The Progressive Pope Fallacy

The Catholic Church’s selection of an American not shy to criticise the US administration as their new Pope does not suddenly make the world’s largest tax-exempt corporation a bastion of progressivism. Pope Leo XIV is the 267th consecutive male pope in the 1,995 years of the papacy, at the head of an organisation that has yet to take responsibility or make more than token amends for its long history of war and oppression.

Pope Leo XIV — who took a name he was not born with from Pope Leo XIII and was immediately accepted with it — is against abortion, medically assisted suicide, and the “homosexual lifestyle.” Hear him in his own words:

His Catholic church refuses to allow women into the ranks of priests and their ascendant ranks into bishops, cardinals, or eventually a pope. The only vaguely progressive message coming out of the Vatican’s new leader is that you should love your immigrant neighbour, not throw them out of your country.

That accepting your neighbour’s existence is the bar the pope needs to meet to be considered a progressive is a testament to just how far to the right the United States has gone. It has created an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend perspective around the Catholic Church where progressives are embracing the arrival of a slightly-less right wing pope as one of their own.

The Catholic church often preaches the need to take care of poor and marginalised people, but has no problem driving them deeper into poverty by fighting birth control and marginalising the queer community, for example. The American Christian right generally are not Catholic, but share these fundamental values. Both espouse the need to follow gospel, but ignore the parts they don’t like or which haven’t been socially acceptable for generations such as, say, stoning the non-believer or, perhaps, cancelling debts in this year of the Jubilee.

The Church hides behind the idea of “God’s Law” to oppose birth control and homosexuality and anything else they consider unnatural. But it is the church itself which is unnatural. While homosexuality has been documented in over 1,500 animal species, homophobia is a uniquely human trait.

If we truly are God’s creation, then we must also accept that this God created both homosexuals and homophobes, both Christians and non-Christians, and created hatred between people and groups. Empirical evidence would suggest that God’s law is supremacy, hatred, conflict, and division.

From the Crusades nearly a thousand years ago through most of the time since, the Catholic church has been engaged in undermining and destroying civilisations and cultures throughout the world. While the Jesuit order recorded much of what they found in the Americas, in other parts of the world the colonial Catholic church often under what became called the doctrine of discovery simply destroyed what they found, forcing the people they “discovered” to either become Catholic, or perish. God’s will indeed.

My in-laws family in the Philippines are devoutly Catholic. The country itself is named for King Philip II of Spain, who expanded the Spanish empire to its global peak in the name of the Catholic church. My efforts to understand the pre-Catholic language and culture of the Philippines have been hampered by the very poor records left behind as the country was forcibly Christianised over centuries of Spanish-Catholic rule.

The discoveries made under the doctrine were not of vacant lands looking for settlers, but of cultures that were not aware of, and did not subscribe to, European Christianity. It was a doctrine of conquest, of colonisation, of expansion, of gathering and expanding wealth under the simple pretext of God’s will.

The Catholic church, worldwide, is estimated to directly own about 177 million acres of land, which translates to about 716,000 square kilometres. In relative terms, that is about the same area as Morocco and larger than any country in continental Europe. While the Vatican may be the smallest country on the planet, the land they own would put them closer to the 40th largest. The church has worldwide assets of at least $73 billion, though it is likely far higher. In other words, the Catholic Church is fundamentally a big business, fighting to keep their taxes low and their influence high, just like every other large corporation today.

It is hard then to imagine any scenario in which the leader of the Catholic Church, after centuries of waging war, driving people into poverty in the name of their god, and destroying whole civilisations, could be considered progressive for the simple act of saying we should love our neighbours. No amount of sugar-coating can ever make the Pope, the leader of the Catholic church, in its current form even vaguely progressive. To say that the current one is even trying to be progressive or a reformer is as big a stretch as the doctrine of discovery.

While we can love this neighbour as they are, the church has much to atone for and much to reconsider before the idea of a ‘progressive pope’ can be seen as anything but a patently absurd fallacy.