The American Pope

What should politically inclined Americans make of Pope Leo XIV?

By Emile Doak, executive director of the Chelsea Academy Foundation in Front Royal, Virginia, and contributing editor at The American Conservative

When Cardinal Dominique Mamberti appeared on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica last Thursday, there was a real possibility that the man he would announce as the new pope would represent a geographic first for the Catholic Church. Among the reported papabile—cardinals considered contenders for the papacy—were many prelates from outside the Roman Church’s traditional European base. Sure enough, Cardinal Memberti’s announcement of Robert Francis Prevost as Pope Leo XIV was an historic first—but not because the new pope hailed from the “margins” so favored by Pope Francis. The election of a Chicagoan to the chair of St. Peter is even more improbable. And it says as much about the changes in the country of the new Holy Father’s birth as it does the Church he now leads. 

Like many American towns, Clinton, Iowa, underwent significant demographic change in the late 19^th century. The town, with its strategic location just up the Mississippi River from important transit links in the Quad Cities, quickly became a center of the fledgling lumber industry. Clinton’s need for more labor was attractive to the significant influx of European immigrants arriving in the country, and many made their way from the East Coast to the American heartland. By 1880, voters of foreign birth or parentage outnumbered “old-stock” voters in Clinton. And unlike the town’s original population, these new arrivals did not embrace the Protestant Revolution.

Predictably, political changes followed. In 1887, incumbent mayor Arnold Walliker was defeated in his re-election bid. Walliker and his supporters, many of whom were prominent civic leaders in Clinton, placed the defeat at the hands of Catholic involvement in the organized labor movement. Determined to counter the new Catholic influence, they met soon after the election in the downtown law office of Henry Francis Bowers to found a new political society: the American Protective Association (APA). 

Over the next decade, the APA would become the kindred successor to the Know-Nothing movement that peaked earlier in the century. The society channeled the growing anti-Catholic sentiment of the time, wary of Roman control of American institutions and fiercely defensive of a strict separation of church and state. At its height in the 1890s, the APA was the largest organization seeking to rebuff the influence and integration of Catholics into American life.

It’s worth noting that questions over the relationship of the Catholic Church to the United States went both ways in the late 19^th century. Concerned over a perceived embrace of certain liberal precepts in the American Catholic Church, the Vatican issued a number of letters and encyclicals warning against a new heresy dubbed “Americanism.” While American bishops chalked these concerns up to a straw man, the Vatican’s unease reflects a certain level of tension between a pre-liberal Catholic faith and a liberal interpretation of America’s political system.

The APA was happy to respond in kind. The group’s 1894 Statement of Principles makes clear where the growing anti-Catholic movement in the United States stood on the matter. For example, its first and third principles read: 

First: Loyalty to true Americanism, which knows neither birthplace, race, creed, or party, is the first requisite for membership in the American Protective Association….

Third: While tolerant of all creeds, it holds that the subjection to and support of any ecclesiastical power, not created and controlled by American citizens, and which claims equal, if not greater, sovereignty than the government of the United States of America, is irreconcilable with American citizenship (emphasis added).

Much has changed in the past 131 years. The Roman Pontiff who warned against the Americanism heresy was Pope Leo XIII. As of last Thursday, the current successor of St. Peter is Pope Leo XIV—who was born in Chicago. (One wonders what the APA would make of the reconcilability of Catholicism and American citizenship now that Roman ecclesiastical power is controlled by an American citizen.)

Yet despite these changes—or perhaps because of them—the story of Clinton, Iowa, remains instructive for our present day. In one of this first public addresses, Pope Leo XIV confirmed that his choice of regnal name was meant to honor his immediate Leonine predecessor. In particular, Leo XIV cited Rerum novarum, Leo XIII’s encyclical on capital and labor, which included a robust defense of labor unions—the same institutions whose political power in a small town adjacent to the new pope’s home state prompted the creation of the APA all those years ago.

Indeed, Leo XIII’s critique of capitalist excess is often cited with favor by those hoping to map contemporary politics onto Roman debates. Promulgated amidst the immense disruption of the industrial revolution, Rerum novarum decried “the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making,” defended minimum wage laws and regulations on the length of the work day, and, as mentioned, argued that “the most important of all [protections] are workingmen’s unions.” In an older American political order, one that existed before the head of one of largest labor unions spoke at the Republican National Convention and Democrats voted to kill a minimum wage increase, it’s easy to see why partisans might try to claim Rerum novarum for the Democratic Party.

But a deeper analysis of the document shows the futility of these efforts to claim papal teaching for the contemporary left. The Catholic faith predates the French revolution by nearly two millennia. It does not fit into the modern left-right political paradigm that emerged from that radical upheaval. Its vision is far greater.

Thus, the heart of Rerum novarum is less political economy and more anthropology. It orders economic considerations downstream from the proper subject of that discipline. Determining the just allocation of limited resources among men must rest on a prior judgement of what mankind is for. It is only by first answering that anthropological question, which, from the Catholic lens of Rerum novarum, is also necessarily theological, that the normative judgments of political economy can be made. 

In this light, contra contemporary progressives, Rerum novarum is a deeply conservative document—in the dispositional, rather than political, sense.

It rightly identifies the incompatibility of the socialist project with Christian anthropology. Indeed, Leo XIII begins his encyclical with a strikingly strict rebuke of the socialist movement, before turning to his critique of capitalism—an order that is itself a telling sign of which system he may have deemed the greater threat. And this capitalist critique itself is far more particular than systemic. He sees an economic order run amok, one that too often places capital interests before human interests. Leo XIII is most interested in improving the condition of workers and establishing harmony among the different classes—not in reshuffling or abolishing class altogether. Again, we see a concern that the economic order of the late 19^th century is not enabling men to live lives of virtue—rather than an economic treatise.

So as one might expect from the same pope who was less than enthusiastic about a strict separation of church and state, Leo XIII’s main contention is that the Church must be the solution to the economic discontents of the era. “We approach the subject in confidence,” Leo XIII writes in his encyclical on capital and labor, “for no practical solution can be found apart from the intervention of religion and of the Church.”  

It’s here that the election of the former Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV transcends ecclesiastical concerns and gets to the heart of this magazine’s tagline. The stunning election of an American-born cardinal to the chair of St. Peter—even one reported to be the “least American of the Americans”—says as much about what matters in America as it does about the Church that the Chicagoan now leads.  

It’s not an accident that the genesis of one of this country’s most well-known anti-Catholic associations was sparked by the potent combination of organized labor and Catholicism. The social vision of the Church, espoused most famously (but certainly not exclusively) by Leo XIII, departs from that of a particular reading of Protestant theology. Rerum novarum’s “third way” between socialism and capitalist excess chafes against an economic narrative of growth for its own sake—one that dominated when this country was more self-consciously Protestant. Indeed, the modern conservative movement’s “fusionism” benefitted from the Protestant flavor of the traditionalist leg of the stool. While outsized Catholic representation in the more intellectual circles of the nascent conservative movement is undeniable, the Protestant theology of the Moral Majority and its “Values Voters” fit more neatly with the economic and military legs of the fusionist stool than did the Catholic social teaching of Leo XIII. 

In the past half century, the neoliberal consensus embraced by fusionist conservatives has fueled our current economic discontents, from deindustrialization to the unbridled progress of new technologies and more. Over the same time frame, we’ve seen the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches in the United States. 

It’s ironic, then—or providential?—that it’s a native son of this country who opened his papacy with the intention of addressing these most pressing socioeconomic issues of our day. In explaining his regnal name, Pope Leo XIV echoed his 19^th century predecessor. “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” 

This is still a very young papacy, and the new Holy Father’s past political statements raise more questions than answers. But Pope Leo XIV is right that a renewed, proper understanding of Catholic social teaching is badly needed. The treasure of the Church’s social teaching is capable of both transcending and transforming our inadequate contemporary political categories. It has the potential of accelerating the political realignment already underway. 

Given the history of religion, labor, and capital in this country, it is deeply striking to hear this papal perspective from an American son. But perhaps it shouldn’t be so. During his travels around the young United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville hypothesized that the country’s progeny “will tend more and more to be divided clearly between those who have completely abandoned Christianity and those who have returned to the Church of Rome.” Tocqueville’s assertion must have seemed fanciful in a century that would yet see the rise of groups like the APA. But now, with an American political climate moving beyond the false choice of socialism or unfettered capitalism that Leo XIII decried, and an American pope who signals an intent to move beyond “Americanism” in its many manifestations, Tocqueville may have been more accurate than it once seemed.