Pope Leo XIV on families and the family of nations

Yesterday, Pope Leo XIV delivered an address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican.   It was brief and very simple, but elegant and deep and shows the influence of his namesake Leo XIII and of his theological guide St. Augustine.  The world, Leo says, is a “family of peoples.”  And essential to the wellbeing of nations and the family of nations, he says, are peace, justice, and truth, where peace has justice and truth as its preconditions.  The talk is devoted to elaborating on these three themes.  What follows are some comments on Leo’s remarks.

Peace, Leo notes, is not merely a negative condition, namely the absence of conflict.  True peace between people has as a positive precondition a purity of heart that entails freedom from pride and vindictiveness, and a will to cooperate and understand rather than to conquer.  Here there is an echo of Augustine’s famous account of peace as “the tranquility of order,” where order involves a unity of purpose.  Peace in a community requires agreement on an end, and for Augustine it must be the right end.  What end is that?  For Augustine it is God, and significantly, Leo remarks that “peace is first and foremost a gift.  It is the first gift of Christ.”  (I have more to say about Augustine’s account of peace in a recent Postliberal Order article.)

Turning to justice, Leo indicates that this too requires well-ordered societies.  In this connection, he calls attention to Leo XIII’s famous social encyclical Rerum Novarum.  Importantly, while he mentions working conditions, poverty, and the like, his emphasis is on something else.  He says:

It is the responsibility of government leaders to work to build harmonious and peaceful civil societies.  This can be achieved above all by investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman, “a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society.”  In addition, no one is exempted from striving to ensure respect for the dignity of every person, especially the most frail and vulnerable, from the unborn to the elderly, from the sick to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants alike.

The phrase in quotation marks is from Rerum Novarum, and it is the one direct quote from that document.  Like Leo XIII and other popes who have set out Catholic social teaching, Leo emphasizes that the health of the family is the fundamental precondition of the health of society, and that seeing to the health of the family is one of the duties of governing officials. 

This basic truth of Catholic social teaching is radically at odds with long-prevailing attitudes on both the political left and the political right.  Both, in their different ways, wrongly insist on emphasizing economics rather than morality and culture when addressing social problems.  Both have essentially endorsed the sexual revolution and its transformation in attitudes about divorce, extramarital sex, homosexuality, and the like, albeit the right has done so in a more gradual, piecemeal, and in some cases reluctant manner.  And both have now essentially adopted the libertarian position that even if one laments the sexual revolution, government has no place in trying to roll it back.  From the point of view of Catholic social doctrine, true social justice cannot be achieved until we at long last abandon these errors.

On the topic of truth, Leo says:

Where words take on ambiguous and ambivalent connotations, and the virtual world, with its altered perception of reality, takes over unchecked, it is difficult to build authentic relationships, since the objective and real premises of communication are lacking.  For her part, the Church can never be exempted from speaking the truth about humanity and the world, resorting whenever necessary to blunt language that may initially create misunderstanding.

Though earlier in his address, he had also called for “carefully choosing our words.  For words too, not only weapons, can wound and even kill.”

Leo’s point here seems to be, first, that one obstacle to truth prevailing in human relationships today is the degree to which people’s perceptions are shaped by the “virtual world” – social media and the like, with the biases, groupthink, hot takes, and emotion-driven commentary that it fosters.  This virtual world is reminiscent of the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, which radically distort the understanding of those who dwell in it.

Another obstacle to truth, Leo indicates, is the way that language is so often used today as a weapon or a means of obfuscation, rather than a means of communicating for the sake of mutual understanding and describing objective reality.  Hence the tendency of politicians to use words to flummox opponents, rile up allies, and keep citizens perpetually off balance and divided; and of ideologues to introduce novel usages so as to lend false plausibility to rank sophistries (think of the violence done to language by gender theory, for example). 

Leo teaches that we must remain grounded in objective reality and insist on using language to convey that reality, even bluntly wherever necessary.  This, he goes on to say, is what charity requires, for genuine unity between people must be grounded in truth.  And ultimately, he also says, “truth is not the affirmation of abstract and disembodied principles, but an encounter with the person of Christ himself, alive in the midst of the community of believers.”

This emphasis on truth as ultimately Christocentric once again echoes Augustine.  It also once again echoes Leo XIII, who in Rerum Novarum not only emphasizes that getting the family right is a basic precondition of social justice, but also that, even more fundamentally, “no satisfactory solution will be found unless religion and the Church have been called upon to aid.”  As Leo XIII went on to say in that grand encyclical:

Without hesitation We affirm that if the Church is disregarded, human striving will be in vain… And since religion alone, as We said in the beginning, can remove the evil, root and branch, let all reflect upon this: First and foremost Christian morals must be reestablished, without which even the weapons of prudence, which are considered especially effective, will be of no avail, to secure well-being.

One last remark about Leo XIV’s address.  His phrase “family of peoples” is, I think, especially apt today as an implicit correction to two opposite extreme errors found on the opposite sides of the political spectrum.  On the left we find a globalism that tends to dissolve borders and treats national loyalties as if they are somehow inherently suspect.  On the right we find a jingoistic bellicosity that overcorrects for this globalism.  To see the world as a family of peoples is to see what is wrong with both of these extremes.  For distinct peoples have a right to preserve what defines them as a people, culturally, linguistically, and economically.  But a good member of a family of peoples does not bully or intimidate or lord it over other family members.