I’ve been fascinated by reactions to the news of Pope Leo XIV’s election. News reactions, like Rorschach tests, tell us as much about the news watchers as they do the newsmakers.
Recently I wrote a post on Senator Mark Hatfield, the Oregon politician who defied political categories and lost a chance at being US President because of it. That post earned me a call from an old friend who invited me to speak to a group of Christian professors at a nearby state university. Would I come and use that post as a springboard to discuss faith and politics in our times with this diverse group of academics?
I was as curious to hear their questions and comments as I was to come up with my own. But, now Pope Leo XIV’s ascendency was bringing ample new material to the discussion table. While I won’t be reporting directly on our campus conversation, my thinking here reflects my thoughts in preparation.
How the world of politics affects faith concerns me as much as does the impact of faith on politics. As a person of faith, I understand that faith has much it needs to say concerning our civic discourse, but it risks much in doing so as well. Naïve are those who ignore the hazards.
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Chicagoans are all abuzz as is anyone who’s local world has somehow connected with the new pope’s journey through life. Pity especially his flesh-and-blood brothers who must now live more circumspectly in the fresh limelight. But the former Father Bob of St. Peter’s in Southside Chicago defies easy affinities, especially when it comes to politics.
A thoroughly prolife pontiff, he has enamored and angered pundits on the left and on the right. A citizen of the US, he’s also a dual and naturalized citizen of Peru. A fan of the woe-begotten White Sox, of all teams, he is more international than Chicago homeboy. He is comfortable on the steep trails of the Andes and the cobbled streets of Rome, as he was as a child playing in the schoolyards of his native Dolton, Illinois.
Even in name choice – the papal one, not his birth name – he speaks volumes. By assuming the name of the previous Leo, he evokes the Catholic Social Teachings of the late 19th century. Thus again, he stirs political controversy in the land of his birth. For such identification doesn’t fit comfortably into our politically polarized categories.
And yet, whatever pundits – left or right – want us to believe about the new pope, US politics is not the first priority on his list. He leads a globe-spanning church organization. He prays for peace in Ukraine and the Middle East, just as he prays for a host of other concerns around the world.
But his first allegiance is to serve the flock of the 1.4 billion faithful he leads. Well, maybe second allegiance, for his first by far is to submit to his Lord, Jesus Christ. And this is where his allegiances will collide with our more earthly power-based loyalties. So, they must. For partisan agendas make a poor god for anyone.
Even so, the partisans shamelessly call out to the new pope, “Join us.” Like King Balak of old, they implore the modern-day prophets to bless their earth-bound desires, not realizing pack animals have better sense.
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You’ve heard the story. How King Balak of Moab summoned the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites who were approaching his territory with questionable intent. But Balaam, no prophet of Israel’s God, is unable to do as King Balak requests, no matter how much money Balak offers Balaam. Even Balaam’s nonpartisan donkey refuses to help out. You can read how this hilarious story unfolds, much to Balaam’s dismay and King Balak’s despair, in Numbers 22-24.
What Balaam and Balak were learning is what Joshua, leader of the Israelites would learn, that God cannot be captured by our human appetites, political or otherwise.
When the Israelites are approaching Jericho and the Promised Land, Joshua encounters a man with a drawn sword. Joshua challenges him, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”
“Neither,” the man replies, “for I have come as the commander of the army of the Lord.” This is no mere man Joshua is challenging, but an angelic being, and this angelic being is on God’s side alone. God does not stoop to take human sides. (Joshua 5:13-15)
Joshua, far quicker than Balaam or Balak to size up the situation, doesn’t need a donkey’s help. And so, he quickly defers to this messenger of the nonpartisan God. A few battles later and we find Joshua passing on this lesson to the Israelites. In Joshua 24:15, he calls his people to choose between their own partisan, petty, and territorial concerns on the one hand, and absolute loyalty to the God of the universe on the other.
What fascinates me most in the present conversation about the new pope is how modern partisans want the pope, as messenger of God, to side with them. Even those who don’t believe the pope speaks for God are made happy – or saddened – by how they see the pope lining up – or not – with their partisan side. People on both sides of the political divide in the US want a pope who favors their agenda, especially now that the pope is homegrown.
It is a tension playing out all over the religious spectrum in our nation – as well as elsewhere. I’ve been reading extensively how partisanship has infiltrated communities of faith. In a sense, this is nothing new. I felt those conflicts as a child and heard them in the stories of my forebears. But today’s tensions threaten to capsize the world of faith as they do so much else in our civic and personal lives.
Those who long for power need our loyalty to attain it. While somewhat natural, what is dangerous is when we submit our faith-prioritized allegiances to the aims of the powerful or when faith itself becomes captive to such earthly grasps for power. When, for example, the church becomes yet another tool in achieving political dominance. Or worse yet, when the church’s mission itself becomes political dominance.
Such was the temptation Jesus faced. The devil took Jesus to a very high place and showed him all the kingdoms of the world. “You can have all this,” the devil said, “if you will just bow down and worship me.” (Luke 4:5-7)
Whatever the devil understood of Jesus and his mission, this much he grasped, that winning the world was what Jesus wanted, and the devil was showing him a shortcut. It was a miscalculation shared by many others, including some of Jesus’ own followers, the belief that Jesus could attain this goal through earthly means. Even Pilate mocked the idea by posting “King of the Jews” above Jesus’ head on the cross.
All power and dominion belong to God and God will bestow the same on Jesus, but not via the devil’s ways. Or ours.
Jesus doesn’t fall for the devil’s ploy. He knows where his allegiance lies. “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only,” he replies, quoting Deuteronomy 6:13, a verse every Jew in Jesus’ time could have quoted. (Luke 4:8)
And yet, unless the word “tempted” is pure sham here in this text, the devil’s offer to Jesus is real. Not real in whether the devil had it to offer Jesus, as much as in whether it was truly a temptation for Jesus. The temptation Jesus faced was to avoid the only path to victory that lay in serving and suffering and dying.
Jesus had come to redeem the world, meaning to restore it as God intended, namely to be run by God according to God’s design. In this the devil was not mistaken, well not fully. The devil got where Jesus was headed, but he was clueless about how that would happen and what that would mean. The concept “redeem” was certainly lost on him as was the mistaken notion that redemption could come through bowing down to the devil, of all beings.
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I think of the temptation when I see national and world powers jockeying for supremacy and trying to hijack the church in their pursuit. You want to change the world, don’t you? You want what God designed, don’t you? Well, then follow this shortcut and you’ll achieve your goal. All in the next four years.
For Christians, the temptation to ride the escalator to power is ever present. I’ve seen it all over the church map among mainline Protestants and Pentecostal-Charismatics, among Roman Catholics and evangelicals.
Just as I’ve seen the readiness to indict religious communities for being power-hungry, an anti-religious prejudice both sectarian and secular. We see in others the temptations we harbor.
When I was a child, too small to understand such things, the angst of the 1960 political season was whether the Pope would be the power behind President John F. Kennedy controlling the nation. A similar concern has been expressed regarding recent administrations and the influence of evangelicals and independent charismatics on President Donald J. Trump.
Such fear of presidential takeover by the Papacy during Kennedy’s administration had disappeared by the time the second Roman Catholic was elected president. Biden and Rome were too divided over fundamental issues of life. And anti-Catholics have seemed totally disinterested in the Catholicism of Vice President J.D. Vance.
But I am curious about the thinking behind closed Vatican doors during this recent Conclave. The consensus had been that there would never be an American (US) pope as long as the US was the world’s pre-eminent political and economic power. “A non-American head of the Catholic Church would offer some counterweight to US influence,” so wrote the Catholic Herald in 2022, echoing many other voices. (Why not an American pope?)
And now that we have a pope from the US, what does that say about our nation’s dominance? That the US is in decline as a world power? Or does the fact that the new pope is such an internationalist counter concerns that he might influence Washington or that political powers in the US might control him?
But again, these fears, expressed or implied, say as much about us and our own temptations. We are all tempted by power, are we not?
My wife loves children’s read-aloud books. Besides the many in our home, she empties out the local library all school year long, sharing stories with her pre-K class one heavy-laden bag at a time. A few of the classics have become favorites of mine as well. Especially Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss.
I hope I don’t spoil the story for you; it’s best read with pictures in view. But let me say, briefly, that Yertle was a turtle who claimed to be king of his tiny pond, yet aspired to reach higher than the moon. Until a lowly turtle at the bottom of the heap burped and Yertle ended his reign stuck headfirst in the mud.
Whatever our temptations, whether as national and religious leaders or as lowly “turtles” at the bottom of the heap, the writer of Proverbs was never more on the mark than when he wrote, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” (16:18)
I sense a humbleness in the new pope that I pray ages well. God knows our nation – and our world – sorely need the example.
Though I am not Roman Catholic, I pray God blesses Pope Leo XIV. And I pray the former Father Bob stays close to his roots in Chicago’s working class parishes and among his flock in the rarified Peruvian mountains. Along with the rest of us, may he stay true to his God-ordained allegiances. And may God lead us all not into the scourge of partisan and power temptations but deliver us from evil.
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Photos (clockwise from left): Balaam’s Ass by Rembrandt (1626), Pope Leo XIV, Yertle the Turtle book cover
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