In taking the name Leo XIV, the first American pope signaled a desire to imitate his much-beloved 19th-century predecessor Leo XIII. The previous Leo forged the Catholic response to industrialization; the new one hopes to renew Catholic social doctrine for the age of globalization and artificial intelligence.
It’s fitting, then, that Leo IV’s first apostolic exhortation, “Dilexi Te,” is a meditation on Christian obligations to the poor — one effectively written with his immediate predecessor, Pope Francis, who began work on the document before his death. The exhortation is concerned with the entire Christian relationship to poverty, from almsgiving to hospitals to monastic renunciation, not just the obligations of the state. But it has a clear political point of view, a sharp critique of libertarian visions of political economy, an insistence that capitalism must be tamed and gentled for the sake of basic human goods.
That perspective is hardly a novel one for the papacy: It was offered consistently by the theologically conservative popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, no less than by the liberalizing Francis. But that consistency also illustrates the challenge facing Leo if he hopes to say something novel and arresting on socioeconomic questions, something that’s as relevant to the current moment as Leo XIII’s teaching was to the 19th-century landscape.
The Roman Catholic Church is not a policy shop offering detailed economic blueprints or pre-written social legislation. So it often makes sense for its social doctrine to take the form of general moral guidelines rather than a checklist of policy obligations.
At the same time, however, there is a danger in vagueness and vapor, in offering pious-sounding exhortations that never condense into clear recommendations and whose applications seem to be overtaken by events.
“Our deepest convictions,” the pope suggests in “Dilexi Te,” may end up empty unless they’re “continually cultivated” through “our concrete actions.” In retrospect, the success of Leo XIII’s teaching, most notably his encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” is a case in point: The general Leonine vision of a third way between socialism and laissez-faire capitalism yielded successfully to the concrete agenda of New Deal liberalism and Christian democracy. The pope’s theory successfully anticipated American and European practice, such that the mid-20th-century model of welfare-state capitalism with strong labor unions could be reasonably described as a fulfillment of Roman Catholicism’s vision.
The problem for Catholic social doctrine more recently is that no similarly effective global system has emerged to bridge the gap between rich and poorer countries, even as the American and European welfare states that were built in rough accord with Catholic principles have come under profound demographic strain.
In this environment, the default assumption of the papacy (again, under multiple popes) has been that solutions will probably emerge from the same general left-of-center matrix that produced the original New Deal. And so the social documents the Vatican produces tend to endorse left-of-center impulses — toward global governance and domestic redistribution, environmental protection and support for mass migration — while trying to remain general enough to accommodate various policy approaches.
But what happens if left-of-center politics finds itself coming to grief or hitting various dead ends? Then you get a disconnect, a rhetorical sour spot, where the church’s analysis seems at once too vague and content-free to help the left through its compounding dilemmas and yet still too left-wing to influence conservatives and populists.
Here is a passage from “Dilexi Te” that illustrates this problem:
We must continue, then, to denounce the “dictatorship of an economy that kills,” and to recognize that “while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is being born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow, and the extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.
Again, this is very clearly a critique of libertarianism and an endorsement of some kind of regulation and redistribution. But the actual condition of the world, with the breakdown of the Pax Americana and the return of great power politics, makes it exceedingly unclear how you would implement a new politics of regulation and redistribution on a global scale, and there is no answer to that challenge to be found in the words of the new apostolic exhortation.
At the same time, even setting aside the more laissez-faire United States, rich nations like France and Italy and Germany are all struggling with the legacy costs of their existing systems of regulation and redistribution. What does a papal critique of financial speculation offer to these dilemmas? “How do we fund old-age programs with a fertility rate under 1.5?” is not a question that can be answered with an attack on market fundamentalism.
My point here is not to argue that the papacy should abandon its skepticism of unbridled capitalism and start channeling Friedrich Hayek or Ayn Rand. I accept the Leonine teaching that Catholics are obligated to support a mixed economy and a welfare state, and many conservative Catholics need to hear that teaching reiterated, especially in the United States.
But such a teaching will be harder to receive if it seems to floats away from any kind of realistic policy correlatives, or if it just seems like a Catholic blessing for a vision of political economy that manifestly isn’t working at the moment.
Which is why — and I’m sure I will regret this advice! — I think the new pope should be thinking more about ways to make this kind of teaching less general and more concrete.
For instance, it might be better to say something specific about how much humanitarian aid rich societies owe the developing world — so long as that admonition was applied to Europe as well as to Donald Trump’s America — than to just wax eloquent about how globalization creates inequality. A headline that read “Pope Calls on All Rich Countries to Devote X Percent of Their Budget to Foreign Aid” would inspire plenty of complaints and critiques, but it would also be more clarifying than general condemnations of the rich world’s failings.
Or again, in the European context especially, it might be helpful for the papacy to speak more specifically about hard choices, especially the choice between spending money on the old versus the young, than to just reiterate a general Catholic commitment to cradle-to-grave protections. Because this is where the dilemma lies right now. If the statesmen influenced by Leo XIII were trying to build things new, the lawmakers who might listen to Leo XIV are trying to balance longstanding commitments with emergent needs — and a church that doesn’t speak directly to that balancing act is less likely to be heard.
Obviously the danger here is that the Vatican starts issuing policy recommendations that are just implausible or terrible, undermining whatever minimal political influence it still retains. But the advantage of specificity is that it could force the church’s leaders to directly address the trade-offs that lay Catholics involved in politics are already reckoning with, instead of issuing exhortations that — as Jesus himself might put it — display the innocence of doves but little of the wisdom of the serpent.
This advice has personal as well as political applications. One of the strongest parts of “Dilexi Te” comes at the end, when the pope offers a defense and celebration of almsgiving, and it’s powerful in part because the reader understands clearly what the pontiff is asking him to do. But even here I think His Holiness could have gone further, and said something specific about how much Catholics should try to give away. Tell me to give in “whatever form,” as the exhortation does, and my mind will come up with excuses for giving less than I should. Tell me that Christians ought to tithe consistently, and I may not live up to the admonition, but at least I will feel a little more pressure to aim toward 10 percent.
Such an emphasis on the concrete, I think, will serve the church especially well as it tries to reckon productively with the age of artificial intelligence, a subject of Leo’s personal concern and perhaps of his next major publication.
There is no shortage of general fears and critiques of the A.I. future, and a Vatican that simply adds its own religious form of hand-wringing will offer little to the discussion. What people will need most in the new age, whether they’re students or parents or politicians or tech barons, is realistic and specific advice about what to seek and what to fear, what to accept and what to resist. And this pope will have more to offer the more he escapes from generality into practicality, and tells people not just how to think about the brave new world, but how to act and choose and live.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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