Real Words
I think everyone agrees, this new pope comes at a fascinating and probably strategic time.
We certainly shouldn’t blame anyone in the United States for claiming him as the first American pope. How exciting it is for them. But when you look at his career, you have the clear sense that his heart, his ethical drive and his intellect were really focused on Peru, the complexities of a country going through enormous dramas over the twenty odd years he spent there. For me, he is fundamentally a Latin American pope shaped by the social and economic dramas of Peru.
This isn’t a way of insulting Americans. To the contrary. I think it makes him a particularly interesting new kind of leader for the Catholic Church.
Forgive me for moving from the noble to the ignoble. President Trump, almost immediately after the announcement of the election of the new pope, couldn’t stop himself and announced to the press that there had already been a phone call from the Vatican to the White House. Think about that. What he is imputing is that someone in the Pope’s office felt that the first thing to do upon the election of a new leader, was to let the American president know.
If you think that’s likely, then you might as well stop reading right here. People actually have other things to do than phone Mr. Trump. Particularly when the most important Christian church is coming around a potentially revolutionary corner.
It’s interesting to pause for a second to ask yourself, what does it mean if what the president said wasn’t true. Does it make him a pathological liar? That seems a little bit too ordinary. A mythomaniac? That comes closer to what happened. Perhaps it was simply a confabulation. Yes, I think that’s it. He just can’t help himself. Every day he goes about making things up and seems to enjoy it.
Meanwhile, the press and foreign governments and members of Congress, all of whom would like to treat him as if he were a normally functioning president of the United States, try desperately to make sense of what he has just said. But it doesn’t make any sense. He has either made it up or exaggerated it, or twisted it. Perhaps mythomaniac is the right word after all.
Going back to Pope Leo, I thought there was something very touching about the way he held up a large pad on which he had his notes written. It was so real. Think about all those politicians and CEOs who use teleprompters in order to smoothly read off speeches they haven’t written as if they weren’t reading. We’re not supposed to notice the teleprompters. Marshall McLuhan would probably have said something about this not being communication at all. I think I wrote something about this in The Unconscious Civilization.
Pope Leo, on the other hand, was communicating. He had things to say. Things that relate to the scandal of poverty and violence in the world. Because he was saying real things, it didn’t matter that he was clumsily holding a notebook to help him get his words right.
A very moving moment and when it comes to how to actually talk to and with people, a very real moment.
Just to be that conspiratorial, and I am not the first to float the similarity in the international zeitgeist/turmoil of today and that of when JP II came to the papacy. He was a moral force that weakened the totalitarian regimes of the east bloc.
I am hoping/praying (lapsed Catholic here-pretty sure my Grandma was on the Pope’s payroll) that Leo will be that moral force that the orange haired single stranded DNA sampling off of Epstein's commode cant gloss over. Maybe he is the ‘balm’ that can crack the cult, or weaken it.