“Magnifica humanitas,” Leo XIV’s first encyclical, contrasts two biblical images as a symbol of the contradictions of our time. On one side, the Tower of Babel ; on the other, the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem after the return from exile. Pride and dispersion as against what Paul VI already called “the civilization of love”; a disintegrated and godless city as opposed to a supportive city “in which God and humanity dwell together.”
But looking at today’s world, the contrast can also be applied to two figures of the utmost global significance, both Americans : Donald Trump and Pope Leo. And this is what has been done by Giovanni Orsina, an accomplished scholar of contemporary history and politics, director of the department of political science at LUISS University in Rome, in an August 17 essay published in France in “Le Grand Continent” and in Italy in the newspaper “Il Foglio.”
Within the Church, “Magnifica humanitas” has drawn almost nothing but approval. Critical voices have been very rare, even on the more disputable points of Leo’s preaching on peace and war, highlighted at the end of May by Settimo Cielo.
But precisely for this reason, Orsina’s essay is of great interest. Because it fills a void of reflection and discussion on the role that Leo also plays in the political history of our time, from the cultural divide of the sixties to the present day, with the failure of the liberal revolution – in which the Christian Democrats played a key role in Europe – and the advent of that “counterrevolution” which the populisms are, with the American president’s “politics without morality” on one side and the pope’s “morality without politics” on the other.
That Orsina should criticize Trump through and through is not surprising. Rather, he points out, the serious issue is the broad approval that twice brought Trump to the White House and rewards with millions of votes the populist forces in Europe, those “who most resemble him.”
More painstaking, instead, is Orsina’s analysis of Leo’s thought expressed in “Magnifica humanitas.” The pope, he writes, is rightly skeptical of the salvific claims of technology, but when he speaks of politics, “this prudence of his vanishes.” He attributes to politics a boundless task, that of “orientating economies and technologies to the common good,” but on the condition that it not soil its hands with power, with the exercise of force, “which in the encyclical appears almost solely in pathological forms.”
Orsina writes : “The only power that Leo recognizes as good, in the end, seems to be that which has ceased to be so : it is the power of God that ‘is fully manifested in weakness’ (2 Cor 12:9). The fifth chapter of ‘Magnifica humanitas’ devotes a whole section to the tools with which to build ‘the civilization of love,’ but we do not find there a single lever capable of coercing, a single mechanism by which a reluctant actor can be forced. We find moral dispositions, verbal acts, spiritual practices, ‘responsible planning,’ ‘the assessment of human and social impact,’ ‘inclusion.’ Very ambitious goals, but ineffective tools.”
It is this contradiction that, in Orsina’s judgment, condemns Leo’s encyclical to a disarmed utopia, incapable of guiding concrete action.
“In addition to power,” Orsina continues, “the encyclical also splits realism. On the one hand, it condemns as ‘supposed political realism’ the attitude of those who take into account war, force, and the tragic dimension of the human condition, and points to it as a surrender, almost a moral fault. On the other, it calls for ‘a healthy realism’ that should not reduce politics to morality but start from interests or relations of force to calculate what can be achieved. Yet when it comes to the tools, the calculation always stops one step short of coercion : credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, and ultimately, not surrendering to evil but having hope. Realism too, in short, to be good must first renounce being itself.”
In the pope’s evocation, even the biblical image of the reconstruction of the walls of Jerusalem suffers from this omission of recourse to force. Orsina writes : “In the historical reality of the text, Nehemiah is a military governor acting on behalf of the Persian Empire. Not only does he see to the defense against external enemies by commanding builders who ‘worked with one hand and held their weapons with the other’ (Neh 4:11), but he also intransigently imposes order internally. In the book’s final chapter, collaborative leadership gives way to coercion : ‘I rebuked them, I cursed them, I beat some of them, I pulled out their hair’ (Neh 13:25). By omitting the sword and imperial rigor, the encyclical idealizes Nehemiah’s political realism in a manifesto of pure relational ecology and fraternal cooperation.”
Orsina notes that his critique of “Magnifica humanitas”! does not presume to teach the pope a lesson in theology. What matters to him, as a scholar of history and political science, is “to highlight how deeply in harmony the encyclical is with the civilization of anti-politics and anti-power that crystallized over the last fifty years and today has entered into crisis.”
Orsina has devoted most of his research to the political history of the West and Europe beginning from the sixties, particularly in his book “Counterrevolution : A Political History of Our Time,” published this year, but also in much of his essay in “Le Grand Continent.” There he reconstructs how it came about that Europe is now lost between the universalist ethic of which it is molded and the overbearing return of particularisms. Or, in other words : “between the morality without politics to which it is accustomed and the politics without morality enacted by the so-called populist forces, Trump and those like him, on both sides of the Atlantic.”
It is no surprise that Orsina’s critique of Pope Leo’s vision should have been read with great interest by political scholars, especially those of Catholic extraction. The first response to his essay cited here came from Flavio Felice, professor of the history of political doctrines at the Pontifical Lateran University, in a commentary in “Il Foglio” on August 22.
Felice objects that the politological category dominant in Pope Leo “is not an ideal of perfect peace, but the Augustinian ‘tranquillitas ordinis’: a dynamic and fragile balance, never absolute, always intertwined with conflict, fully accomplished only in the heavenly Jerusalem.”
And in confirmation of this he cites paragraph 218 of “Magnifica humanitas,” where it says that authentic realism “does not reduce politics to morality ; neither does it surrender to violence. Instead, it seeks viable paths for making peace more than a mere word, through credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, conflict prevention and the protection of civilians.”
But here, again, there is no mention of recourse to force, when necessary, except for a vague reference to “conflict prevention.” In confirmation of the extent to which Pope Leo’s “morality without politics” is intertwined with the need to “reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory […] is now outdated,” which he also explicitly maintained in “Magnifica humanitas.”
In highlighting last May 30 the inconsistencies of this claimed “outdating” of the doctrine of “just” war, Settimo Cielo cited an extensive and well-documented contribution in the magazine “Il Regno” by Luca Diotallevi, professor of sociology at Roma Tre University and at the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy, very critical of the “pacifist utopianism” rampant in the Church.
Well, in the next issue of the same magazine, Diotallevi got a reply from Professor Daniele Menozzi, an instructor of contemporary history at the Scuola Superiore Normale in Pisa and the author of important essays on issues of peace and war in the Catholic Church.
In Menozzi’s judgment, what is rampant in the Church is not “pacifist utopianism” but, on the contrary, a “militaristic ideology,” which must be countered with a “pedagogy of nonviolence” aimed at teaching the community of the faithful to “disarm the aggressor without resorting to the destructive power of weapons,” in obedience to what has been preached by Pope Leo – and his predecessor Francis – not only in “Magnifica humanitas” but in countless invectives against all wars and weapons.
The peace preached by Pope Leo may be “disarmed and disarming.” But in the meantime it has ignited a lively battle of ideas.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry : traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.