The pope leo xiv may help Vatican explore the ‘great uncertainty’ that is Trump’s America, wrote Reverend William Lego
Reverend William Lego is the pastor of the Saint Turibius Parish in Chicago and he said that the new pope and the new president will have an interesting relationship.
Like his predecessor, Leo, born Robert Francis Prevost, has advocated for helping the poor and migrants. He has stressed the importance of protecting the environment. He criticized the views of the Vice President on the church, and called for racial justice.
Leo’s election is “not a political statement” by the College of Cardinals, “but it contains a political message,” Massimo Faggioli, a papal expert and professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, told Morning Edition.
The pope criticized the beginning of the Trump administration’s promised mass deportations. The criterion of truth is imposed by the ideological criterion that distorts social life, and that is the reason why Francis wrote.
Throughout his time in politics, Trump has characterized the arrival of migrants at the U.S. border as an “invasion” – even as many have been displaced by economic uncertainty, violence and climate change. Since returning to the White House in January, Donald Trump has thrown the world order out of order, alienating long-time allies and seemingly cozying up to dictators like Putin and Orban.
Faggioli said the Trump effect, which made the impossible possible, was the election of a U.S. pope.
Source: Pope Leo XIV may help Vatican explore the ‘great uncertainty’ that is Trump’s America
Lego, Pope Leo XIV: A Journey Through the Vatican, and The Mysticism About Its Past, Present, and Future
Lego has known Leo since the two were in sixth grade. They attended high school and seminary together. He said thatLeo is a person who helps people. He was very willing to do things and always doing things well.
“If the spirit is open to the church, it will look at the best time to start the church and whoever the best candidate is to lead it.” Our role as Catholics in the world is once that expression of the spirit is public, Lego said.
He thought that the American pope could use his position for a benefit of all. There’s always two sides to a coin.”
The only way to assess an American pope is through his voting record, sports loyalties, and whether he has replied to a certain number of Popes on social media. (We are a very tribalist nation that only thinks about things through the lens of being American.) We are now collectively engaged in mining the metadata of Pope Leo XIV’s former life for clues as to the direction of his papacy just as much as we are trying to divine meaning from his choice of regnal name and the thirteen Leos that came before him. Frivolous or not, the digital history of a religious figure is now a thing that exists.
The moment the white smoke appeared above the Sistine Chapel, I immediately turned on my television, because I wanted to see who the new pope would be, and then hopped on social media, because I knew that the internet could tell me more about the new pope faster than television could. That, and the memes would be good.
I’m not a Catholic, and didn’t grow up one. The best description of my religious affiliation is probably “lapsed Buddhist.” But I’ve always been intrigued by the Catholic Church as an institution: its deep history, its vast theology, its artistic influence and societal dominance, the internal politics and external diplomacy of the modern Vatican. I joke that I treat Catholicism like a foreign land and that white men treat Japan like a foreign land, but my interest in the Vatican is sincere and I’m astonished that it has maintained its mysticism in the modern era.
Which is why I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that less than two hours into his papacy, I learned more about the pope through his digital footprint than I did through the information filtered through Vatican press releases or interviews with his friends and family.
I found out that he supports gun control legislation, Syrian refugees, and encourages Trump to support climate change legislation, among many other things, thanks to his retweets. I was able to learn that he wrote a book on religious statistics. I learned from a post that he was a Republican, but then learned that Illinois does not have partisan voter registration. (The Washington Free Beacon reports that Leo XIV has previously voted in Republican primaries.) I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone posted a screenshot of the pope’s Venmo transactions.
I did not have to dig for it. A friend of mine who’d attended an Augustinian high school sent it to me, because it was apparently going viral among people who’d attended Augustinian educational institutions, because everyone who ever went to an Augustinian school in the United States somehow knows someone who knows him. Robert Prevost XIV‘s account is currently set to private, but there is still a public photo of the future Pope, wearing glasses and a black windbreaker. That’s a meme right there, thought my horrible, earthly, secular mind.
What is your digital footprint? How religious figures are influenced by their online history and what their social media footprints can tell us about their faith and ministry
I would not have stopped to send that social media profile if it were from a politician, celebrity or coworker who needed vetting. It is argued that mining any public figure’s digital activity is fair game, if they are held to some degree of accountability. It is difficult for congressmen’s careers to tanks with vemkin requests. Old tweets can land someone in hot water in the present day. The phone number of a former Fox News anchor is linked to a public account on the internet.
When you try to apply this standard to a pope, you get the sense that it is completely inexplicable that you can even read the socials of the spiritual leader of the world. In fact, it’s baffling to think that a religious figure could be subjected to scrutiny of their internet history, or that they possess something as anodyne as a digital footprint — particularly someone inheriting a role that supposedly dates back to the time of Jesus and was established by Saint Peter the Apostle, whose predecessors are ancient saints and medieval rulers, and who claims the title of God’s representative on Earth, according to the 1.4 billion members of the church he leads.