his sermons to Pope Benedict XVI in September 2010.  But arguably his religious commitments also strongly influenced his political life.

At Labour Party Conference in Manchester, September 2009, with polls dropping fast following his indecision over calling a general election, Prime Minister Brown deliberately challenged popular assertions that all parties were the same.  He listed the impressive achievements since the 1997 General Election that he had been involved in: half a million children taken out of poverty, Sure Start, child benefit at record levels, numbers of pensioners below the poverty line halved, the Disability Discrimination Act, the minimum wage, the Winter fuel allowance, trebling of foreign aid, debt cancellation for the poorest countries. Then “crime cut by a third, “the shortest NHS waiting times in history” and a “legally enforceable right to early cancer screening and treatment within one week”.  For ten years, of course, he had shared these achievements with Prime Minister Tony Blair.  He was responsible, as Prime Minister himself, for the first ever Climate Change Act in 2008, and the Equality Act 2010, transposed from EU law,  protecting everyone in Britain from discrimination in work, education, housing and provision of services.  Compared with these achievements progress during  2010-2023  comes as a shock.

In the 2008-2010 global economic crisis Gordon Brown rallied the G7 and G20 around his plan for a $1.1 trillion recovery package taken from national budgets – and taxpayers  known as ‘quantitative easing’ to recapitalise the banks, boost demand and counter recession.  He admitted responsibility for too light regulation of financial services, failure to spot the dangers of the market for sub-prime mortgages and the banks’ casino culture whilst the Conservative Party wanted less regulation.

Brown’s dithering, his fall from grace in the public eye by 2009 and resultant electoral failure, illustrate a number of perennial features of British politics: the influence of the right-wing press such as the Daily Mail and, in the Murdoch empire, notably The Sun, on a public tired and suspicious of politicians, giving no second chances to political leaders it turns against. 
 
Labour leaders have always faced headwinds.   Clement Attlee, who sustained a radical socio-economic programme for six years despite post-war bankruptcy, was defeated only in 1951.   Later Labour governments walked a tightrope: policies promoting a more just society on one side, the imperative of winning general elections to implement such policies on the other.  And Brown had a strong moral compass, combined with only a modest ability to connect with, and breakthrough to, a fractious public.  Change ‘moral’ to ‘legal’ above and this could be said of Sir Keir Starmer.

The turn of the millennium heralded a particularly sharp national decline in Christian faith and church attendance.  No politician could safely ‘do God’.  Kate Forbes, contender for the SNP leadership, and Tim Fallon, Liberal Democrat leader 2015-2017, were both damaged by disobeying Alistair Campbell’s golden rule.

Reviewers have been positive about Power with Purpose focusing on issues of interest to themselves.  Thus tensions between Brown and Blair over the years feature prominently, but the chapter “Joy in the Morning: Gordon Brown’s quiet faith” does not.   There is only a passing mention in the Church Times which has hosted a podcast on the book instead.  But few doubt Brown’s religious upbringing was influential in his politics. 

Brown became known for phoning NGOs to coordinate public advocacy for overseas aid and debt reduction with his own diplomacy and government action. He was also quite open in his relationship to the Churches and religion.  If there is one speech - missed by Macintyre - which illustrates Brown’s Christian motivations and their significance for government policy as Chancellor of the Exchequer, it is ‘Economics of Hope’, his address to the Church of Scotland’s 1999 General Assembly, dedicated to his recently deceased father, a passionate call for debt relief to the poorest nations, increased aid, and the pursuit of the millennium development goals. “For it is our Christian teaching - the faith I was brought up in – that when some are poor, our whole society is impoverished; that when there is an injustice somewhere it is a threat to justice everywhere; that what – as Dr. King said – selfish men tear down, selfless men and women must build anew”.

On 24 July 2008, after the ecumenical Walk for Witness in central London led by Archbishop Rowan Williams, Gordon Brown spoke on the moral imperative to reduce global poverty in the courtyard at Lambeth Palace.  Brown and the march were promoting the millennium development goals (MDGs) lagging as the half-way mark passed to the 2015 closing date for reaching them.  Some 650 Anglican bishops, politicians attending the 2008 Lambeth Conference, plus heads of NGOs were present.  This was no sudden embrace of the Churches and NGOs. 

Brown has even joked about the wrong sort of approach to religion and politics recounting how his father told a story about a fellow minister’s choice of hymns after local elections:  “Sometimes the congregation was asked to sing the hymn, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’.  When the other party won he announced the hymn, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind Forgive our Foolish Ways’.  And in the event of “no overall control” he could always perform “God works in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform”. 
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Gordon Brown would be the first to say secular values could equally have motivated, and been in play, in government policies that prevailed from 1997-2010.   And a quiet faith does not eliminate bad mistakes.  But faith values truth in the exercise of power and enhances clarity of purpose.  James Macintyre should be applauded for a good title, a good book, and daring to write sympathetically about religion and high political office.
 
 
 
 
 
                        
 

“I don’t need international law”, Trump told the world in January;  his “own morality”, his “own mind” was all that he needed to formulate foreign policy. Trump’s mind and morality do not inspire confidence.  

No reasonable person in a democracy would willingly agree to tolerate or endorse lawlessness within their own nation-state, so why is lawlessness between States once more acceptable?  If law and moral principles underpin a successful economy and a harmonious society, why should we consider them superfluous to the conduct of international relations?  Yet, political leaders are balancing speaking clearly in defense of international law with avoiding alienating Trump.

If there were no ‘structures of sin’, covetousness and the quest for power and dominance, if humanity overcame its failings and all became virtuous citizens, we might do without laws, national and international.   But for the time being, our attempts at formulating and enforcing just laws is as good as it gets. 

Thomas Aquinas roots ‘natural law’ in human nature tapping into God’s eternal law.   Catholic social teaching with its virtues, values and principles of compassion, solidarity and justice is an important expression of it.  And the Eucharist mediates a specifically Christian form of globalisation, relativizing national and ethnic identities, giving sense and transcendental meaning to a common humanity seeking the common good.

The Vatican, internationalist in outlook, now led by an American born citizen of Peru continues to promote its conception of international peace and justice which it sees as inseparable. This means rules about the conduct of war must be respected and the promotion of existing conventions about the rights of peoples within nations as well as those crossing borders in flight from persecution and danger.  But Papal teaching is essentially that war should be outlawed especially as it is the nature of modern weaponry to cross the boundary between combatant and non combatant and to maximise damage. On the very first day of the attack on Iran, bombing killed over a hundred 7-12 girls in a school.

An extraordinary social video came out of the White House last Thursday: alongside clips from Top Gun, Spiderman, and perhaps a nod at Trump’s ancestry, Braveheart actual ‘strike footage’ from Iran illustrating the promised “death and destruction all day long”.  Entitled ‘Justice the American Way’, its moral depravity is striking.   Just as Archbishop Blaise Cupich of Chicago wrote in response, it depicted a “real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game”: an ‘American Way’ which ignores the very existence of international law and the values it attempts to preserve.   Pete Hegseth, self-styled US secretary of State for War, a man responsible for command of the largest military force in the world both approved it and appeared in it.  

Archbishop Cupich is a refreshingly clear voice of condemnation and focus on the victims of war.  But the response of many Church leaders to wars and conflict is to call for reconciliation.  It is sometimes as if the Church is hovering between and above the oppressor and the oppressed, the torturer and the tortured.  This was the gist of the theological critique directed in 1985 at the height of the struggle against apartheid in part at what they called ‘Church theology’ distinguishing it from the ‘State theology’ and their own prophetic voice. The Kairos document, signed by some 180 Christian leaders, began life in the Institute of Contextual Theology led by the late Albert Nolan, a Dominican friar and Frank Chikane from the Apostolic Faith Church, soon to become the General-Secretary of the South African Council of Churches.  There is a contemporary Palestinian Kairos document too. 

The point is that conflict between two individuals in a family is not like that between ethnic groups, different religious groups and States.  Their reconciliation demands repentance expressed in justice restored, some sense of historical antecedents, culpabilities acknowledged and remedied before any genuine resolution.  There is not going to be any reconciliation between the barbaric regime in Iran and today’s American government.  At best there will be some kind of transactional agreement after thousands are killed from the air.

After the Second World War, the Church supported the creation of the UN and its international institutions.  These were  intended to protect and develop the principles of international law pioneered by the League of Nations Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ).  The prime purpose of these was to reduce and eliminate causes and justifications for States going to war again.
Catholic statesmen made a significant  input into the creation, in 1952, of the European Iron and Steel Community which by 1993  had evolved into the European Union as defined by the Maastricht Treaty.  The EU and its predecessors have produced, embodied in its institutions,  a unique body of supra-national law, its consequential judicial proceedings respected within the courts of its member States. 

But law to be effective must be enforceable.  The UN International Court of Justice (ICJ), set up in 1945, suffered, and suffers, from the limitations of needing  States’ consent to be a party to a dispute in the court, and the lack of enforcement procedures after adjudication.   South Africa’s filing a complaint, called a ‘Memorial’, garnering support from other countries for their application under the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, against Israel’s conduct in Gaza was an almost unique event.  In this sense the court’s power is to provide more of a moral than a punitive constraint. 

Trials, convictions and punishment of individuals for the most serious offences, such as war crimes and genocide, have taken place in the International Criminal Tribunal  for the Former Yugoslavia, 1993-2017, and the International Tribunal for Rwanda after the genocide (1994-2015).  The International Criminal Court  (ICC) set up in 2002 has issued several warrants for arrests.  But it has been mainly African offenders who have seen the inside of a prison cell.  The USA, Russia and China play no part in this judicial body.  Trump’s administration positively tries to undermine it with sanctions.

In an important 1999 speech in Chicago, with the somewhat Catholic title “Doctrine of the International Community”, Tony Blair reflected on the beginning of three months of bombing  of Serbia in response to Milosevic’s forces’ mass murders of Muslim men and boys in Kosovo.  Tony Blair set five conditions for getting involved in other people’s conflicts.  Does the case for intervention hold water? Have all diplomatic options been exhausted? Can military operations be sensibly and prudently undertaken?  Are we prepared for the long haul?  Are our national interests involved?   The plight of the Kosovan people was in his mind.  His own failure to apply these criteria to the Iraq invasion was a tragedy.  Keeping close to America, sharing in its military interventions had overridden all other considerations.  He should re-read his speech and apply his conditions to Iran.  Sir Keir Starmer thankfully seems to have done so.   And being  verbally attacked by Trump is a kind of assurance you are doing the right thing.