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- [00:00]
Matthew Remsky
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Julian Walker
Dax, Sorry, did you know about this? Seven day money back guarantee.
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Matthew Remsky
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Julian Walker
You say a week of terrain tests? Yeah, I can test the brake pad resistance at variable speeds.
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Matthew Remsky
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- [00:21]
Julian Walker
Make sure our stuff fits nicely.
- [00:23]
Kristen Bell
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- [00:24]
Julian Walker
Still need to buy the car. Getting ahead of ourselves here.
- [00:27]
Matthew Remsky
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- [00:31]
Kristen Bell
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- [01:10]
Matthew Remsky
Hello everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Matthew Remsky.
- [01:21]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
- [01:23]
Matthew Remsky
We are on Instagram and threads on SpiritualityPod as well as individually on BlueSky and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon or just the bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. We are independent media creators and we really appreciate your support. Episode 258 Pope Bob vs Trump World the day before. We're sitting down now to record this. Julian. We saw this clip of Pope Bob giving a brief audience to convert Tradcath JD Vance, possibly the most annoying convert in the world, with Usha standing beside him in a black mantilla. Jeanette Rubio's in a mantilla as well. Marco is very stiff. He's holding his breath. He always looks constipated. Vance has this cherubic manner that I think belies all of his bootlicking aggression. And he hands the pontiff an oversized envelope and he says that it's an invitation from Donald and Malenia to a White House dinner. Pope Bob smiles guardedly as he takes it and without looking at it, sets it on his desk, saying quietly, I'll read that at some point. And Vance sputters, of course, of course. And then they give him a Bears jersey signed by their kids, even though he's a baseball guy. And then they pose. I don't know if you saw the photo, but it's a Very awkward photo. There's like 8 inches between them all and they're standing quite stiff, I don't know, like on a wedding cake or something. The scene sums up the church state tension of whatever phase of global fascism we're now entering, I think, and marks a high point in our consideration of the religion of politics. Here come these shitheels jailing students, rendering immigrants and blueprinting the Trump Gaza resort. And they shuffle into the Vatican with hats in hand to meet a fellow American who is nothing like their boss. And they're asking for pats on the head. And we have this enigmatic response from Pope Bob that I think sums up where we all are as we read the incense swirls for whether he's going to keep steering the world's 1.4 billion Catholics against the tides of late stage capitalism somehow Francis style. And will he do it while seeking common ground with conservative movements around the world on the key points of anti wokeness? Okay, Julian, so a sometimes Catholic leftist and a progressive atheist walk into a podcast studio on day 13 after Bob Prevost transitioned robes and names to become Pope Leo xiv. I don't have a joke here, but where do you think we should start?
- [04:11]
Julian Walker
Well, I think we start with Pope Francis having died on April 21, 2025, just for posterity, which was Easter Monday. He was 88 years old. Amongst the many appropriate reactions of sadness and appreciation for him around the world, his death of course also kicked some of our usual suspects into gear. So delightful, yeah, delightful. MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who you would not let me leave out today. Matthew took to Twitter to say, right, today there were major shifts in global leaderships, apparently drawing a link between the death of Francis and Klaus Schwab having stepped down as leader of the World Economic Forum. And she went on to tweet that evil is being defeated by the hand of God right now. Greene had previously said that she herself left the Catholic Church. This was in a long interview because it was under the control of Satan and was no longer following the teachings of Christ and that Francis's calls for compassionate treatment of immigrants would destroy the American Constitution. I think she just, she got her wires crossed there. She was talking about her, her, her boss and the guy whose boots she likes to like all day long. But anyway, right, our favorite roid, raging, unfunny comedian, conspiracy grifter. We haven't heard from him in a while. J.P. sears. He wove similar threads together about Pope Francis and Klaus Schwab being evil proponents of transgenderism and Climate authoritarianism and COVID lockdowns in one of his trademark videos, along with vaccines cause autism nonsense. Somehow both more unpleasant to listen to and more powerful and influential. Former Trump senior adviser and Catholic Steve Bannon approached the conclave following Francis's death by what he described in the Guardian as organizing a show of force of traditionalists with confrontational wall to wall media coverage. And he also referred to the recently deceased pontiff as a fake Pope who was frequently called. Who he has frequently called a Marxist, a globalist and anti American. So that's sort of the mood on that side of the spectrum.
- [06:23]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. And one thing to add about Taylor Greene is in that category of every conspiracy theorist has a point because she specifically tags the reality of clerical abuse. Not in the interview that you mentioned, but in a tweet that it was in April of 2022 that I think a ton of cradle Catholics will resonate with.
- [06:43]
Julian Walker
Yeah, it's in that interview as well.
- [06:45]
Matthew Remsky
Oh, it is there too. Okay. All right.
- [06:47]
Julian Walker
It's the low hanging fruit, right?
- [06:48]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. Well, she does say, I stopped attending Catholic Mass when I became a mother because I realized I could not trust the church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.
- [07:00]
Julian Walker
Nothing to disagree with there.
- [07:02]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, she's not wrong about any of that. And her conflation of Schwab and Francis also points to distrust over money and political networking. And that's what we'll get to in a bit.
- [07:12]
Julian Walker
Yeah. Now, I mentioned J.B. sears, Margie, Taylor Greene because they're good enough stand ins for the generalized maga, conspiracism about the Vatican, and especially any shred of Catholic progressivism. But there were other conspiratorial tropes ready to be triggered by these events. Some social media posts claimed that Francis was already dead and a body double was being used to fool us in the days before Easter Monday. For what reason, I do not know.
- [07:39]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, they're always thin on that, right? Like, who cares?
- [07:42]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Others joked that J.D. vance was somehow responsible for the Pope's demise due to his having visited Francis literally the day before. Yeah, there's also this 900 year old book in the Vatican apparently called the Prophecy of the Popes, which claims to predict. Which is claimed by people to predict Judgment Day. It was supposedly written in the 12th century by an Irish saint named Malachi, but it's widely believed by scholars to actually be a forgery. It says that the world will end in 2027. So maybe this time they'll be right. The book was apparently buried supposedly at that time, so like 900 years ago in what used to be called the Vatican Secret archive, which is also a site of a lot of conspiracies, including about UFO secret UFO information. And then it was discovered, you know, some 40 years later. Some believe that in a cryptic passage in it, which is sort of worthy of Nostradamus in its. In its weirdness, the book predicts the identities of all the future popes, you know, via. Like, you can sort of interpret it if you squint just right, and who the final pope will be. But, you know, this is clearly not really going anywhere, but it does. This stuff does bubble up to the surface when we have an event like this.
- [08:59]
Matthew Remsky
Right. So there is a lot to say and even more to wonder about Bob Prevost of Chicago, who just became Pope Leo xiv. There's his Americanness, his roots in Global south ministry, his Florida man brother Lou, who is a fan of all things maga, but who has decided to tone it down for the time being.
- [09:24]
Julian Walker
Well, he's decided to tone it down, but he's doing, like, interviews.
- [09:27]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, all over the place. Yeah, he loves it. Also, there's Leo's choice of name against the backdrop of Catholic social teaching and its relationship to labor issues. We'll get to that. And also just how much smiling capital he's going to spend on facing down the more fascist elements of American tradcath Maga. Now, we are not a general religious news platform. Our beat is religious ideology and sociality and how they often intensify paranoia, conspiratorial thinking, authoritarianism, and also material cruelty. But also how religious and spiritual, you know, traditions and fads conceal these things. Right. So we look at how yoga and wellness and New Age culture have provided a spiritual rationale for liberalism, how most yoga people are just totally unaware of the fascist incursions into their history and. And its relationship to eugenics and spiritual racism. Also, people who think that Donald Trump is a lightworker, and they think that's some sort of, like, crazy wisdom thing. We've looked at white nationalism concealing its compatibility with fascism under visions of a future Christianized nation and world. And then, you know, as per last week's episode, we've also looked at, you know, techno utopianism as promoted by people like Andreessen, used to spiritually bypass questions of inequality or ecological crisis.
- [10:57]
Julian Walker
Yeah. While posturing in some kind of, like, sage style, you know, like in his manifesto, where it's all sort of Thus I have decreed, discovered.
- [11:08]
Matthew Remsky
Right, so I have heard. Yeah. So that's the vein as well, in which we've so far analyzed Catholic influence. And we focused on a number of major and connected historical arcs dating back to the 1970s that I thought it would be good to review. So we'll link to of our previous episodes on these topics. But just briefly, we did a lot of work on the Satanic Panic, which was driven by this unlikely alliance between feminist leaning psychotherapists following the correct somatic intuition that child sexual abuse is both common and hidden, and the Catholic Church going through this reactionary backlash to Vatican ii in the mid-1960s. And the therapy aspect of it blended in this kind of narrative creativity through books like Courage to Heal. I think we did like two episodes on that.
- [11:59]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [12:00]
Matthew Remsky
Which was a root influence on the modern trauma therapy movement and also unfortunately at the heart of the recovered memory controversy. But Satanic Panic, Catholics were rebelling against the impacts of the Vatican II council which brought this liberalizing agenda to the liturgy. It, you know, championed ecumenical cooperation. It, you know, moved towards purging anti Semitism from church culture. And there were debates all over the place about the place of Marxist influenced and anti colonial liberation theology from the global South. And also there were a lot of reconsiderations of the role of women in the church. Now this alliance was perfectly embodied by the therapeutic turned celebrity quasi religious relationship between Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith through their book, Michelle remembers.
- [12:55]
Julian Walker
Hold on. Therapeutic turned celebrity turned married?
- [13:00]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, right. I guess they were married before they became celebrities.
- [13:03]
Julian Walker
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's true. Yeah. We did so much work looking at this Matthew, because Satanic Panic and Michelle remembers not only echo things like the blood libel that goes back to the middle ages in 12th century Europe, you know, when Jews were accused of kidnapping and ritual torture and murder and drinking the blood of Christian babies and children. But it also prefigures moving forward now the QAnon and adrenochrome madness that spiked, especially in the US in 2020. Yeah, something secret and diabolical is corrupting and brutalizing our children. Of course, it can't be our own government, school system and dysfunctional families or the Catholic priests to whom we've entrusted them.
- [13:42]
Matthew Remsky
No, it can't be any of those things. We have to find something else. It's like it's contin acts of displacement and.
- [13:49]
Julian Walker
Yeah, Communist vampires.
- [13:51]
Matthew Remsky
Right. So we also looked at the anti abortion movement and how it has its intellectual but not quite its activist roots in Catholicism because U.S. protestants and evangelicals didn't take it up as an issue prior to the enactment of a lot of the civil rights statutes that took away Stacks tax status privileges for their non integrated Bible colleges in the 1970s. And at that point, US evangelicals had to find a political cause that would reestablish their power but not appear to be racist. They needed this other issue and saving fetuses was an obvious choice. And they turned to the Catholics for the moral and theological arguments that they needed about, you know, when does life start and the status of the woman's body. The Protestants really weren't interested in any of that. They didn't have that sort of hammered out. And this forged an alliance where previously enmity towards Catholics was so severe that it was like a big obstacle to the presidential bid of jfk.
- [14:53]
Julian Walker
My enemy's enemy is my friend. I got really fascinated with Opus dei, which is this deliberately secretive and Machiavellian association founded in Spain from within the Catholic Church in 1928 by this priest named Jose Maria Escriva, who claimed, as many people do, to have been guided by a vision from God. It has had an absolutely shameful alliance with the fascist government under Francisco Franco, who ruled for 36 years. And Opus Dei, excuse me, amassed extraordinary wealth and power via its strategy of recruiting very rich and influential members through this sort of multi tiered organization where some are priests and some are laypeople and some live together in these dormitories under very sort of austere conditions. And others are out in the world making money and donating tons to Opus Dei. They're estimated to be worth $3 billion. And they've had uneasy but largely conciliatory relationship with the Vatican. Yeah, their founder, Escriva, who I mentioned, was even canonized as a saint by John Paul ii. Politically the group has very reactionary, conservative, puritanical policies and practices, according to the reporting of Gareth Gore, who's this journalist who wrote in some ways the definitive expose book, which is controversial about them, but they've been accused by him of enacting cult like demands and controls over members. They have been charged legally with human trafficking and labor practices that verge on slavery. In terms of our current American political landscape, though, what's interesting is that several prominent figures are actually involved or alleged to secretly be involved with Opus DEI through actually some pretty reasonable educated guesswork. These include former Heritage foundation President and Project 2025 architect, wouldn't you know it? Kevin Roberts, former AG Bill Barr, Supreme Court alumni, Scalia and Thomas Annalito, and the man who is himself behind the conservative Catholic takeover of the Supreme Court, Leonard Leo. This is all consistent with Garrus Gore's book about the group, characterizing them as seeking totalizing worldly power for their particular religious ideology. The group has publicly refuted Gore's bombshell reporting, but he stands his ground on it. Now, Pope Benedict was very supportive of Opus dei, but then, perhaps surprisingly, so too, was Francis. He even said about Jose Maria Escriva, the founder, that he was a precursor to Vatican II due to how his organization called non priests into a life of sanctity. And Francis would go on to canonize Escriva's successor, a man named Alvaro del Portillo. But there are some complexities here because he's also made some changes to canon law in 2023 that seemed to be designed to limit Opus Dei's power.
- [17:46]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [17:47]
Julian Walker
And so now Pope Leo, following on from some of Francis recommendations, seems set to go a step further.
- [17:55]
Matthew Remsky
Well, they're more than recommendations. They were, they were ordered changes to canon law that actually would take away Opus Dei's power to canon or to, to, to name its own bishops. It was going to put all of the administrative and financial sort of oversight over Opus DEI and shunt that all to the Vatican, which is significant. And, you know, we're going to talk about the money in a moment, but, you know, just reviewing that this is an organization that's estimated to be worth $3 billion. That's 1/5 of the estimated asset holdings of the Vatican itself. If the Vatican is estimated to be worth 10 to 15 billion dollars. There's a thing about, like, priceless artifacts that we'll get into in a moment. But like, you can see what kind of line these people have to walk with not only this very sort of conservative and reactionary organization, but this very wealthy and politically connected organization that could very easily become a parallel church. Right. So last in our list of Catholic threads is a more sort of, I guess, frayed thread, which is that every other manfluencer out there is getting baptized these days and talking about the Latin mass and mobilizing theological arguments against birth control and why women should stay at home. There is an intense level of manosphere fetishizing of tradcath ideology being used to justify misogynistic backlash against feminism and to construct these romantic and fascist visions of authority. And when these guys really get agitated, they rehash the satanic panic themes with their own versions of Qanon and they elevate their own Maga style pope figures like Bishop Strickland to oppose the woke corruption of the Francis Church. Now we have the arrival of Pope Bob and the world I think is going to get exposed to a slightly different side of Catholic modernity that Francis started to pull the veil back on. Now, his choice of the name Leo XIV has implications that, you know, we'll get into in a bit. But overall his arrival, I would say is a break from the fairly cursed lineage that we've so far been chewing on on this podcast. He does not come out of the satanic panic. He is not strongly linked with anti abortionism and activism that way. He is anti abortion, but this is a standard position. This is not his, this is not the thing that he rides or dies on. He has nothing to do that we've seen so far with Opus dei. He's formed by monastic community and experience and then on the ground ministry in the global south with some political activism under his belt as well. So I think he's giving people exposure to a different church on one hand, like a futuristic and aspirational non European movement that's marked by its receptivity to post Vatican II radicalism, as radical as it can be. But on the other hand, he's also, through his name choice, he's referring back to a church of the late 19th century that realized that massive political and economic changes were reshaping what it meant to be human through the Industrial Revolution. And so, you know, at that point, Leo XIII has this choice about becoming either more politicized through his church leadership or more cloistered. In response to this set of conditions and the 13th, Leo headed up a politicized Catholic response to unbridled colonial capitalism on one side, and also positioned himself as resisting communist materialism and atheism on the other. And through that sort of third way passage, he is seen to have inspired a lineage of left leaning socialist, sometimes even Marxist Catholics, from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers Party to Daniel Berrigan and the anti Vietnam War movement. You know, these figures who had pretty outsized impacts here in the us.
- [22:16]
Julian Walker
So you're suggesting that his, his choice of name telegraphs at least some of this in terms of his, his affinity.
- [22:22]
Matthew Remsky
For this figure 100%. Like Leo XIII is said to be the father of Catholic social teaching, which is part of its modernization move at the, at the end of the 19th century.
- [22:36]
Julian Walker
I just want to say I was so pleased actually that you sent me the clip of Vance and Usha visiting Pope Leo, because his body language, his facial expression, his whole kind of. You described it as being inscrutable Right. His, his whole sort of, like, his lack of putting on any pretense of, you know, social graces or, or being in any way kind of awed by, like, oh, the President of the United States wants me to come visit. Yes, I'll, I'll, I'll get, I'll get to that later. I'll have a look at that when I get a chance. I, I just, I really like that.
- [23:12]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. So we'll talk about some temperament stuff in a bit, but I want to dig first into Taylor Greene's conflation of Klaus Schwab and Pope Francis, because this focus that she has on the globalization of wokeness carries with it this old suspicion of Vatican wealth and political intrigue. And she's not wrong about how fascinating that stuff is because Vatican finances and political networking have always been, you know, throughout history, very opaque.
- [23:45]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, regarding the first thing you said, it's actually the irony here is that it's the banalities of anti. Wokeness that have been globalized, with authoritarian leaders like Hungary's Viktor Orban picking up on talking points from Maga, which is like, hard to see how you translate these things cross culturally.
- [24:02]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [24:02]
Julian Walker
But to your second point, I mean, you know, as a non Catholic, I can't really look at any footage from the Vatican without having a visceral reaction to what looks to me like monarchical opulence and excess, which is. It's about the spectacle in a way that, that confers a level of spiritual and worldly authority that I, I'm just very suspicious of.
- [24:27]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, you know, I, I hear that. And, and I think that whether they are aware of it or not, every Catholic has to grapple with the paradox of the outrageous spectacle. Like, is it grand, is it inspiring, is it hollow and hypocritical, is it laughing in your face? Because the administrators that, you know, have actually been abusive, but they're actually very comfortable. You might be very poor. Like, you're making this obvious observation about what everybody saw streaming over the past couple of weeks. Did you notice how there wouldn't have been like a single mainstream TV presenter who would say anything like that out loud, though?
- [25:10]
Julian Walker
Sure, yeah.
- [25:11]
Matthew Remsky
I mean, it's quite. It would feel quite rude. Right. There's so. There's even a kind of secular sort of, I don't know, deference towards, towards all of that stuff.
- [25:20]
Julian Walker
It's funny actually, because I, because I grew up in the colonies in South Africa and I'm from Zimbabwe. I remember, you know, things like when, when Charles And Diana got married. And you know, just how everyone is in front of the TV watching this. And there's just a lot of different ways that we were, we were still kind of, we still had a sort of reflexive loyalty to the empire, even though, you know, we'd fought to get rid of them or something.
- [25:47]
Matthew Remsky
Right.
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Julian Walker
And, and then I, when I come to the US to find that outlets like CNN also have that same weird differential deferential attitude towards the British family getting married or babies being born. Like it's, like it's news, like it's like. And like it's somehow. I don't know. For me, the mystique is sort of always implied that these are very special people. And I just don't, I just don't think they are.
- [26:15]
Matthew Remsky
One interesting thing that I want to mention on this point is that for the last 50 years, I think the Church has actually tried to face up to this criticism, this, this paradox partly through the aesthetic liberalization of Vatican ii, which is a huge rejection of opulence, a rejection of top down authority where clergy are suddenly wearing jeans under their robes and they decorate their altars with macrame. And a lot of the trad cath anxiety we'll be talking about is directly related to the morality of performative power and who actually holds it. These people want gold leaf on fucking everything. They don't like that Pope Francis came out on the balcony after his election in the white cassock without the, without the red velvet. They don't like that he wore scuffed, you know, black loafers, which apparently Leo's wearing too. They don't like that he kept his plain silver or stainless steel pectoral cross. They don't like any of that. They want to preserve the aesthetics of dominance and glory and largesse. And that takes money. So we'll get to that. But I think that one key thing in this area that everyone should understand about both Francis and Leo is that they have to code switch aesthetically between Vatican glory and streetwear to span these kind of like historical demands. So back to the suspicions of people like Greene and others. I would say that ironically, the most relevant modern hinge point for being suspicious of the Vatican would have been to Marjorie Taylor Greene's liking and also to the liking of Vance and Leonard, Leo and so on, especially through their connection to Opus Dei, because this is really, you know, the 1929 Church State collapse that is represented by the Lateran Treaty in which Mussolini and Pius XI sign this accord that establishes the Vatican as a sovereign City, state. And this resolves the Rome question, which was left hanging by the annexation of all kinds of people, papal territories, back in 1870 by the kingdom of Italy. That resulted in the Papacy not recognizing the legitimacy of the Italian state for six decades. So at the point at which Mussolini is making his deal with the Pope, the Vatican is not recognizing his authority as being the leader in Italy. So this treaty consolidates church and fascism relations. It also establishes the Catholic Church as the state religion of Italy. But included in the deal was compensation to the Vatican for those lost territories back in 1870. And that provided a foundation for its modern financial empire, along with all of the colonial stuff that we'll talk about. And it allowed Mussolini to position himself as the deal maker, the great reuniter of Italy. So he got the deal. He got the best deal. Best deal ever.
- [29:11]
Julian Walker
Well, we really need Greenland, Matthew. We have to have Greenland for our national security and the Suez Canal and taking advantage of us.
- [29:19]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, yeah. So as fascism grows in power, this pact expands on this old tradition of religion that's mobilized to both rationalize and mystify power. All things that Taylor Crean should love. Right. And also it ends up recruiting Catholics into pious Fascist violence. So we have Italian and Spanish bishops who are out there blessing Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War in Ireland. I was just reading about this because I'm fascinated with the International Brigades. There was this guy named Ian O'Duffy who rounded up 700 men, blue shirts, they called them, to sail to Spain on a German ship flying a swastika flag as they were weighing anchor at Galway. The bishops were out on the dock blessing them as they went. So anyway, maga is this theme. Religious aspirations of purity and authenticity and originality that are indifferent distinguishable from fascist fetishes of the Golden Age. And where we have this Venn diagram of spiritual and political leaders, that. That is often a circle. Okay, so to the extent that Marjorie Taylor Greene is pointing at financial opacity and mystery and because as you've brought up, we've just witnessed this absurd display of wealth during the Conclave and the installation pageantry, I think we should talk about the money and what we know and what we don't. Because I think it provides a roadmap for talking about the political and theological themes and stakes and challenges in this transition from Francis to Leo. It kind of like provides a foundation, I think. So today the Vatican reports almost 1 billion in annual income. 65% of it is self generated or from the capital holdings of 10 to 15 billion in assets. And if you're thinking that doesn't sound like much, you're actually right, because, you know, by comparison, there's, like, one hedge fund, this is the top one in the U.S. bridgewater is worth seven to eight times as much at $89 billion. Right. So the Vatican ranked 197th or last globally in terms of GDP, and the GDP per capita is ranked 44th globally. So that's way up in the. In the list because most. Most folks are white collar in several senses of the word. However, in all of the murky accounting of Vatican wealth, they exclude the priceless artifacts and heritage buildings, which are not deemed as capital assets because they cannot be sold. So St. Peter's Basilica, for instance, is on the books, valued at €1. Oh, wow. The consensus among art appraisers is that all of this stuff is impossible to assess for market value. So the Vatican is this paradox. It's a center of capitalist and colonial accumulation where the numbers actually disappear and nobody really owns anything.
- [32:18]
Julian Walker
Yeah. Which is wild. And just to be clear, when you start talking about those per capita rankings in terms of gdp, you're talking about a territory that has no manufacturing.
- [32:30]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [32:31]
Julian Walker
Nothing grows, no crops.
- [32:32]
Matthew Remsky
It's tourism. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So then the question becomes, how well are they monetizing those assets? And recently, we have to say the answer is not very well. Because as of 2020, the Vatican, as a modern corporate administrative institution, maintains a fully benefited workforce, Good for them. Of 2 to 3,000 people. That's over 1100 women, 700 workers at the Vatican museums alone. And the big problem they're facing is that the Vatican pension fund faces a significant unfunded liability estimated at over 600 million euros in 2022. There were some earlier internal reports that suggested that liability could be as high as 1 1/2 billion euros. So to sort all of this out and to get a clearer picture of how to achieve solvency and how income and assets are in constant flux in this world where faith is falling here and it's rising there. They're recruiting in this place, and the seminaries are empty over there. Francis made a bunch of moves starting in 2014, very early on to improve financial transparency during his tenure. So this was kind of his DOGE program.
- [33:42]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. But with. With better intentions.
- [33:44]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. Well, so he opened the books to external auditors, who found and Then closed down 3500 Vatican bank accounts linked to mafia money, illegal deals, and hidden corruption. This is, like, accumulated over decades, maybe centuries, and shit. It's like if you if you open up the books in Switzerland or something like that, what would you actually find? Well, he tried to do that.
- [34:05]
Julian Walker
3500.
- [34:07]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. It's a lot, right?
- [34:08]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [34:09]
Matthew Remsky
These are accounts belonging to Italy's ultra rich and political power brokers. And he also wanted to centralize the accounting because there's this baroque chaos of squirreling away money here and there and probably way outdated file systems, some of which are done in calligraphy or whatever. And that provided all kinds of opportunities for grift, as we see in the case of Cardinal Angelo Beccio, who was made a cardinal by Francis in 2018. But he was then convicted by the Vatican court for embezzling church funds for real estate investment schemes featuring, like, high end apartments in London worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Right.
- [34:47]
Julian Walker
So it's a familiar story, really, about power and money and corruption.
- [34:53]
Matthew Remsky
And I think it's a really good thing to start with because his attitude towards digging through the books actually, I think forces him. I mean, he's already doing this because he's from the global south and he's read Gutierrez and he's familiar with liberation theology. But I don't think you can account for the Vatican books without asking the bigger questions of, okay, where the fuck did all of this come from? And what is our relationship to our colonial past? She was a decorated veteran, a Marine.
- [35:28]
Dax Shepard
Who saved her comrades, a hero.
- [35:31]
Kristen Bell
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
- [35:43]
Sarah Kavanaugh
I remember sitting on her couch and.
- [35:45]
Matthew Remsky
Asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying? This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
- [36:06]
Kristen Bell
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying.
- [36:13]
Matthew Remsky
Listen to Deep Cover the Truth About.
- [36:15]
Dax Shepard
Sarah, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [36:21]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Nomi Frye. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
- [36:23]
Kristen Bell
I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week?
- [36:29]
Matthew Remsky
We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.
- [36:33]
Kristen Bell
That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, Maybe it's just kind of a.
- [36:39]
Matthew Remsky
Trend and we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.
- [36:45]
Kristen Bell
Join us on Critics At Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [36:51]
Dax Shepard
Hey, do you have trouble sleeping? Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy podcast. It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh. Stories that are great for adults and kids alike. For years now, Sleepy has helped millions of people catch some much needed Z's, start their next day off fresh and discover old books that they didn't know they loved. So whether you have a tough time snoozing or you just like a good bedtime story, fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy. Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy. Find Sleepy on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes each week. Sweet dreams.
- [37:50]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. So I think digging around in the dirt of Vatican money inevitably brings up all these questions about, you know, these things that can never be accounted for. Like the way in which the priceless assets of the Vatican are actually a ledger. Like they're a diary. Diary entries of colonial era appropriation. That doesn't mean that when we see those images of St. Peter's Square on. On livestream, we are simply looking at the spoils of colonialism. It's a little bit more hidden than that. Like the construction of the Vatican structures or the materials came from local marble quarries and, you know, concrete materials came. Came from local sources. But just as an example of how the old world sort of adorned itself in stolen glory, there's a ceiling in a church called the Basilica of St. John Lateran that's built with local stone, but then it's decorated with six tons of gold leaf. If you can imagine, like a pallet where you have six. Like, that's three cars worth or something like that. Right. And then pounded into like, just into paper thin. Like. That's an incredible amount of coverage. I haven't seen this thing. But where did the gold come from? It was donated by the king of Spain in the 16th century, and it was explicitly stolen from the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires.
- [39:09]
Julian Walker
Yeah, but Matthew, that gold was all being used to glorify false gods.
- [39:12]
Matthew Remsky
Sure. Yes. Right.
- [39:14]
Julian Walker
I mean, I joke, but the religious justification for European colonialism's brutal conquest and theft was front and center during this period. Right?
- [39:23]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. Well, because papal bulls in the 15th century established the doctrine of discovery. So we did an episode on this a couple of months ago when. When really on a bender about Greenland and the 51st state renaming the Gulf of America. Right. Yeah. And the doctrine of discovery, just a little refresher, granted colonial powers rights over newly discovered lands, often resulting in the expropriation of indigenous territories and the transfer of wealth to the church and its various agencies and institutions. And so the Church becomes this major landowner and economic force in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia during the colonial period, and in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the Church received these vast land holdings, tributes, and, you know, and a share of all of the wealth that was extracted from the colonized. And at times, the Church owned up to half the total wealth in some Latin American regions. And its influence and wealth only grew through its role as the spiritual legitimizer of colonial regimes, which often rewarded it with. With even more treats. Right. The very best deals. But back in 2023, Francis upended all of that, at least theoretically, at least nominally, with a repudiation of the doctrine of discovery. In a statement that was released eight months before, he traveled here to Canada in a very unique meeting where he gathered with indigenous leaders and apologized for the role that the Catholic Church played in colonial genocide. Now, how that's going to actually materialize into, you know, reparations is. Is another question. But he wrote at that time, never.
- [41:13]
Julian Walker
Again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected with the idea that one culture is superior to others or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others. The Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political doctrine of discovery.
- [41:36]
Matthew Remsky
You can kind of see and feel, Marjorie Taylor Greene, like melting like the wicked wish of the west, as that's being read over the.
- [41:43]
Julian Walker
I'm a proud Western chauvinist.
- [41:45]
Matthew Remsky
Right. So moves towards financial transparency, rejecting the doctrine of discovery. We haven't even gotten to social teachings on culture and war issues, but it's pretty clear that these points alone set Francis on a collision course with not only the American hegemony throughout the world, but and its excesses in the age of Trump. But also it plotted this. This conflict against the tradcasts, against Opus Dei and, you know, reactionary converts like J.D. vance. And, you know, that's sort of how we get to the present moment.
- [42:21]
Julian Walker
Yeah. How dare he deny the primacy of Judeo Christian values.
- [42:27]
Matthew Remsky
Right. Exactly. Right.
- [42:29]
Julian Walker
The greatest thing that God ever created, which is why America rules the world. So we've established that he had a reformist mentality with regard to corruption and the crimes of colonialism. But beyond that, was he really progressive Francis, or was he woke, as the Magas love to call him?
- [42:48]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I think it's a mixed story. I think it depends who's asking. You know, I've got a. This is. This is a personal anecdote about the kind of things that I've seen change just in my lifetime within Catholic culture, and that, you know, I would attribute a lot of those changes to the influence of Francis. I had not been to a Catholic mass in about 35 years, and then last spring, my kid had this event that they were going to downtown. It was on a Sunday, and I happened to drop them off, like, half an hour before a mass at the St. Michael's Cathedral, which is one of the places that I grew up in. And then I was going to have time to go to this thing, and I. And I just decided to go and this church, you know, 35 years ago, any given Sunday, the congregation would have been 85% white, something like that. And I showed up and the numbers were reversed. It was about 15% white. There were West Africans there. There were people from, like, the Philippines. There were people from Singapore and Taiwan, and people from all over the world. And then there were these two things that happened during the liturgy, which was, for the most part, unchanged from what I had remembered it. But the first thing was that during the offertory prayer, there's the gifts are brought up to the altar that are going to be blessed. And as the gifts are being offered, there's this tradition where somebody will sort of announce a certain number of intentions for people to pray for, right? Like, let's see if we can, you know, hold in our hearts this particular idea for the next week. And this woman got up to the lectern, and she said a number of things about, like, political prisoners and, you know, peace in the Middle east and an end to the war in Ukraine and stuff like that, and things that you would expect. And then she said, for those who are angry or for those who are enraged at the church because they have not been heard, because their grievances and their anguish over abuse has not been heard, may they find listening ears amongst our clergy from the fucking pulpit, right? And I was like, I had to do. I had to make sure I wasn't high, and I wasn't. Then the next thing that happened was the priest there is 32 years old. I found out later, he's pretty much Fresh out of seminary. And it's the beginning of Lent. And so the season is about like, we know that Jesus is on his way to death. And, and this is a time of sober reflection on all of our sort of existential vulnerabilities. And he gives this very competent sort of presentation of the message of Lent is that when you encounter difficulty in your life, try to see what wisdom you can glean from it. You might have the instinct to run away from the difficulties, from the dark times of life as quickly as you can, but there might be something there that you can take with you that will allow you to love other people better and so on. But then he says, so it's very competent, very sort of run of the mill. But then he says, you know, of course, if you're actually in danger in some way, if you're not safe in your own home, don't listen to anything that I'm saying this morning. You really have to make yourself safe first. I was like, holy, this guy is giving a trauma, informed sermon in the church I grew up in. What the hell has happened? And I think one of the things that happened.
- [46:44]
Julian Walker
He's also acknowledging that certain people are subject to worse levels of oppression and things to be afraid of, right?
- [46:52]
Matthew Remsky
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think one of the things that happened was that this is the imprint of Francis. And I can just tell you, as somebody who grew up having attended thousands of services in that building that had no hint of anything like that, to have that injected into the air there, along with the incense that you still remember is like, it's wild and, and so, and so it's like from the outside it, it might not seem like, especially with regard to social issues and you know, are we going to allow gay people to actually be full persons and marry and stuff like that, if those things don't change, that can seem very, very repressed from the outside. But like, if you are sort of encapsulated within this womb, which is sometimes a prison, and there are these glimmers of light, that is very significant. Right, okay. So Francis starts his papacy by giving The TradCast this four alarm fire. When he's answering a reporter's question about homosexual life and ethics, he answers with his own question. This is right in 2013, right at the beginning of his papacy, he says, who am I to judge? In response to this question about, you know, how are gay people to live? Right. Then he goes on to have these countless visits with queer folks, with trans sex workers, with non binary youth, and it's all under this mantra he has of. Of todos, or all are welcome in Spanish. He authorized communion for divorced Catholics. And that really sent the conservatives reeling because what other rewards do they get from staying in their shitty marriages? Right? Like, they should have, like, special access and exclusive access to communion. And then, you know, as. As we're. We're gonna talk about, there are still all of these recalcitrant limits, like reproductive rights. There isn't any, Any movement on, really. And then. And then gay marriage and, and the, the ordination of women. So.
- [48:57]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean, this stuff is always a bit weird for me, Matthew, as, As a, As a non Catholic, as a non religious person, because it goes to questions around how we think about Vatican power and the role of the Pope. Like, it's not, it's not really a government or a legal body. The Pope is not a king. He's not a. He's not a prime minister. In terms of official positions. It seems like there's this tightrope that he has to walk across a billion people, many of whom these days are concentrated in communities of the global south that are very socially conservative. And when I hear about Francis enjoying tea and biscotti with gay and trans people, but that he's also publicly called gender ideology the ugliest danger of our time.
- [49:40]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [49:41]
Julian Walker
And he's not in favor of gay marriage, and he's not advanced an agenda to make women priests or even support contraceptive rights, let alone abortion rights. All of that. Like, I. It just, it doesn't. It's hard for me to swallow.
- [49:53]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [49:54]
Julian Walker
It feels like he gets put in some kind of special category as this religious leader, where he can officially hold the same stance on a lot of the social issues as like the run of the mill Republican Party, but then be called a progressive or even be called woke because he's a nice guy with the mystique of some kind of holy status, which I just don't believe in.
- [50:14]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I sympathize with all of that. I agree with almost all of it. And I think that's where we're headed here is towards this uncanny question, which is how relevant can this institution be in this time? I think I want to say that for a lot of Catholics, the mystique that you're talking about is also, or maybe sometimes even not much more than an acknowledgement of political power. So if they cut him slack on not moving strongly enough on things like gay marriage, those Catholics will interpret that through a lens of political limitation and strategy and holding a coalition together.
- [50:50]
Julian Walker
I mean, I want to be careful not to agree with what might seem to me like a kind of downplaying of the mystique, because, you know, all of that pomp and ceremony, the robes, the throngs of people waiting, you know, to see his first appearance, all of the attention that has to do with his position as a religious figurehead, as the figure of God.
- [51:15]
Matthew Remsky
Right. And then maybe the core question that you and I are always talking about is like, okay, so is that mystique and investiture of the institution that has great cultural meaning for people that's built up over years, or do people also harbor a magical sort of notion that, you know, when he puts on the fisherman's ring that symbolizes his lineage to Peter, that somehow something magical has happened to his body? Does that happen? And, you know, if he touches you, are you going to have a special blessing and stuff like that? And. And, yeah, I would agree that it's really hard to parse those things apart.
- [51:56]
Julian Walker
I mean, all of those religious rituals and symbols, they have a whole lot of power in terms of, like, this is a very, very special, unique person who has some kind of perspective and wisdom and anointed understanding of God's will.
- [52:15]
Matthew Remsky
If I try to imagine myself at 16 or something like that, but, like, forward in the future, so that. So that I wasn't meeting Pope John Paul ii, who I wasn't really fond of, but I was meeting Pope Francis, let's say. Let's say I was in one of those groups of youth that was meeting him. It's hard for me to imagine shaking his hand and feeling that I was being touched by somebody holy, as opposed to being touched by somebody who had written this amazing essay about the environment called Laudati Si. And I mean, that's me. That's my rationalism. Yeah. But, you know, I suppose I always have these questions around, like, well, what percentage of this faith community has a kind of humanistic orientation towards these things? And what percentage has. Has a kind of, like, I don't know, hangover of magical thinking? Right.
- [53:17]
Julian Walker
I mean, it's. It's a fascinating question, and as you point out, it's an impossible one to really know the answer to. Like, it would require a great deal fieldwork, social research to find out. And even then, it's a moving target. However, I think within people who do take all of this seriously, there is some sense that his statements on these key social and political issues and environmental issues, you know, for example, have a level of weight that is important. It's significant. And for people who are devout Catholics, there's something sort of almost inviolable about what his opinions are, and which is one of the reasons why you then have all of this pushback from people who are like, this is no longer what Jesus intended. Right.
- [54:10]
Matthew Remsky
I do think that you hit the nail on the head with the weird status of the organization, because more and more, I think it's a persuasion project. The Catholic Church, their outreach and conversion strategy, it has to reflect the social needs of really diverse groups. Whatever the Vatican decides about gay marriage has to fly in County Derry and it has to fly in Kinshasa. And that's the scourge of. That's the challenge of being a universal church. Right?
- [54:38]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah.
- [54:39]
Matthew Remsky
And I just want to reflect that. Like, our title today is about Pope Leo, but we don't know much about Pope Leo except that he's taking up all of this stuff like it's been. He's been handed this folder, right?
- [54:50]
Julian Walker
That's right. And he is a successor to all of this in a way that many of the other potential candidates would not.
- [54:55]
Matthew Remsky
Would not have been. Exactly right. So Francis was relentless on the topic of environmental protection. He argued for more porous and welcoming borders between the global north and South. He championed the rights of immigrants. That led him into direct conflict with Vance in the month before he died, because Vance invoked St. Augustine's principle of Ordo Amoris to basically justify ICE raids. Because he argued this really sort of illiterate oxygen mask on you first position. You got to take care of yourself and your family first. The order of love is like, who do you love first? Like, who are you responsible for first? But he turned the, you know, you've got to put on your own face mask first principle into a divine instruction. And Francis basically said, you're full of shit. That's not Catholic teaching. And then Cardinal Prevost, like, tweeted the same rebuke. No, actually, the ordo amoris is that you're committed to God first, and then right after that, you're committed to all of human beings, and then right after that, that you're committed to animals, and then after that you're committed to materials. Right. So, yeah, it's pretty funny exchange there.
- [55:58]
Julian Walker
This is sort of in the vein of what we've been discussing, but from a slightly different angle, because I do have a question for you, Matthew. Like, when I see Democrats who you would call liberals, right, Praise people like Mitt Romney and John McCain or better yet, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, right. Republicans who on principle, have rejected Trump. They've been active in the January 6th committee that sought to hold him to account and thereby actually committed career suicide when. When they. They're praised by liberals. But then leftists like yourself point out that they're otherwise still terrible right wingers who we disagree with on everything else, which is true. I can't help but wonder why someone like Pope Francis is somehow any better because he breaks bread with trans people and speaks out about the cruelty to immigrants. But he's still rank and file conservative on gay marriage, abortion, hiv, pretension prevention, female clergy, et cetera.
- [56:55]
Matthew Remsky
Well, I think you're right on all of the points of social teaching, and especially the one about female clergy is essential and crucial because none of the problems that the church or anybody faces together are going to be resolved without women's leadership. Recently I became acquainted with this breakaway incipient convent in Portland, Oregon, that just consists of, like, three nuns. And they tell their story on their website about how they actually had to form their own religious order, or they're seeking to form their own religious order because there's a whole process behind that, because they didn't get support from their superiors when they had sexual harassment claims against a particular priest. And so they. They moved out of their residence. They are on their own. They're trying to figure out. They still have their vows of poverty, unfortunately. So, like you now, they have to figure out what they're going to continue to do as Catholic nuns. The upshot is that what they want to do is they want to get into a kind of ministry for victims of clerical sexual abuse. They want to train themselves in it, and they want to do that from a Catholic perspective. And people might have different, you know, ideas about whether that's helpful or not, but I can imagine there's a lot of people in the Catholic Church that would rather go to, you know, a Catholic sort of counselor with regard to trying to heal from that kind of thing than to somebody else, or at least there's a place for them. And I think that's a really good example of how by excluding women from leadership positions to the extent that this administration does, to just lose all of that. It's just insane to give up on all of that fire, all of that potential.
- [58:40]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I wanted to say this earlier, but it's crystallizing more and more for me as I have these questions for you. I'm getting this sense because it is not only a political organization and because of just the incredible numbers of people and numbers of different countries, we're talking about that are involved in the Catholic Church, that the Pope has these in a way at least two different roles, right? That one role is as the figurehead, as the administrator, as the person who has to put on a certain kind of face. And as you were just saying, it has to fly as well in Kinshasa as it does in Derry. It has around the world. It has to be palatable. There has to be some sense of accounting for the fact that there's an array of political attitudes. But then there's this other role which I hear you sort of gesturing towards, which is one of the example of how he behaves as a human being, who he interacts with, what kinds of messages he is telegraphing, for example, through gatherings with. With trans people under this idea of everybody is welcome. And you know, when you talk about these women and when we think about Pope Bob, who he was before, before he became Pope Leo, the on the ground kind of realities that you are describing from visiting your old cathedral, that to me it is, it is making sense. It's getting through some of my atheist kind of skepticism where I realize, realize, okay, there, there is the reality of existing within communities and meeting the needs of those communities and being sensitive to and educated on the political complexities and the demographic realities of those communities in such a way that you really are being of service and embodying whatever your understanding is of compassion and love and service in ways that. That I think I would do well not to dismiss.
- [60:44]
Matthew Remsky
Well, yeah, maybe. But back to your question of why does Francis get this sort of special status? Is he better than Republicans who sit on the J6 committee? I mean, I think he's better, I think that any Pope's job at this point, now that the Church is more or less decoupled from active colonization, it's going the other way that the job is going to be to foster an internationalist dialogue in a globalized world between global north and South. And if that dialogue is rooted in a critique of capitalism and in the existential gravitas around the environment, and now with Pope Bob, the threats of AI, I think that puts these guys in a different category from rhinos. But you know, we have to see how the record shakes out. So as we round up the Francis legacy, I think here's the sort of logic flow. There's, there's this financial investigation and this will towards transparency that means we have to face the origins of money complicity in capitalism and colonialism. Being from the global south puts him in direct contact with that paradigm the whole problem of extraction and appropriation and climate crisis merges with a discourse on decolonization. And then what does that mean in church administrative terms? Like, what does he try to do with that? Well, he comes up with this term. I don't think he coins it, but it' fairly recent. And the term is synodality, which is the idea that a global church has to decenter its authority and it has to listen to those on the political and economic margins. So how does that cash out in real life? Well, he had this emphasis on listening spaces, and that led to the inclusion of indigenous voices at synods and at church gatherings particularly. You know, there's a really notable one that was the synod on the Amazon. And it featured this moment where an indigenous woman offered Frances a Panchamama icon. This is a traditional goddess from the region. And he welcomed it into the Vatican gardens. And the trads lost their fucking minds. As if the entire church wasn't millennia of syncretism. And like, nobody had ever been to New Orleans or fucking Mexico during the day. The of the dead. So, you know, I've got this quote from Al Jazeera about how this shakes out in material terms or might possibly in the future. In March 2021, the Jesuits, which is a major Catholic order, it's also Francis's order, made a groundbreaking commitment to raise $100 million for the descendants of 272 enslaved people they once owned and to foster racial reconciliation projects. So there's some money now on the table in some of these circumstances. But in the absence of larger discussions or plans for reparations or the actual returning of museum artifacts or figuring out how to sell assets for compensation, it really remains to be seen whether this is all like kind of nonprofit listening and feeling talk that will provide cover for institutional inertia. Right. A lot of the people in abuse victim discourse feel this way about the distance between Francis's presentation of openness and the material impacts it might have. It's not moving fast enough. It never moves fast enough. And in that slowness, there is a distance that is between, you know, what's needed and what's on offer that creates this vacuum. And in that vacuum, I think we get cynicism and even conspiratorial thinking.
- [64:41]
Nomi Frye
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- [66:41]
Matthew Remsky
So one of the things that Leo inherits is that Francis drove the US conservative Catholic sector insane. Just a couple of examples. Well one one American example and one European example. Cardinal Burke is seen as the de facto leader of traditional prelates in the US and globally. He was railing against Francis for years on the issue of communion for divorced and remarried Catholics and on the issue of, you know, how welcoming people are supposed to be towards LGBTQ people. He insisted that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be denied communion. This is a guy who loves the Latin mass. And in 2014, Francis demoted him. This is quite early on in his fancy Vatican position. And then in 2023, he really lost patience with Burke and he stripped him of his stipend and his fancy Vatican apartment. This was also part of the budgetary clawbacks, because, of course, they're not going to meet their pension fund requirements. In an episode with David Lafferty, I covered a much more extreme cardinal, a guy named vigano, who in August 2018 published a QAnon Ting 7000 word open letter that accused Francis and senior church leaders of covering up sexual abuse allegations. Not incorrect in broad terms, although no direct allegations against Francis ever emerged. But Vigano also used that notoriety to launch into attacks on the Pope's inclusive vision, especially regarding LGBTQ rights. And by 2022, he was verging on sedevacantism or this idea that, well, nobody's really sitting in the throne of Peter. And he called Francis Bergoglio, which is his, you know, dead name, I guess. And in 2024, he accused Francis of schism while announcing or denouncing the Second Vatican Council as a cancer. So that was it for him. The church turfed him out that summer. He didn't even attend his own trial. And he's pretty much out to pastor now. Pastor now. But he's still a focus of the tradcath podcast industry, along with his supporters, like Bishop Strickland, who we talked about with Mike Lewis in episode 183. Strickland was removed by Francis for alleged mismanagement of his diocese. But a lot of his stans. This is the Opus DEI crowd, and a lot of tradcath manfluencers thought that it was because of Strickland's Twitter attacks on the Francis agenda and his enthusiasm for going on QAnon podcasts and making dumb speeches at CPAC. And it may have been that, right?
- [69:18]
Julian Walker
It's a wild, wild world.
- [69:20]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. So we have all of this anxiety that's rippling through the 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, all political persuasions, as they watch the chimney for white smoke, centered on the question of, will Pope Bob continue down this road? Will he hew to the center? Is he going to bounce? Right. And the jury's going to be out for a while. But I think there's one clear thing that we can say is that as an American, progressive, friendly Pope with decades of service in the global south during a period of revolutionary violence and state repression. Bob Prevost presents an alternative American face to the world in opposition to Trump. Not radical opposition, not directly anti capitalist, except for one statement about AI that it might have those implications, but a kind of moral opposition in the mode of peaceful keeper. I think we can wrap up with what we know about Bob so far. He's born in 55, he's raised in a very specific Catholic parochial time. And, you know, this is the world of my dad in Detroit where, you know, Midwest and, and other regional Catholic communities were geographically and like tribally located in parishes that made you identifiable in terms of attitude, you know, know the work that you did, your class, your temperament. So this was a completely immersive community church experience. It's something that I think evangelicals strove to replicate in the 1980s with mega churches. He's also in this very recognizable relationship with his brothers. One of them is kind of like a middle of the road, you know, Catholic guy still living in, still living in, outside of Chicago. And then there's Florida man Louis, who is on all of the interviews recently, especially because he had a bunch of MAGA influenced, well, really red pilled Facebook posts. Totally, yeah. Accusing Obama of longing for the total destruction of our way of life and turning this country into dictatorship and a racist one. On top of it. He posted something that was calling on the jailing of Democrats for the treason of meeting with Zelensky. He posted a meme saying, your child isn't trans, you're just a shitty parent. Like, you know, total bullshit. But I wonder, actually just in family terms, the optics of, you know, Thanksgiving, what's going to happen here? Like Lou has said, he'll tone it down. I wonder if there's an opportunity here for Bob and Lou to perform some kind of public reconciliation as a microcosm for American healing. I don't know. What do you think?
- [72:00]
Julian Walker
I'm totally here for it. Let's do it. It.
- [72:03]
Matthew Remsky
I'd love to see it. Anyway, very important to know that he had extreme popularity as a local priest and bishop in Peru. There's these stories about how when his birthday came around, they had to book a whole week off because there would be at least seven honorary birthday dinners in people's homes that he had to attend to. Everybody in town knew him. He came up very importantly in the Augustinian order. And he did his PhD in the role of the Augustinian prior or a monastic leader. And this is a mendicant order, you know, vows of poverty funded by donations and patrons and historical land grants. I think that's going to influence his managerial style. The big deal about him being from an order, and this is true of Francis as well, is that it's really different from the diocesan mold of, you know, the sort of solopreneur parish manager who works his way up through the church hierarchy as, you know, kind of like in a corporation or something like that. When you come from an order, it's not really like that. And I think that's going to be really influential. I think in a future bonus, I'm going to look at the fact that J.D. vance took Augustine as his confirmation name. So there's a weird overlap and sort of conflict here between, you know, Vance's interest in Augustinianism and of course, where Bob is coming from. And I think it shines a light on these very old warring interpretations of Augustine's main work, the City of God. You know, some people interpret the City of God as being about the earthly city at war with the divine city, that it's about the defense of traditional order. It's a criticism of human pride that the focus is on the Apocalypse. And progressives, to the extent that they've existed for the last hundred years in the Catholic Church, church have often read the City of God as some sort of model for the mundane city, being the perfect divine city already, that the focus is on inviting everyone into the divine city. The focus is on development rather than restoration of something that may have never existed. So we also have these continuities with Francis in the Global south connection. He refers to synodality in his first speech from the balcony. It looks like he might be pushing Opus DEI towards the reforms that Francis actually ordered. And informants also tell me that unlike Francis, Pope Bob will not be able to avoid so much the English language trolling harassment from the Maga Church. So there might be the possibility of a more direct confrontation. And I think that's part of what you and I might be feeling when we see Vance enter his office and have this kind of awkward meeting is that there's no language barrier there. They can just talk to each other like people from the same country. And who knows how honest that can get, right? How direct that can get. I think I'm going to finish with two things that are most important with regard to his relationship to Trumpism. As far as I can speculate forward, he had years of on the ground protest activism in Paris against the repressions of the Fujimori authoritarian backlash against the Shining Path communist insurgency, which was incredibly brutal and violent. He took this middle path route of pacifism. He would often offer masses and prayers for victims of both the insurgency and the US backed reactionary government that followed. So Pope Bad is not a stranger to either fascism or, you know, government repression or to the dangers of extremist resistance to government repression.
- [76:01]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [76:02]
Matthew Remsky
And just to re up from last week, I think this is the biggest waving flag of where his political attention is going to lie through his comments on name choice. You know, he tells the conclave guys the day after he's elected that he chose the name of Leo because Leo XIII, 130 years ago ago wrote about capital and labor on the cusp of the industrial revolution. And he says, in our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor. And I think that's kind of incredible to refer back to the first papal intervention in industrial capital as we careen into the AI verse. So, you know, you know, who knows what will come of this Midwest warmth and sort of normalcy and his commitment to the poor. But, you know, it does seem that this election is the Catholic Church's poke in the eye of Trumpism. And I think this take on AI additionally sets him on a collision course with Silicon Valley and the tech titans.
- [77:18]
Julian Walker
Absolutely. And the fact that you were just underlined lining that he knows what authoritarianism looks like, he's been on the receiving end of fascist, you know, misuse of power. And he's, and he's worked within communities where he's had to figure out how to navigate those complexities. I think that, that sets up actually a very interesting potential confrontation.
- [77:42]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. And I just, I think it's kind of an interesting turning point or chapter in this very, very grim period that has some positive possibilities to it. This is what I can say. I'm not dreading this papacy.