American Hope

Leo XIV will elude capture by the culture war

The new Pope is American. Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV, is a Chicago-born Augustinian friar, who spent much of his ministry in Peru. I wish him grace as he takes up the task of leadership in these turbulent times.

The immediate online response to his announcement yesterday, across both sides of the culture war, was striking: a frenzied rummaging in rumour, social media, and previous utterances for where the new Pope might stand on political matters, especially immigration and “gender”. On the Right, the howls of WOKE MARXIST POPE are now raising the roof, based on Twitter posts about topics such as George Floyd and JD Vance’s views on the ordo amoris. On the Left, the muttering about his insufficiently radical views on “LGBTQ issues” has likewise begun.

In other words, both sides of the culture war are already squaring up to him, for not aligning perfectly with their view of the way the world should be. As Mike Solana put it, with characteristic dryness: “For people who don’t go to church, and were hoping for a less Catholic pope, this was considered a mixed bag. For the rest of us: AMERICAN POPE.”

From my own denominationally ambiguous vantage-point I’m hesitant to weigh in too noisily on doctrinally Catholic matters. But eruption of related culture-war, as well as the overall international attention garnered by the conclave and election of Leo XIV, attests to the way these events have resounded well beyond the world’s community of Catholics To understand why, and particularly why it feels so significant at this moment to have an American Pope, I revisited a paper written just over a century ago, that sets the bicameral culture-war shouting of recent days in perspective: Carl Schmitt’s 1923 work Roman Catholicism and Political Form.

Schmitt needs careful handling, as his own later association with the Nazi regime serves, in some eyes, to render all his words untouchable. But this paper was written well ahead of that controversial time, at a moment between the wars every bit as turbulent as our own. It homes in on two macro-themes that loom just as today, if not larger, and carry special relevance for the role in which Leo XIV now begins his service: firstly the inadequacy of instrumental power to order human life, unless it is accompanied by moral authority, and secondly the rise of what Schmitt called “economic-technical thinking”, and the Church’s role in relation to such thinking.

The paper opens by describing a pattern of criticism faced by Roman Catholicism, which Schmitt argues recurs throughout modernity: specifically, its longstanding resistance to being corralled by any one secular political agenda. Reading it felt very much in continuity with reading the online tussling over Robert Prevost’s Twitter timeline:

Critics have demonstrated how it always pursues political coalitions, whether with absolute monarchs or monarchomachists; how, during the Holy Alliance, after 1815, it became a center of reaction and an enemy of all liberal freedoms, especially freedom of the press and freedom of education; how, in European monarchies, it preaches the alliance of throne and alter, and in the peasant democracies of the Swiss cantons or in North America it stands wholly on the side of a firm democracy. […] Catholic royalists and legitimists appear arm-in-arm with Catholic defenders of the republic. Some Catholics are tactically aligned with a socialism others believe to be in league with the devil. They have even parlayed with Bolsheviks at a time when bourgeois advocates of the sanctity of private property still saw in them a cabal of criminals hors la loi.

Schmitt dismisses the imputation that this evidences a lack of principle. On the contrary:

From the standpoint of a world-view, all political forms and possibilities become nothing more than tools for the realization of an idea. Some of what appears inconsistent is only the consequence and manifestation of a political universalism.

In what does this universalism rest? It’s not simply an imperial machine that obliterates all difference. There is, he argues, a profound distinction between the universalism of the Roman Catholic Church, and that of secular imperialisms - including that of the “economic-technical thinking” whose spread Schmitt was prescient in detecting, long before critiques of managerialism reached their contemporary mainstream.

Unlike the homogenising power of these empires, Schmitt argues, the Catholic Church derives its power not from military or financial force but on an authority grounded in its “power of representation”. It exists as a metonym for “the civitas humana”, within a world where “the representative capacity” has almost entirely disappeared. And this “principle of representation” stands as “antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today.” In this latter mindset, communist and capitalist are in agreement on the aim - “an electrified earth”, standing for the technologisation of everything - and disagree mainly on the best way to achieve it. Catholicism, Schmitt argues, is not the antonym of this mindset, not merely “the soulful polarity of soullessness”, a status that would render it merely “a hygienic institution for enduring the rigors of competition”. It is a worldview not defined in opposition to “economic-technical thinking” but radically other to it: “The Church has its own rationality.”

Economic thinking, he argues, “knows only one type of form, namely technical precision”. For this reason, it is structurally blind to the power of representation, which “invests the representative person with a special dignity, because the representative of a noble value cannot be without value.” The machinic, technical order obliterates representation in this sense - and, with it, the political. “[T]he understanding of every type of representation disappears with the spread of economic thinking”.

The last vestiges of representation survived in parliamentary political forms, says Schmitt. But the more completely procedural the economic-technical order becomes, the less able it is to perform this representative work: “One cannot represent oneself to automatons and machines, any more than they can represent or be represented.” From this it follows that, to the extent that modernity succeeds in depoliticising the state, it will expel from itself all forms of representation. And in such a world, Schmitt hypothesises, the Catholic Church would stand alone, as the last remaining repository of representative authority: “the only agency of political thinking and political form”. This is not, he cautions, desirable from the Church’s own perspective; it is in truth a terrible weight to carry. But Schmitt foresaw this as a logical corollary of the managerial direction of travel.

102 years on from Roman Catholicism and Political Form, we are far closer to “the electrified earth” and its order of pure neutralisation and proceduralism. The resulting order of NGOs, institutions, transnational financial and demographic flows, depoliticised policy laundering and “deep state” manoeuvres, has all but expunged the type of human “representation” that Schmitt described. Our political leaders grow increasingly interchangeable, their policy platforms are often barely distinguishable, and the central drumbeat of “progress” remains the pursuit of interchangeability and fungibility.