The most annoying convert TradCath in the world, JD Vance, whose cherubic face belies all his bootlicking aggression, gets his moment with Pope Bob. Usha stands behind him in a black mantilla. He hands the pontiff an oversized envelope: an invitation from Donald and Melania to a White House dinner. Bob smiles guardedly as he takes it and without looking at it, setting it on his desk. “I’ll read that at some point,” Vance sputters, “of course, of course.”
The scene is set for the Church-State tension of whatever phase of global fascism we’re now entering. These ghouls who jail students, disappear immigrants, and lobby for the Trump Gaza resort, shuffle into the Vatican with hats in hand to meet a fellow American who is nothing like their boss, asking for pats on the head, wondering what kind of alliance they can forge, perhaps through anti-wokeness discourse.
The enigmatic response from Pope Bob sums up where we all are as we read the incense swirls for whether he’s going to keep steering the world’s 1.4B Catholics against the tides of late-stage capitalism and environmental disaster, Francis-style.
Show Notes
Michelle Remembers | Satanic Panic Patreon Collection
Brief: Deep Church Conspiracy (w/David Lafferty)
Brief: The CPAC Pope and the Icicle Babies (w/ Brad Onishi)
183: Woke Pope Cancels America's Bishop (w/Mike Lewis)
Sisters of the Little Way
Vatican’s financial watchdog reports decrease in suspicious activities reports in 2024
Why the next Pope faces major money challenges
Pope warns the Vatican pension fund needs urgent reform as employees demand transparency
Cardinal convicted of embezzlement won't participate in conclave for Pope Francis's successor
A cardinal is convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in Vatican trial
Church defends Indigenous peoples: ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ was never Catholic
Vatican Denounces ‘International Law of Colonization’
Reparations for empire: What the new pope owes to Africa | Slavery
Catholic Order Pledges $100 Million to Atone for Slave Labor and Sales
The Dark History of How the Catholic Church Built Its Massive Wealth
The Vatican—Bulwark of Imperialism
Indigenous leaders hope Vatican's repudiation of oppressive colonial concepts leads to real change
The Man Who Took On Pope Francis: The Story Behind the Viganò Letter
The Excommunication of Archbishop Viganò - Crisis
Bishop Strickland removed from diocese after accusing pope of backing 'attack on the sacred'
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Episode 258, Pope Bob vs.
Trump World.
The day before we're sitting down now to record this, Julian, we saw this clip of Pope Bob giving a brief audience to convert Tradcast J.D. Vance, possibly the most annoying convert in the world, with Usha standing beside him in a black mantilla.
Jeanette Rubio's in a mantilla as well.
Marco is very stiff.
He's holding his breath.
He always looks constipated.
Vance has this cherubic manner that I think belies all of his bootlicking aggression, and he hands the pontiff an oversized envelope, and he says that it's an invitation from Donald and Melania to a White House dinner.
Pope Bob smiles guardedly as he takes it, and without looking at it, sets it on his desk, saying quietly, I'll read that at some point.
And Vance sputters, of course, of course.
And then they give him a Bears jersey, signed by their kids, even though he's a baseball guy.
And then they pose, I don't know if you saw the photo, but it's a very awkward photo.
There's like eight inches between them all, and they're standing quite stiff.
I don't know, like on a wedding cake or something.
The scene sums up the church-state tension of whatever phase of global fascism we're now entering, I think, and marks a high point in our consideration of the religion of politics.
Here come these shitheels, jailing students, rendering immigrants, and blueprinting the Trump Gaza resort, and they shuffle into the Vatican with hats in hand to meet a fellow American who is nothing like their boss, and they're asking for pats on the head.
And we have this enigmatic response from Pope Bob that I think sums up where we all are as we read the incense swirls for whether he's going to keep steering the world's 1.4 billion Catholics against the tides of late-stage capitalism somehow, Francis-style.
And will he do it while seeking common ground with conservative movements around the world on the key points of anti-wokeness?
Okay, Julian, so a sometimes Catholic leftist and a progressive atheist walk into a podcast studio on day 13 after Bob Prevost transitioned robes and names to become Pope Leo XIV.
I don't have a joke here, but where do you think we should start?
Well, I think we start with Pope Francis having died on April 21st, 2025, just for posterity, which was Easter Monday.
He was 88 years old.
Amongst the many appropriate reactions of sadness and appreciation for him around the world, his death, of course, also kicked some of our usual suspects into gear.
So delightful MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who you would not let me leave out today, Matthew, took to Twitter to say, today there were major shifts in global leaderships.
Apparently drawing a link between the death of Francis and Klaus Schwab having stepped down as leader of the World Economic Forum.
And she went on to tweet that evil is being defeated by the hand of God.
Now, Green had previously said that she herself left the Catholic Church, this was in a long interview, because it was under the control of Satan and was no longer following the teachings of Christ.
And that Francis'calls for compassionate treatment of immigrants would destroy the American Constitution.
I think she just, she got her wires crossed there.
She was talking about her boss and the guy whose boots she likes to like all day long.
But anyway, our favorite, roid-raging, unfunny comedian, conspiracy grifter, we haven't heard from him in a while, J.P. Sears.
He wove similar threads together about Pope Francis and Klaus Schwab being evil proponents of transgenderism and climate authoritarianism and COVID lockdowns in one of his trademark videos, along with vaccines cause autism nonsense.
Somehow, both more unpleasant to listen to and more powerful and influential former Trump senior advisor and Catholic Steve Bannon...
Approached the conclave following Francis' death by what he described in The Guardian as organizing a show of force of traditionalists with confrontational wall-to-wall media coverage.
And he also referred to the recently deceased pontiff as a fake pope who he has frequently called a Marxist, a globalist, and anti-American.
So that's sort of the mood on that side of the spectrum.
Yeah, and one thing to add about Taylor Greene is in that category of every conspiracy theorist has a point because she specifically tags the reality of clerical abuse, not in the interview that you mentioned, but in a tweet that...
It was in April of 2022 that I think a ton of cradle Catholics will resonate with.
Yeah, it's in that interview as well.
Oh, it is there too?
Okay, all right.
It's the low-hanging fruit, right?
Yeah.
Well, she does say, I stopped attending Catholic Mass when I became a mother because I realized I could not trust the church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.
Nothing to disagree with there.
Yeah, she's not wrong about any of that.
And her conflation of Schwab and Francis also points to distrust over money and political networking, and that's what we'll get to in a bit.
Yeah.
Now, I mentioned J.P. Sears, Margie Taylor Greene, because they're good enough stand-ins for the generalized MAGA conspiracism about the Vatican, and especially any shred of Catholic progressivism.
But there were other conspiratorial tropes ready to be triggered by these events.
Some social media posts claim that Francis was already dead and a body double was being used to fool us in the days before Easter Monday.
Yeah, they're always thin on that, right?
Like, who cares?
Yeah, yeah.
Others joked that J.D. Vance was somehow responsible for the Pope's demise due to his having visited Francis literally the day before.
There's also this 900-year-old book.
In the Vatican, apparently, called the Prophecy of the Popes, which is claimed by people to predict Judgment Day.
It was supposedly written in the 12th century by an Irish saint named Malachi, but it's widely believed by scholars to actually be a forgery.
It says that the world will end in 2027, so maybe this time they'll be right.
The book was apparently buried, supposedly, at that time, so like 900 years ago.
In what used to be called the Vatican Secret Archive, which is also a site of a lot of conspiracism, including about UFO, secret UFO information.
And then it was discovered some 40 years later.
Some believe that in a cryptic passage in it, which is sort of worthy of Nostradamus in its weirdness, the book predicts the identities of all the future popes.
You can sort of interpret it if you squint just right and who the final pope will be.
This is clearly not really going anywhere, but this stuff does bubble up to the surface when we have an event like this.
Right.
So there's a lot to say and even more to wonder about Bob Prevost of Chicago, who just became Pope Leo XIV.
There's his Americanness, his roots in Global South Ministry.
His Florida man brother, Lou, who is a fan of all things MAGA, but who has decided to tone it down for the time being.
Well, he's decided to tone it down, but he's doing, like, interviews every other day.
Yeah, all over the place.
Yeah, he loves it.
Also, there's Leo's choice of name against the backdrop of Catholic social teaching and its relationship to labor issues.
We'll get to that.
And also just how much smiling capital he's going to spend on facing down the more fascist elements of American tradcalf mega.
Now, we are not a general religious news platform.
Our beat is religious ideology and sociality and how they often intensify paranoia, conspiratorial thinking, authoritarianism, and also material cruelty, but also how religious and spiritual traditions and...
Fads conceal these things, right?
So we look at how yoga and wellness and new age culture have provided a spiritual rationale for liberalism, how most yoga people are just totally unaware of the fascist incursions into their history and its relationship to eugenics and spiritual racism.
Also people who think that Donald Trump is a light worker and they think that's some sort of like crazy wisdom thing.
We've looked at white nationalism concealing its compatibility with fascism under visions of a future Christianized nation and world.
And then, you know, as per last week's episode, we've also looked at, you know, techno-utopianism as promoted by people like Andreessen.
Used to spiritually bypass questions of inequality or ecological crisis.
Yeah, while posturing in some kind of like sage style, you know, like in his manifesto where it's all sort of, thus I have decreed and discovered.
Right, so I have heard.
Yeah, so that's the vein as well in which we've so far analyzed Catholic influence.
And we focused on a number of major and connected historical arcs dating back to the 1970s that I thought it would be good to review.
So we'll link to all of our previous episodes on these topics.
But just briefly, we did a lot of work on the Satanic Panic, which was driven by this unlikely alliance between feminist-leaning psychotherapists following the correct somatic intuition that child sexual abuse is both common and hidden, and...
The Catholic Church going through this reactionary backlash to Vatican II in the mid-1960s.
And the therapy aspect of it blended in this kind of narrative creativity through books like Courage to Heal.
I think we did like two episodes on that.
Which was a root influence on the modern trauma therapy movement.
And also, unfortunately, at the heart of the recovered memory controversy.
But satanic panic Catholics were rebelling against the impacts of the Vatican II Council, which brought this liberalizing agenda to the liturgy.
It championed ecumenical cooperation.
It moved towards...
And there were debates all over the place about the place of Marxist-influenced and anti-colonial liberation theology from the Global South, and also there were a lot of reconsiderations of the role of women in the church.
Now, this alliance was perfectly embodied by the therapeutic-turned-celebrity-quasi-religious relationship between Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith through their book, Michelle Remembers.
Hold on.
Therapeutic turned celebrity turned married.
Yeah, right.
I guess they were married before they became celebrities.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, we did so much work looking at this, Matthew, because Satanic Panic and Michelle Remembers not only echo things like the blood libel that goes back to the Middle Ages in 12th century Europe, you know, when Jews were accused of kidnapping and ritual torture and murder and drinking the blood of Christian babies and children.
But it also prefigures, moving forward now, the QAnon and adrenochrome madness that spiked, especially in the US in 2020.
Something secret and diabolical is corrupting and brutalizing our children.
Of course, it can't be our own government, school system, and dysfunctional families, or the Catholic priests to whom we've entrusted them.
No, it can't be any of those things.
We have to find something else.
It's like continual acts of displacement and rejection.
Yeah, communist vampires.
Right.
So we also looked at the anti-abortion movement and how it has its intellectual but not quite its activist roots in Catholicism because U.S. Protestants and evangelicals didn't take it up as an issue prior to the enactment of a lot of the civil rights statutes that took away tax status privileges for their non-integrated Bible colleges in the 1970s.
And at that point, US evangelicals had to find a political cause that would reestablish their power but not appear to be racist.
They needed this other issue, and saving fetuses was an obvious choice.
And they turned to the Catholics for the moral and theological arguments that they needed about, you know, when does life start and the status of the woman's body.
The Protestants really weren't interested in any of that.
They didn't have that sort of hammered out.
And this forged an alliance.
Where previously enmity towards Catholics was so severe that it was like a big obstacle to the presidential bid of JFK.
My enemy's enemy is my friend.
I got really fascinated with Opus Dei, which is this deliberately secretive and Machiavellian association founded in Spain from within the Catholic Church in 1928 by this priest named José María Escriva, who claims, as many people do, to have been guided by a vision from God.
It has had an absolutely shameful alliance with the fascist government under Francisco Franco, who ruled for 36 years.
Opus Dei amassed extraordinary wealth and power via its strategy of recruiting very rich and influential members through this sort of multi-tiered organization where some are priests and some are laypeople and some live together in these dormitories under very sort of austere conditions and others are out in the world making money and donating tons to Opus Dei.
They're estimated to be worth $3 billion.
And they've had this uneasy but largely conciliatory relationship with the Vatican.
Their founder, Escriva, who I mentioned was even canonized as a saint by John Paul II.
Politically, the group has very reactionary, conservative, puritanical policies and practices, according to the reporting of Gareth Gore, who's this journalist who wrote, in some ways, the definitive expose book, which is controversial about them.
But they've been accused by him of enacting cult-like demands and controls over members.
They have been charged legally with human trafficking and labor practices that verge on slavery.
In terms of our current American political landscape, though, what's interesting is that several prominent figures are actually involved or alleged to secretly be involved with Opus Dei through actually some pretty reasonable educated guesswork.
These include former Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect, wouldn't you know it, Kevin Roberts, former AG Bill Barr, Supreme Court alumni Scalia and Thomas Annalito, and the man who is himself behind the conservative Catholic takeover of the Supreme Court, Leonard Leo.
This is all consistent with Garrus Gore's book about the group characterizing them as seeking totalizing worldly power for their particular religious ideology.
The group has publicly refuted Gore's bombshell reporting, but he stands his ground on it.
Now, Pope Benedict was very supportive of Opus Dei.
But then, perhaps surprisingly, so too was Francis.
He even said about José María Escriva, the founder, that he was a precursor to Vatican II due to how his organization called non-priests into a life of sanctity.
And Francis would go on to canonize Escriva's successor, a man named Alvaro del Portillo.
But there are some complexities here because he's also made some changes to canon law in 2023 that seemed to Yeah.
And so now Pope Leo, following on from some of Francis'recommendations, seems set to go a step further.
Well, they're more than recommendations.
They were ordered changes to canon law that actually would take away Opus Dei's power to name its own bishops.
It was going to put all of the administrative and financial sort of oversight over Opus Dei and canon law.
Shunt that all to the Vatican, which is significant.
And we're going to talk about the money in a moment, but just reviewing that this is an organization that's estimated to be worth $3 billion, that's one-fifth of the estimated asset holdings of the Vatican itself.
If the Vatican is estimated to be worth $10 to $15 billion, there's a thing about priceless artifacts that we'll get into in a moment.
You can see what kind of line these people have to walk with not only this very sort of conservative and reactionary organization, but this very wealthy and politically connected organization that could very easily become a parallel church, right?
So, last in our list of Catholic threads is a more sort of, I guess, frayed thread, which is that every other manfluencer out there is getting baptized these days and talking about the Latin Mass and mobilizing theological arguments against birth control and why women should stay at home.
There is an intense level of manosphere fetishizing of trad-cath ideology being used to justify misogynistic backlash against feminism and to construct these romantic and fascist visions of authority.
And when these guys really get agitated, they rehash the satanic panic themes with their own versions of QAnon, and they elevate their own MAGA-style Pope figures like Bishop Strickland to oppose the woke corruption of the Francis Church.
Now we have the arrival of Pope Bob.
Now, his choice of the name Leo XIV has implications that we'll get into in a bit, but overall, his arrival, I would say, is a break from the...
Fairly cursed lineage that we've so far been chewing on on this podcast.
He does not come out of the satanic panic.
He is not strongly linked with anti-abortionism and activism that way.
He is anti-abortion, but this is a standard position.
This is not the thing that he rides or dies on.
He has nothing to do that we've seen so far with Opus Dei.
He's formed by monastic community and experience and then on-the-ground ministry in the Global South with some political activism under his belt as well.
So I think he's giving people exposure to a different...
Church, on one hand, like a futuristic and aspirational non-European movement that's marked by its receptivity to post-Vatican II radicalism, as radical as it can be.
But on the other hand, he's also, through his name choice, he's referring back to a church of the late 19th century that realized that massive political and economic changes were reshaping what it meant to be human through the Industrial Revolution.
And so, you know, at that point, Leo XIII has this choice about becoming either more politicized through his church leadership or more cloistered in response to this set of conditions.
And the XIII, Leo, headed up a politicized Catholic response to unbridled colonial capitalism on one side and also positioned himself as resisting communist materialism and atheism on the other.
And through that sort of third-way passage, he is seen to have inspired a lineage of left-leaning socialists, sometimes even Marxist Catholics, from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers' Party to Daniel Berrigan and the anti-Vietnam War movement, you know, these figures who had pretty outsized impacts here in the U.S. So you're suggesting that his choice of name...
Leo telegraphs at least some of this in terms of his affinity for this figure.
100%.
Leo XIII is said to be the father of Catholic social teaching, which is part of its modernization move at the end of the 19th century.
I just want to say I was so pleased, actually, that you sent me the clip of Vance and Usha visiting Pope Leo because his body language, his facial expression.
You described it as being inscrutable, right?
His lack of putting on any pretense of social graces or being in any way kind of awed by like, oh, the President of the United States wants me to come visit.
Yes, I'll get to that later.
I'll have a look at that when I get a chance.
I really like that.
Yeah, so we'll talk about some temperament stuff in a bit.
I want to dig first into Taylor Greene's conflation of Klaus Schwab and Pope Francis, because this focus that she has on the globalization of wokeness carries with it this old suspicion of Vatican wealth and political intrigue.
And she's not wrong about how fascinating that stuff is, because Vatican finances and political networking have always been, throughout history, very opaque.
Yeah, I mean, regarding the first thing you said, it's actually, the irony here is that it's the banalities of anti-wokeness that have been globalized with authoritarian leaders like Hungary's Viktor Orban picking up on talking points from MAGA, which is like hard to see how you translate these things cross-culturally.
But to your second point, I mean, you know, as a non-Catholic, I can't really look at any footage from the Vatican without having a visceral reaction to what looks to me like...
monarchical opulence and excess, which is, it's about the spectacle in a way that, that confers a level of spiritual and worldly authority.
Yeah, you know, I hear that, and I think that whether they're aware of it or not...
Every Catholic has to grapple with the paradox of the outrageous spectacle.
Like, is it grand?
Is it inspiring?
Is it hollow and hypocritical?
Is it laughing in your face because, you know, the administrators that you know have actually been abusive, but they're actually very comfortable?
You might be very poor.
Like, you're making this obvious observation about what everybody saw streaming over the past couple of weeks.
There wouldn't have been a single mainstream TV presenter who would say anything like that out loud, though.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, it would feel quite rude, right?
So there's even a kind of secular sort of, I don't know, deference towards all of that stuff.
It's funny, actually, because I grew up in the colonies in South Africa, and I'm from Zimbabwe, I remember things like when Charles and Diana got married, and just how everyone is in front of the TV watching this, and there's just a lot of different ways that we were still kind of, we still had a sort of...
of the empire, even though, you know, we'd fought to get rid of them or something.
Right.
And then when I come to the U.S. to find that outlets like CNN also have that same weird deferential attitude towards the British royal family getting married or babies being born, like it's news.
And like it's somehow...
I don't know.
For me, the mystique is sort of always implied that these are very special people.
And I just don't think they are.
One interesting thing that I want to mention on this point is that for the last 50 years, I think the Church has actually tried to face up to this criticism, this paradox, partly through the aesthetic liberalization of Vatican II, which is a huge rejection of opulence, a rejection of top-down authority, where clergy are suddenly wearing jeans under their robes and they decorate their altars with macrame.
These people want gold leaf on fucking everything.
They don't like that Pope Francis came out on the balcony after his election in the white cassock without the red velvet.
They don't like that he wore scuffed black loafers, which apparently Leo's wearing too.
They don't like that he kept his plain silver or stainless steel pectoral cross.
They don't like any of that.
They want to preserve the aesthetics of dominance and glory and...
I think that one key thing in this area that everyone should understand about both Francis and Leo is that they have to code switch aesthetically between Vatican glory and streetwear to span these kind of historical demands.
So, back to the suspicions of people like Green and others.
I would say that, ironically, the most relevant modern hinge point for being suspicious of the Vatican would have been to Marjorie Taylor Greene's liking, and also to the liking of Vance and Leonard Leo and so on, especially through their connection to Opus Dei, because this is really, you know, the 1929 church-state collapse that is represented by the Lateran Treaty.
In which Mussolini and Pius XI sign this accord that establishes the Vatican as a sovereign city-state.
And this resolves the Rome question, which was left hanging by the annexation of all kinds of papal territories back in 1870 by the Kingdom of Italy.
That resulted in the papacy.
Not recognizing the legitimacy of the Italian state for six decades.
So at the point at which Mussolini is making his deal with the Pope, the Vatican is not recognizing his authority as being the leader in Italy.
So this treaty consolidates church and fascism relations.
It also establishes the Catholic Church as the state religion of Italy.
But included in the deal was compensation to the Vatican for those lost territories back in 1870, and that provided a foundation for its modern financial empire, along with all of the colonial stuff that we'll talk about, and it allowed Mussolini to position himself as the dealmaker, the great reuniter of Italy.
So he got the deal.
He got the best deal, the best deal ever.
Well, we really need Greenland, Matthew.
We have to have Greenland for our national security and the Suez Canal and taking advantage of us.
Yeah, so as fascism grows in power, this pact expands on this old tradition of religion that's mobilized to both rationalize and mystify power.
All things that Taylor Crean should love, right?
And also, it ends up recruiting Catholics into pious fascist violence.
So we have Italian and Spanish bishops who are out there blessing Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War.
In Ireland, I was just reading about this because I'm fascinated with the international brigades.
There was this guy named Ian O'Duffy who rounded up 700 men, blue shirts they called them, to sail to Spain on a German ship flying a swastika flag.
As they were weighing anchor at Galway, the bishops were out on the dock blessing them as they went.
So anyway, MAGA is this theme, religious aspirations of purity and authenticity and originality that are indistinguishable from fascist fetishes of the golden age.
And we have this Venn diagram of spiritual and political leaders that is often a circle.
To the extent that Marjorie Taylor Greene is pointing at financial opacity and mystery, and because, as you've brought up, we've just witnessed this absurd display of wealth during the conclave and the installation pageantry, I think we should talk about the money and what we know and what we don't, because...
I think it provides a roadmap for talking about the political and theological themes and stakes and challenges in this transition from Francis to Leo.
It kind of provides a foundation, I think.
So today, the Vatican reports almost $1 billion in annual income.
65% of it is self-generated or from the capital holdings of $10 to $15 billion in assets.
If you're thinking that doesn't sound like much, you're actually right, because by comparison, there's one hedge fund, this is the top one in the U.S., Bridgewater, is worth seven to eight times as much at $89 billion.
So the Vatican ranked 197th or last globally in terms of GDP, and the GDP per capita is ranked 44th globally, so that's way up in the list because most folks are white-collar in several senses of the word.
However, in all of the murky accounting of Vatican wealth, they exclude the priceless artifacts and heritage buildings, which are not deemed as capital assets because they cannot be sold.
So St. Peter's Basilica, for instance, is on the books valued at one euro.
The consensus among art appraisers is that all of the stuff is impossible to assess for market value.
So the Vatican is this paradox.
It's a center of capitalist and colonial accumulation where the numbers actually disappear and nobody really owns anything.
Yeah, which is wild.
And just to be clear, when you start talking about those per capita rankings in terms of GDP, you're talking about a territory that has no manufacturing.
Yeah, nothing.
It grows no crops.
It's tourism, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, so then the question becomes, how well are they monetizing those assets?
And recently, we have to say the answer is not very well, because as of 2025, the Vatican, as a modern corporate administrative institution, maintains a fully benefited workforce, good for them, of 2,000 to 3,000 people.
That's over 1,100 women, 700 workers at the Vatican museums alone.
And the big problem they're facing is that the Vatican Pension Fund faces a significant unfunded liability estimated at over 600 million euros in 2022.
There were some earlier internal reports that suggested that liability could be as high as 1.5 billion euros.
Wow.
And to get a clearer picture of how to achieve solvency and how income and assets are in constant flux in this world where faith is falling here and it's rising there, they're recruiting in this place and the seminaries are empty over there.
Francis made a bunch of moves starting in 2014, very early on, to improve financial transparency during his tenure.
So this was kind of his doge program.
Yeah, yeah.
With better intentions.
Yeah.
So he opened the books to external auditors.
Who found and then closed down 3,500 Vatican bank accounts linked to mafia money, illegal deals, and hidden corruption.
This is like accumulated over decades, maybe centuries and shit.
It's like if you open up the books in Switzerland or something like that, what would you actually find?
Well, he tried to do that.
3,500.
Yeah, it's a lot, right?
Yeah.
These are accounts belonging to Italy's ultra-rich and political power brokers.
And he also wanted to centralize the accounting because there's this Baroque chaos of...
Squirreling away money here and there and probably way outdated file systems, some of which are done in calligraphy or whatever.
And that provided all kinds of opportunities for grift, as we see in the case of Cardinal Angelo Becchio, who was made a cardinal by Francis in 2018.
But he was then convicted by the Vatican Court for embezzling church funds for real estate investment schemes featuring high-end apartments in London worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right?
It's a familiar story, really, about...
And I think it's a really good thing to start with because his attitude towards digging through the books actually, I think, forces him.
I mean, he's already doing this because he's from the Global South and he's read Gutierrez and he's familiar with liberation theology.
But I don't think you can account for the Vatican books without asking the bigger questions of, okay, where the fuck did all of this come from and what is our relationship to our colonial past?
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Yeah, so I think digging around in the dirt of Vatican money inevitably brings up all these questions about, you know, these things that can never be accounted for, like the way in which the priceless assets of the Vatican are actually a ledger, like they're a diary, diary entries of colonial-era appropriation.
That doesn't mean that when we see those images of St. Peter's Square on livestream, We are simply looking at the spoils of colonialism.
It's a little bit more hidden than that.
Like the construction of the Vatican structures or the materials came from local marble quarries and concrete materials came from local sources.
But just as an example of how the old world sort of adorned itself in stolen glory, there's a ceiling in a church called the Basilica of St. John Lateran that's built with local stone.
But then it's decorated with six tons of gold leaf.
If you can imagine like a pallet where you have six, like that's three cars worth or something like that, right?
And then pound it into like, just into paper thin.
Like that's an incredible amount of coverage.
I haven't seen this thing.
But where did the gold come from?
It was donated by the king of Spain in the 16th century.
And it was explicitly stolen from the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires.
Yeah, but Matthew, that gold was all being used to glorify false gods.
Sure, yes, right.
I mean, I joke, but the religious justification for European colonialism's brutal conquest and theft was front and center during this period, right?
Yeah, well, because...
Papal bulls in the 15th century established the doctrine of discovery.
So we did an episode on this a couple of months ago when Trump was really on a bender about Greenland and the 51st state.
Renaming the Gulf of America.
Right, yeah.
And the doctrine of discovery, just a little refresher, granted colonial powers' rights over newly discovered lands, often resulting in the expropriation of indigenous territories and the transfer of wealth to the church and its various agencies and institutions.
And so the church becomes this major landowner and economic force in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia, during the colonial period.
And in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the church received these vast land holdings, tributes, and a share of all of the wealth that was extracted from the colonized.
And at times, the church owned up to half the total wealth in some Latin American regions.
And its influence and wealth only grew through its role as the spiritual legitimizer of colonial regimes, which often rewarded it with even more treats, right?
The very best deals.
But back in 2023, Francis upended all of that, at least theoretically, at least nominally, with a repudiation of the doctrine of discovery.
In a statement that was released eight months before he traveled here to Canada in a very unique meeting where he gathered with indigenous leaders and apologized for the role that the Catholic Church played in colonial genocide.
Now, how that's going to actually materialize into reparations is another question, but he wrote at that time.
Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected with the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.
The Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political doctrines.
You can kind of see and feel Marjorie Taylor Greene like melting like the Wicked Wish of the West as that's being read over the...
I'm a proud Western chauvinist.
Right.
So moves towards financial transparency.
Rejecting the doctrine of discovery.
We haven't even gotten to social teachings on culture and war issues, but it's pretty clear that these points alone set Francis on a collision course with not only the American hegemony throughout the world and its excesses in the age of Trump, but also it plotted this conflict.
Against the tradcasts, against Opus Dei, and, you know, reactionary converts like J.D. Vance.
And, you know, that's sort of how we get to the present moment.
Yeah, how dare he deny the primacy of Judeo-Christian values?
Right.
Exactly.
Right.
The greatest thing that God ever created, which is why America rules the world.
So we've established that...
He had a reformist mentality with regard to corruption and the crimes of colonialism.
But beyond that, was he really progressive, Francis?
Or was he woke, as the Magas love to call him?
Yeah, I think it's a mixed story.
I think it depends who's asking.
This is a personal anecdote about the kind of things that I've seen change just in my lifetime.
Within Catholic culture, and that, you know, I would attribute a lot of those changes to the influence of Francis.
I had not been to a Catholic Mass in about 35 years, and then last spring, my kid had this event that they were going to downtown, it was on a Sunday, and I happened to drop them off like half an hour before a Mass at the St. Michael's Cathedral, which is one of the places that I grew up in.
And then I was going to have time to go to this thing, and I just decided to go.
And this church, you know, 35 years ago, any given Sunday, the congregation would have been 85% white, something like that.
And I showed up and the numbers were reversed.
It was about 15% white.
There were West Africans there.
There were people from, like, There were people from Singapore and Taiwan and people from all over the world.
And then there were these two things that happened during the liturgy, which was, for the most part, unchanged from what I had remembered it.
But the first thing was that during the offertory prayer, the gifts are brought up to the altar that are going to be blessed.
And as the gifts are being offered, there's this tradition where...
Somebody will sort of announce a certain number of intentions for people to pray for, right?
Like, let's see if we can hold in our hearts this particular idea for the next week.
And this woman got up to the lectern and she said a number of things about political prisoners and peace in the Middle East and an end to the war in Ukraine and stuff like that and things that you would expect.
Or for those who are enraged at the church because they have not been heard, because their grievances and their anguish over abuse has not been heard, may they find listening ears amongst our clergy.
From the fucking pulpit, right?
And I was like, I had to do, I had to make sure I wasn't high.
And I wasn't.
Then the next thing that happened was the priest there is 32 years old.
I found out later.
He's pretty much fresh out of seminary.
And it's the beginning of Lent.
And so the season is about, like, we know that Jesus is on his way to death.
And this is a time of sober reflection.
On all of our existential vulnerabilities.
And he gives this very competent presentation of the message of Lent is that when you encounter difficulty in your life, try to see what wisdom you can glean from it.
You might have the instinct to run away from...
The difficulties from the dark times of life as quickly as you can.
But there might be something there that you can take with you that will allow you to love other people better and so on.
But then he says, so it's very competent, very sort of run-of-the-mill.
But then he says, you know, of course, if you're actually in danger in some way, if you're not safe in your own home, don't listen to anything that I'm saying this morning.
You really have to make yourself safe first.
I was like, holy fuck, this guy.
Is giving a trauma-informed sermon in the church I grew up in.
What the hell has happened?
And I think one of the things that happened...
He's also acknowledging that...
Certain people are subject to worse levels of oppression and things to be afraid of, right?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I think one of the things that happened was that this is the imprint of Francis.
And I can just tell you as somebody who grew up having attended thousands of services in that building that had no hint of anything like that, to have that injected into the air there along with the incense that you still remember is like, It's wild.
And so it's like, from the outside, it might not seem like, especially with regard to social issues and, you know, are we going to allow gay people to actually be full persons and marry and stuff like that?
If those things don't change, that can seem very, very repressed from the outside.
But if you are sort of encapsulated within this...
Womb, which is sometimes a prison, and there are these glimmers of light, that is very significant, right?
Okay, so Francis starts his papacy by giving the Tradcast this four-alarm fire when he's answering a reporter's question about homosexual life and ethics.
He answers with his own question.
This is right in 2013, right at the beginning of his papacy.
He says, who am I to judge in response to this question about how are gay people to live, right?
Then he goes on to have these countless visits with queer folks, with trans sex workers, with non-binary youth.
And it's all under this mantra he has of todos or all are welcome in Spanish.
He authorized communion for divorced Catholics and that really sent the conservatives reeling because what other rewards do they get from staying in their shitty marriages, right?
Like they should have like special access and exclusive access to communion.
And then, you know, as we're going to talk about, there are still all of these recalcitrant limits like reproductive rights.
There isn't any movement on really.
And then gay marriage and the ordination of women.
So, yeah, I mean, this stuff is always a bit weird for me, Matthew, as a non-Catholic, as a non-religious person, because it goes to questions around how we think about Vatican power and the role of the Pope.
Like, it's not really a government or a legal body.
No.
The Pope is not a king.
He's not a prime minister.
In terms of official positions, it seems like there's this tightrope that he has to walk across a billion people, many of whom these days are concentrated in communities of the global South that are very socially conservative.
And when I hear about Francis enjoying tea and biscotti with gay and trans people...
But that he's also publicly called gender ideology the ugliest danger of our time.
And he's not in favor of gay marriage.
And he's not advanced an agenda to make women priests or even support contraceptive rights, let alone abortion rights.
All of that, it's hard for me to swallow.
It feels like he gets put in some kind of special category as this religious leader where he can officially hold the same stance on a lot of the social issues as the run-of-the-mill.
Republican Party, but then be called a progressive or even be called woke because he's a nice guy with the mystique of some kind of holy status, which I just don't believe.
Yeah, I sympathize with all of that.
I agree with almost all of that.
And I think that's where we're headed here is towards this uncanny question, which is how relevant can this institution be in this time?
I think I want to say that for a lot of Catholics, the mystique that you're talking about is...
Also, or maybe sometimes even not much more than an acknowledgement of political power.
So if they cut him slack on not moving strongly enough on things like gay marriage, those Catholics will interpret that through a lens of political limitation and strategy and holding a coalition together.
I mean, I want to be careful not to agree with what might seem to me like a kind of downplaying of the mystique, because, you know, all of that.
The pomp and ceremony, the robes, the throngs of people waiting to see his first appearance, all of the attention, that has to do with his position as a religious figure, as the nature of God.
Right.
And then maybe the core question that you and I are always talking about is like, okay, so is that mystique and investiture of...
The institution that has great cultural meaning for people that's built up over years, or do people also harbor a magical notion that when he puts on the fisherman's ring that symbolizes his lineage to Peter, that somehow something magical has happened to his body.
Does that happen?
And if he touches you, are you going to have a special blessing and stuff like that?
Yeah, I would agree that it's really hard to parse those things apart.
I mean, all of those religious rituals and symbols, they have a whole lot of power in terms of like, this is a very, very special, unique person who has some kind of perspective and wisdom and anointed understanding of God's will.
If I try to imagine myself at 16 or something like that, but forward in the future so that I wasn't meeting Pope John Paul II, who I wasn't really fond of, but I was meeting Pope Francis, let's say.
Let's say I was in one of those groups of youth that was meeting him.
It's hard for me to imagine shaking his hand and feeling that I was being touched by somebody holy.
As opposed to being touched by somebody who had written this amazing essay about the environment called Laudate Sea.
And I mean, that's me.
That's my rationalism.
But I suppose I always have these questions around like, well, what percentage of this faith community...
What percentage has a kind of like...
I don't know, hangover of magical thinking, right?
I mean, it's a fascinating question, and as you point out, it's an impossible one to really know the answer to.
Like, it would require a great deal of social research to find out, and even then, it's a moving target.
However, I think within people who do take all of this seriously, there is some sense that his statements on these key...
Social and political issues and environmental issues, for example, have a level of weight that is important.
It's significant.
And for people who are devout Catholics, there's something sort of almost inviolable about what his opinions are, which is one of the reasons why you then have all of this pushback from people who are like, this is no longer...
I do think that you hit the nail on the head with the weird status of the organization, because more and more, I think it's a persuasion project, the Catholic Church.
Their outreach and conversion strategy, it has to reflect the social needs of really diverse groups.
Whatever the Vatican decides about gay marriage has to fly in County Derry, and it has to fly in Kinshasa.
And that's the challenge of being a universal church, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And I just want to reflect that our title today is about Pope Leo, but we don't know much about Pope Leo except that he's taking up all of this stuff.
He's been handed this folder, right?
That's right.
And he is a successor to all of this in a way that many of the other potential candidates would not have been.
Would not have been, exactly.
Right.
So Francis was relentless on the topic of environmental protection.
He argued for more porous and welcoming borders between the global North and South.
He championed the rights of immigrants.
That led him into direct conflict with Vance.
in the month before he died because Vance invoked St. Augustine's principle of Ordo Amoris to basically justify ice raids because he argued this really sort of illiterate oxygen mask on you first position.
You gotta take care of yourself and your family first.
The order of love is like, who do you love first?
Who are you responsible for first?
But he turned the, you know, you've got to put on your own face mask first principle into a divine instruction.
And Francis basically said, you're full of shit.
That's not Catholic teaching.
And then Cardinal Prevost tweeted the same rebuke.
No, actually, the order of amoris is that you're committed to God first, and then right after that, you're committed to all of human beings.
And then right after that, you're committed to animals.
And then after that, you're committed to materials, right?
So, yeah, it's a pretty funny exchange there.
This is sort of in the vein of what we've been discussing, but from a slightly different angle, because I do have a question for you, Matthew.
When I see Democrats, who you would call liberals, praise people.
Like Mitt Romney and John McCain, or better yet, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Republicans who on principle have rejected Trump.
They've been active in the January 6th committee that sought to hold them to account and thereby actually committed career suicide when they're praised by liberals.
But then leftists like yourself point out that they're otherwise still terrible right-wingers who we disagree with on everything else, which is true.
Well, I think you're right on...
All of the points of social teaching, and especially the one about female clergy, is essential and crucial because none of the problems that the church or anybody faces together are going to be resolved without women's leadership.
Recently, I became acquainted with this breakaway incipient convent in Portland, Oregon, that just consists of like three nuns.
And they tell their story on their website about how they actually had to form their own religious order or they're seeking to form their own religious order because there's a whole process behind that.
Because they didn't get support from their superiors when they had sexual harassment claims against a particular priest.
And so they moved out of their residence.
They are on their own.
They're trying to figure out.
They still have their vows of poverty, unfortunately.
So now they have to figure out what they're going to continue to do as Catholic nuns.
The upshot is that what they want to do is they want to get into a kind of ministry for victims of clerical sexual abuse.
They want to train themselves in it and they want to do that from a Catholic perspective.
And people might have different ideas about whether that's helpful or not.
But I can imagine there's a lot of people in the Catholic Church that would rather go to a Catholic sort of counselor with regard to trying to heal from that kind of thing than to somebody else.
Or at least there's a place for them.
And I think that's a really good example of...
By excluding women from leadership positions to the extent that this administration does, to just lose all of that, it's just insane to give up on all of that fire, all of that potential.
Yeah, you know, I wanted to say this earlier, but it's crystallizing more and more for me as I have these questions for you.
I'm getting this sense, because it is not...
Only a political organization.
And because of the incredible numbers of people and numbers of different countries we're talking about that are involved in the Catholic Church, that the Pope has these, in a way, at least two different roles, right?
That one role is as the figurehead, as the administrator, as the person who has to put on a certain kind of face.
And as you were just saying, it has to fly as well in Kinshasa as it does in Derry, right?
It has to, around the world, it has to be palatable.
There has to be some sense of accounting for the fact that, you know, there's an array of political attitudes.
But then there's this other role, which I hear you sort of gesturing towards, which is one of the examples of how he behaves as a human being, who he interacts with, what kinds of messages he is telegraphing, for example, through gathering with trans people under this idea of everybody is welcome.
And, you know, when you talk about these women, and when we think about Pope Bob, who he was before he became Pope Leo, the on-the-ground kind of realities that you are describing from visiting your old cathedral, that to me, it is making sense.
It's getting through some of my atheist kind of skepticism where I realize, okay.
There is the reality of existing within communities and meeting the needs of those communities and being sensitive to and educated on the political complexities and the demographic realities of those communities in such a way that you really are being of service and embodying whatever your understanding is of compassion and love and service in ways that I think I would do well not to dismiss.
Well, yeah, maybe.
But back to your question of like, why does Francis get this sort of special status?
Is he better than Republicans who sit on the J6 committee?
I mean, I think he's better.
I think that any pope's job at this point, now that the church is more or less decoupled from active colonization, it's going the other way, that the job is going to be to foster an internationalist dialogue.
In a globalized world between global North and South, and if that dialogue is rooted in a critique of capitalism and in the existential gravitas around the environment, and now with Pope Bob, the threats of AI, I think that puts these guys in a different category from RINOs.
We have to see how the record shakes out.
So as we round up the Francis legacy, I think here's the sort of logic flow.
There's this financial investigation and this will towards transparency that means we have to face the origins of money, complicity in capitalism and colonialism.
Being from the global south puts him in direct contact with that paradigm.
The whole problem of extraction and appropriation and climate crisis merges with a discourse on decolonization.
And then what does that mean in...
Church administrative terms.
Like, what does he try to do with that?
Well, he comes up with this term.
I don't think he coins it, but it's fairly recent.
And the term is synodality, which is the idea that a global church has to de-center its authority and it has to listen to those on the political and economic margins.
So how does that cash out in real life?
Well, he had this...
Emphasis on listening spaces, and that led to the inclusion of Indigenous voices at synods and at church gatherings.
Particularly, you know, there's a really notable one that was the synod on the Amazon, and it featured this moment where an Indigenous woman offered...
Francis, a Poncha Mama icon, which is a traditional goddess from the region, and he welcomed it into the Vatican Gardens and the trads lost their fucking minds as if the entire church wasn't millennia of syncretism and like nobody had ever been to New Orleans or fucking Mexico during the Day of the Dead.
So, you know, I've got this quote from Al Jazeera about how this shakes out.
In material terms, or might possibly in the future, in March 2021, the Jesuits, which is a major Catholic order, it's also Francis' order, made a groundbreaking commitment to raise $100 million for the descendants of 272 enslaved people they once owned and to foster racial reconciliation projects.
There's some money now on the table in some of these circumstances, but in the absence of larger discussions or plans for reparations, or the actual returning of museum artifacts, or figuring out how to sell assets for compensation, it really remains to be seen whether this is all non-profit listening and feeling talk that will provide cover for institutional inertia.
A lot of the people in abuse victim discourse feel this way about the distance between Francis' presentation of openness and the material impacts it might have.
It's not moving fast enough.
It never moves fast enough.
And in that slowness, there is a distance between what's needed and what's on offer that creates this vacuum.
And in that vacuum, I think we get cynicism and even conspiratorial thinking.
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So, one of the things that Leo inherits is that Francis drove the U.S. conservative Catholic sector insane.
Just a couple of examples.
Well, one American example and one European example.
Cardinal Burke.
He is seen as the de facto leader of traditional prelates in the U.S. and globally.
He was railing against Francis for years on the issue of communion for divorced and remarried Catholics and on the issue of how welcoming people are supposed to be towards LGBTQ people.
He insisted that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be denied communion.
This is a guy who loves the Latin Mass.
And in 2014, Francis demoted him.
This is quite early on in his fancy Vatican position.
And then in 2023, he really lost patience with Burke and he stripped him of his stipend and his fancy Vatican apartment.
This was also part of the budgetary clawbacks because, of course, they're not going to meet their pension fund requirements.
In an episode with David Lafferty, I covered...
A much more extreme cardinal, a guy named Vigano, who in August 2018 published a QAnon-tinged 7,000-word open letter that accused Francis and senior church leaders of covering up sexual abuse allegations.
Not incorrect in broad terms, although no direct allegations against Francis ever emerged.
But Vigano also used that notoriety to launch into attacks on the Pope's...
Inclusive vision, especially regarding LGBTQ rights.
And by 2022, he was verging on sedivacantism, or this idea that, well, nobody's really sitting in the throne of Peter.
And he called Francis Bergoglio, which is his, you know...
Dead name, I guess.
And in 2024, he accused Francis of schism while announcing or denouncing the Second Vatican Council as a cancer.
So that was it for him.
The church turfed him out that summer.
He didn't even attend his own trial.
And he's pretty much out to pastor now.
He's still a focus of the TradCath podcast industry, along with his supporters like Bishop Strickland, who we talked about with Mike Lewis in episode 183.
Strickland was removed by Francis for alleged mismanagement of his diocese, but a lot of his stans, this is the Opus Dei crowd, and a lot of TradCath manfluencers thought that it was because of Strickland's Twitter attacks on the Francis agenda and his enthusiasm for going on QAnon podcasts and making dumb...
It's a wild, wild world.
Yeah, so we have all of this anxiety that's rippling through the 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, all political persuasions, as they watch the chimney for white smoke, centered on the question of, will Pope Bob continue down this road?
Will he hew to the center?
Is he going to bounce right?
And the jury's going to be out for a while, but I think there's...
One clear thing that we can say is that as an American progressive friendly pope with decades of service in the global south during a period of revolutionary violence and state repression, Bob Prevost presents an alternative American face to the world in opposition to Trump.
Not radical opposition, not directly anti-capitalist, except for one statement about AI that it might have those implications.
But a kind of moral opposition in the mode of peacekeeper.
I think we can wrap up with what we know about Bob so far.
He's born in 55. He's raised in a very specific Catholic parochial time.
And this is the world of my dad in Detroit, where Midwest and other regional Catholic communities were geographically and tribally located in parishes that made you identifiable in terms of attitude.
The work that you did, your class, your temperament.
So this was a completely immersive community church experience.
It's something that I think evangelicals strove to replicate in the 1980s with megachurches.
He's also in this very recognizable relationship with his brothers.
One of them is kind of like a middle-of-the-road Catholic guy still living outside of Chicago.
And then there's Florida Man Lou.
Who is on all of the interviews recently, especially because he had a bunch of MAGA-influenced, well, really red-pilled Facebook posts.
Yeah, accusing Obama of longing for the total destruction of our way of life and turning this country into dictatorship and a racist one on top of it.
He posted something that was calling on the jailing of Democrats for the treason of meeting with Zelensky.
He posted a meme saying, your child isn't trans, you're just a shitty parent.
Total bullshit.
But I wonder, actually, just in family terms, the optics of Thanksgiving.
What's going to happen here?
Like, Lou has said he'll tone it down.
I wonder if there's an opportunity here for Bob and Lou to perform some kind of public reconciliation as a microcosm for American healing.
I don't know.
What do you think?
I'm totally here for it.
Let's do it.
I'd love to see it.
Anyway.
Very important to know that he had extreme popularity as a local priest and bishop in Peru.
There's these stories about how when his birthday came around, they had to book a whole week off because there would be at least seven honorary birthday dinners in people's homes that he had to attend to.
Everybody in town knew him.
He came up, very importantly, in the Augustinian order.
And he did his PhD in the role of the Augustinian prior, or a monastic leader.
And this is a mendicant order, you know, vows of poverty, funded by donations and patrons and historical land grants.
I think that's going to influence his managerial style.
The big deal about him being from an order, and this is true of Francis as well, is that it's really different from the diocesan mold of, you know, the sort of solopreneur.
parish manager who works his way up through the church hierarchy as kind of like in a corporation or something like that.
When you come from an order, it's not really like that.
And I think that's a, that's a, that's going to be really influential.
I think in a future bonus, I'm going to look at the fact that JD Vance took Augustine as his confirmation name.
So there's a weird overlap and, and sort of conflict here between, you know, Vance's interest in August.
Augustinianism and, of course, where Bob is coming from, and I think it shines a light on these very old warring interpretations of Augustine's main work, The City of God.
You know, some people interpret The City of God as being about the earthly city at war with the divine city, that it's about the defense of traditional order, it's a criticism of human pride, that the focus is on the apocalypse.
And progressives, to the extent that they've existed for the last hundred years in the Catholic Church, have often read the City of God as some sort of model for the mundane city being the perfect divine city already.
That the focus is on inviting everyone into the divine city.
The focus is on development rather than restoration of something that may have never existed.
We also have these continuities with Francis in the Global South connection.
He refers to synodality in his first speech from the balcony.
It looks like he might be pushing Opus Dei towards the reforms that Francis actually ordered.
And informants also tell me that, unlike Francis, You know, Pope Bob will not be able to avoid so much the English language trolling and harassment from the MAGA church.
So there might be the possibility of a more direct confrontation.
And I think that's part of what you and I might be feeling when we see Vance enter his office and have this kind of awkward meeting, is that there's no language barrier there.
They can just talk to each other, like people from the same country, and who knows how honest that can get, how direct that can get.
I think I'm going to finish with two things that are most important with regard to his relationship to Trumpism, as far as I can speculate forward.
He had years of on-the-ground protest activism in Peru against the repressions of the Fujimori authoritarian backlash.
Against the shining path communist insurgency, which was incredibly brutal and violent.
He took this middle path route of pacifism.
He would often offer masses and prayers for victims of both the insurgency and the U.S.-backed reactionary government that followed.
So Pope Bob is not a stranger to either fascism or, you know, government repression or to the dangers of extremist resistance to government repression.
Yeah.
And just to re-up from last week, I think this is the biggest waving flag of where his political attention is going to lie through his comments on name choice.
You know, he tells the Conclave guys the day after he's elected that he chose the name of Leo because Leo XIII, 130 years ago, wrote about capital and labor on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution.
And he says, And I think that's kind of incredible to refer back to the first papal intervention in industrial capital as we careen into the AI-verse.
So, you know, who knows what will come of this Midwest warmth and sort of normalcy and his commitment to the poor.
But, you know, it does seem that this election is the Catholic Church's poke-in-the-eye of Trumpism.
And I think this take on AI additionally sets him on a collision course with Silicon Valley and the tech titans.
Absolutely.
And the fact that you were just underlining that he knows what authoritarianism looks like.
He's been on the receiving end of fascist misuse of power, and he's worked within communities where he's had to figure out how to navigate those complexities.
I think that sets up actually a very interesting potential issue.
Yeah, and I think it's kind of an interesting turning point or chapter in this very, very grim period.
