Being spiritually guided and maintaining a powerful bureaucracy that extracts resources from societies, are inherently difficult cross-purposes, which I personally see as opposed and irreconcilable.
While I applaud your sentiment, Robert Sapolsky would argue with you.
Despite the appearance of "free will" among the outliers on the bell curve, it's the belly of that bell curve that will determine our future. In the aggregate, humans are utterly predictable, based on sound ecological principles.
I'm afraid humans are simply not mature enough as a species to avoid Odum's "Maximum Power Principle".
Like all other creatures on Earth, humans will continue to leverage fossil sunlight to dissipate more and more power, to the detriment of the least among us, and also to the detriment of the larger natural world.
The coming Great Reversal, when fossil sunlight enters irrevocable, terminal decline, seems to be our only hope.
Success and failure are subject to historical revision. Time increases the power of a morally stubborn witness. An Edward R. Murrow cannot take down a Joseph McCarthy directly, but over time his gaze and his truth-telling exposed that particular evil as a hollow and decaying stage set.
Pope Francis was a success if you compare Catholicism's moral authority before and after his reign. Pope Leo will inherit some of that authority and probably increase it if he acts according to his impulses of empathy and kindness. He will be an idiomatically savvy observer of the Trump administration, and a steady moral gaze can corrode authoritarianism faster than any constitutional maneuvering.
It's interesting that both popes marinated in brutal South American realpolitik and have a history of acting pragmatically with tyranny. That can either corrupt idealism or strengthen it. In Francis's case, it strengthened it. From what I can see, there is reason to hope that Leo will be a force for mercy and compassion in this cruel world.
There has always been a debate, probably even since its origins, within the church between a conservative tendency which tends to reinforce the established order and therefore serve the powers that be, and a more social tendency, turned towards the poorest and therefore by essence contesting the same powers.
And at the same time, there's a fundamental and probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction between the various civil religions that emerged in the 19th century proposing an earthly paradise and a theistic religion promising one in the afterlife...
I recall the impact that Francis’s Laudato Sí (2015) had on the religious community in general. Many Catholics were proud of that document and the leadership it showed. Unfortunately, like so many other climate initiatives, it lost momentum ― maybe because Francis himself was physically ailing in his last few years.
The Episcopal Church in the United States appoints a new presiding bishop every nine years. This keeps the leadership relatively young and fresh. (The current presiding bishop was elected in 2024 at the age of 49.) Maybe the Roman Catholics need a similar policy.
Well, coming from the US, Leo XIV should have first hand knowledge of how money "trumps" every other facet of human existence and morality. As far as his long term ability or desire to help the common man I will refer to Gibbon: " The influence of the clergy, in a time of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people."
Thank you, Ugo, for this important account of the Catholic Church and the earlier Leo. Your thoughts on the agrarian / industrial transition are new to me. I look forward to the translated book!
Elsewhere this morning I was reminded by a pilgrim setting out on a long-planned journey, of the tears a few years ago at Lampedusa. She is too late for the older Francis but is in hope for renewal of the same spirit.
Maybe the mistake was during the middle ages: "In the Middle Ages, the Church could own land, give work to peasants, and manage agricultural production. With the industrial revolution, the Church could not, or would not, build factories, give work to workers, or manage production."
I always find it amusing when the spiritual side of a religion tries to reconcile itself with the social ordering and control side. It's the same everywhere, from Islam to Hinduism, even Buddhism suffers from this malaise. And it's always justified in the same way: ordinary people are stupid and need someone to govern them.
So I don't find it surprising that it's irreconcilable to live a healthy spiritual life coherently with a flourishing modern life.
I'm not saying Leo XIV doesn't have good ideas, but maybe it's the wrong approach.
Being spiritually guided and maintaining a powerful bureaucracy that extracts resources from societies, are inherently difficult cross-purposes, which I personally see as opposed and irreconcilable.
I pick spiritually-guided.
You have free will.
While I applaud your sentiment, Robert Sapolsky would argue with you.
Despite the appearance of "free will" among the outliers on the bell curve, it's the belly of that bell curve that will determine our future. In the aggregate, humans are utterly predictable, based on sound ecological principles.
I'm afraid humans are simply not mature enough as a species to avoid Odum's "Maximum Power Principle".
Like all other creatures on Earth, humans will continue to leverage fossil sunlight to dissipate more and more power, to the detriment of the least among us, and also to the detriment of the larger natural world.
The coming Great Reversal, when fossil sunlight enters irrevocable, terminal decline, seems to be our only hope.
Take personal control of your food supply, folks.
It is not impossible to be good even without free will -- or so I believe.
It's our only hope.
Success and failure are subject to historical revision. Time increases the power of a morally stubborn witness. An Edward R. Murrow cannot take down a Joseph McCarthy directly, but over time his gaze and his truth-telling exposed that particular evil as a hollow and decaying stage set.
Pope Francis was a success if you compare Catholicism's moral authority before and after his reign. Pope Leo will inherit some of that authority and probably increase it if he acts according to his impulses of empathy and kindness. He will be an idiomatically savvy observer of the Trump administration, and a steady moral gaze can corrode authoritarianism faster than any constitutional maneuvering.
It's interesting that both popes marinated in brutal South American realpolitik and have a history of acting pragmatically with tyranny. That can either corrupt idealism or strengthen it. In Francis's case, it strengthened it. From what I can see, there is reason to hope that Leo will be a force for mercy and compassion in this cruel world.
There has always been a debate, probably even since its origins, within the church between a conservative tendency which tends to reinforce the established order and therefore serve the powers that be, and a more social tendency, turned towards the poorest and therefore by essence contesting the same powers.
And at the same time, there's a fundamental and probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction between the various civil religions that emerged in the 19th century proposing an earthly paradise and a theistic religion promising one in the afterlife...
I recall the impact that Francis’s Laudato Sí (2015) had on the religious community in general. Many Catholics were proud of that document and the leadership it showed. Unfortunately, like so many other climate initiatives, it lost momentum ― maybe because Francis himself was physically ailing in his last few years.
The Episcopal Church in the United States appoints a new presiding bishop every nine years. This keeps the leadership relatively young and fresh. (The current presiding bishop was elected in 2024 at the age of 49.) Maybe the Roman Catholics need a similar policy.
Well, coming from the US, Leo XIV should have first hand knowledge of how money "trumps" every other facet of human existence and morality. As far as his long term ability or desire to help the common man I will refer to Gibbon: " The influence of the clergy, in a time of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people."
Thank you, Ugo, for this important account of the Catholic Church and the earlier Leo. Your thoughts on the agrarian / industrial transition are new to me. I look forward to the translated book!
Elsewhere this morning I was reminded by a pilgrim setting out on a long-planned journey, of the tears a few years ago at Lampedusa. She is too late for the older Francis but is in hope for renewal of the same spirit.
Maybe the mistake was during the middle ages: "In the Middle Ages, the Church could own land, give work to peasants, and manage agricultural production. With the industrial revolution, the Church could not, or would not, build factories, give work to workers, or manage production."
I always find it amusing when the spiritual side of a religion tries to reconcile itself with the social ordering and control side. It's the same everywhere, from Islam to Hinduism, even Buddhism suffers from this malaise. And it's always justified in the same way: ordinary people are stupid and need someone to govern them.
So I don't find it surprising that it's irreconcilable to live a healthy spiritual life coherently with a flourishing modern life.
I'm not saying Leo XIV doesn't have good ideas, but maybe it's the wrong approach.