A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #36 - King Leo XIV - Gianni Cimbalo * (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The Church has chosen Prevost as Francis' successor. The baton passes 
from a Jesuit to an Augustinian. In search of unity, the Catholic Church 
draws on its monastic orders, the profound thinking of its theologians 
and its experience, to provide solutions to current problems. Even if 
the secular world has tried to give a political reading to the choice of 
the new Pope, thinking of a response to the decline of the US empire, 
Trump's policies and so on, in our opinion, the choice was necessitated 
above all by profound internal reasons. The brief but tumultuous 
pontificate of Francis has opened up crisis scenarios on several fronts 
that the new Pope is called to resolve and to do so he needs to present 
himself as the one who recomposes the unity of the Church, in the 
continuity of the papal magisterium and recovers tradition, innovating.

The name

When the pontiffs choose a name they are very careful to recover the 
characteristic traits of their predecessors and intend to send an 
intelligible message to the entire ecclesia, precisely through the 
assumption of the name, so that the lines of action are clear and 
visible, hypothetical and predictable. Of his 13 predecessors, the 
current Pope intends to recover above all the function performed by Leo 
XIII presented as the Pope of the laboratories for his encyclical "Rerum 
Novarum", but in reality profoundly conservative. Upon closer 
inspection, Leo XIII was a great restorer, a fighter against liberalism, 
socialism, and anarchism, a supporter of the centrality of the Church's 
social doctrine, based on compromise between capital and labor, the 
rejection of class struggle, collaboration between capital and labor, 
and a substantial return to order-an order characterized by the 
preservation of the exploitation of man by man, but, thoughtfully, 
softened by charity and Christian solidarity, so as to ensure that 
excessive inequalities did not cause that profound rebellion, that 
revolutionary palingenesis called for by the masses. In that historical 
phase, Leo's response to the development of productive forces and to 
social change resulted in a substantial failure: it proposed a society 
of small and medium-sized, distributed companies with collaborative 
shareholdings in a world in which gigantic oligopolies were triumphing 
and asserting themselves. The result was the prevalence of fascism and 
Nazism on the one hand, and of a savage capitalism on the other, which 
needed to ally itself with Soviet communism to defeat fascist 
totalitarianism. It took two world wars for ordoliberalism, inspired by 
Catholicism, to assert itself and impose its order on Europe. Now that 
that cycle appears to have come to an end, the Catholic Church faces the 
global rise of "prosperity theology," which constitutes one of the 
greatest dangers it faces, as it undermines and corrupts from within the 
founding principles of Christianity, as it was read and interpreted by 
the Church Fathers. The danger is great because this worldview has 
established itself, with the Trump administration, at the center of the 
residual imperial power of an empire, the American one, certainly 
decadent, but dangerous precisely because it is dying. By taking the 
name Leo XIV, Prevost seems to want to send the message that, like his 
predecessor, he will be able to innovate within the framework of 
continuity and restore order while ensuring stability.

The new challenge

In assuming that name there seems to be a new challenge that would make 
her wrists tremble: that of wanting to reformulate a new and different 
vision of economic and social relations, which profoundly innovates the 
social doctrine of the Church, which gives it peculiar characteristics 
of originality compared to the message of other Churches and religions, 
which takes into account the spread of artificial intelligence and work, 
with the issues connected to the ecological transition, to the debts and 
credits of States, to debt relief, to the problems posed by global 
finance seen in relation to the growing poverty of all. It seems that 
Leo XIV wants to respond in a new and original way to that cry that 
comes forcefully from the peripheries of the world where he served 
during his magisterium, answering the questions of the Church's social 
doctrine on work, on fair wages, on the relationship between private 
good and common good, on the nature of business, on the nature of 
capitalism, on the vocation of the entrepreneur, on peace, and many 
other issues such as the environmental question, following in the 
footsteps of his predecessor's encyclical. But to do this he must 
acknowledge that today capitalism has moved from the factory to finance, 
from work to consumption, that the "spirit of business" has invaded the 
world and conquered souls, the nihilism of goods has deserted souls, 
imposing meritocracy as a value and the leadership of financial capital 
has imposed itself, becoming a religion and replacing Christianity with 
its new dogmas. The awareness of all this will inevitably lead him to 
clash with that vision typical of Trumpism for which technology and the 
fusion of man and machine decide everything, for a world where the 
oligarchy takes on changing and multifaceted aspects of absolute 
dominance in the diversity of political regimes and dominant 
institutions. This task seems more urgent than ever. Especially since 
today another declination of social doctrine is looming in competition 
with the Catholic Church and its vision of the world, not only the 
technocratic one but also that of orthodoxy, supported by a symphonic 
relationship between State and Church, which in turn presents itself as 
the true guardian of the values of tradition, ready to compete on a 
global level for the control of consciences, but above all the 
management of society. In the globalized world, orthodoxy, both in the 
version of the third Muscovite Rome and its social catechism, and in 
that of the reborn second Rome of Constantinople, seat of the Ecumenical 
Patriarchate, is increasingly jostling to assert itself; both of these 
entities present themselves as antagonists to the Catholic vision. While 
the clash is taking place on European soil between these two entities, 
plastically summarized in the war in Ukraine, the Catholic Church is 
called to operate on the global dimension of the world, having to face 
and resolve the problems linked to its international dimension as a 
universal Church. Also on this side it is therefore necessary to give a 
clear and unequivocal answer. As regards this last aspect of the 
pontificate of Leo XIV, what the pontiff will say and do in his probable 
trip to Nicaea, on the anniversary of the Council 1700 years ago on the 
relationship with Orthodoxy, will be important.
Unity

In any case, the Catholic Church's response to the challenge to which 
the vastness of its expansion calls it is that of unity. A unity to be 
expressed through the rediscovery of collegiality, enhancing synodality 
in the Church which passes on the one hand through the strengthening of 
the function of the management of the Curia and on the other through the 
accentuation and enhancement of the role of the Episcopal Conferences, 
implementing a decentralization in relations with the States which 
passes through the stipulation of collaboration contracts, not 
necessarily through Concordats, which increasingly characterize the 
relations between civil and religious authorities. This choice is 
necessary to recognize and enhance the different sensitivities, 
depending on the geographical areas, traditions and customs, in a world 
where the Catholic Church is increasingly a global institution. On the 
other hand, this orientation responds to the increasingly widespread 
tendency of States to contain the autonomy of the Churches, given that 
in times of growing nationalism each State wants its own Church and 
considers secularism increasingly outdated, favoring the affirmation of 
a sort of symphonic relationship read in a Catholic key. This tendency 
is evident if only one examines in detail the legal acts produced by the 
relationships established by the individual episcopal conferences with 
the States in which they exercise jurisdiction, evidence of a 
fragmentation of the relationships between States and Churches, aimed at 
strengthening the control of the executives over the life and political 
choices of the people.
The finances of the Church
Among the most serious problems that Francis has had to face is 
undoubtedly that of the management of the Vatican's finances which is 
intertwined with the lobbies present in the Curia and in particular with 
the one that covers up pedophilia. The reckless investments of Carol 
Wojtyla and Marcinkus, their relationships with the Banco Ambrosiano, 
the manipulations of the IOR, have produced a crisis in the Vatican 
finances that the German Episcopal Conference with its payments has not 
been able to fill. At the time, fundamentalist organizations such as the 
Legionaries of Christ and Opus Dei offered to fill the deficit, asking 
for and obtaining in exchange cover for the filth that many of the 
prelates who were part of it practiced towards minors, covering up the 
criminal behavior of prelates of high and low rank. Francis has 
attempted to save the Catholic Church from this humiliating drift, 
willing to pay the price of the collapse of the Vatican finances due to 
the lack of resources of many. Today the deficit of the Holy See seems 
to oscillate between 70 million and 1 billion euros. It must be said, 
however, that the disorder is such that it is nearly impossible to 
assess the Church's actual assets, especially considering the 
incalculable value of the real estate it owns in Rome alone. Nor is 
there any clarity regarding the ownership of dioceses and parishes, nor 
which resources are attributable to the central structure of the Church 
or rather pertaining to its branches. What is certain is that the 
support expected to come from Peter's Pence from the dioceses of the 
United States, even if impoverished by the large penalties paid to 
settle pedophilia cases, should be able to recover the deficit, making 
up for the diminished contribution from the German Bishops' Conference, 
whose finances are burdened not only by the burden of the German 
economic crisis but also by the decline in attendance. Compared to 
Francis, Prevost has the advantage of having worked for years on the 
appointment of bishops, having the opportunity to deepen his knowledge 
of the intermediate fabric of ecclesiastical power in the territories 
and can therefore reasonably count on a network of trusted men, spread 
across the territory, perhaps capable of ensuring greater control 
between the center and the periphery, certainly functional to mending 
the existing fractures in the episcopate; furthermore, his positions as 
a moderate centrist, as a prudent innovator, can ensure, also thanks to 
the energy that comes from his young age, to remove those obstacles that 
have so far stood in the way of a work of cleaning and rationalizing the 
functioning of ecclesiastical structures, or at least this is what the 
cardinals who elected him are counting on.
The political Pope
Certainly, as has been underlined, the new pontiff could only follow in 
the footsteps of Francis in invoking peace, as indeed all the pontiffs 
have done since the loss of temporal power, and therefore after Leo 
XIII, once they ascended to the chair of Peter. A first element of 
discontinuity is constituted by the position of the new pontiff on the 
war in Ukraine, its causes, responsibilities, consequences, 
geo-strategic, which in many ways excludes Vatican diplomacy from peace 
negotiations, while there seems to be continuity with regard to the 
position on Gaza and the Palestinian question. However, it is to be 
believed that the pontificate of Leo XIV will be characterized by 
interventions on the theological and magisterial level, having as its 
objective the pacification of consciences and the theological, spiritual 
and experiential aspects more exquisitely religious of belief. Unless 
the horror deriving from the genocide of the Palestinians is not enough 
to raise a high cry of horror of the reigning pontiff and the 
condemnation without appeal of the murderers. *From: "Crescita Politica" 
- Newsletter of the Union of Communists     Anarchists of Italy - n. 
197, May 2025.

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