D (14:23)
So Leo, whose name of course means lion, responded saying, brothers and sisters, this is our God, Jesus, King of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. And then Leo pivots into a full on liberation theology register which will characterize the rest of his Holy Week appearances. As we set our gaze upon him who was crucified for us, we can see a crucified humanity in his wounds. We see the hurts of so many women and men. Today, in his last cry to the Father, we hear the weeping of those who are crushed, who have no hope, who are sick and who are alone. Above all, we hear the painful groans of all those who are oppressed by violence and are victims of war. Christ, King of Peace, cries out again from his cross. God is love. Have mercy. Lay down your weapons. Remember that you are brothers and sisters. So that's Palm Sunday on Thursday. He's back on Twitter with this extraordinary tweet, which I'll spend some time on. The cross is part of the mission. The imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within. The violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. The poor imprisoned and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death. Yet in so doing, he brings a new creation to light. And I'm going to take some time with this because I think it's extraordinary. But I'll start by saying that every once in a while, something lights up the social channels in a way that shows what people are otherwise hiding. The number of respondents to and sharers of this tweet in particular, who revealed their post Catholic or collapsed Catholic or gutter Catholic selves lighting up was kind of amazing. These are people who never talk about their heritage because it's private, and they're suddenly overcome with the need to gesture, to point at and wonder. And my favorite among hundreds of responses was from Nora Laredo, who's an independent leftist journalist here in Canada who does a lot of great work covering the ndp, but also right wing extremism. She retweeted the Pope with a quote tweet, quote, be right back. I'm just pouring contempt on all my pride. And she's remembering a hymn that we all sang on Good Friday. Quote, When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count, but loss and pour contempt on all my pride. This is written by the English nonconformist and father of English hymnody, Isaac Watts, who published it in his Hymns and spiritual songs in 1707. But my favorite aspect is that Laredo's quote tweet is expressing humility, not toward the cross, but towards Leo's capacity to intervene on Twitter, which is a cesspool of pride. So as to the tweet itself, since Leo XIV is highly educated in and fond of liberation theology, I read it through a Marxist lens because to my ear, it's a powerful description of the development of liberatory consciousness through contradiction. So he starts by saying the cross is part of the mission, and it's an opening that sets the stage for a meditation on transformative conflict. So the cross of history can be seen as the symbol of a horizontal flow of events interrupted by vertical revolutions. And also in liberation theology, the cross is the instrument of state torture, which is ongoing and suffered by all bodies under capitalism, especially those in the global South. Also, I think the meaning of mission here is close to the German Sendung, or the idea that workers and the poor are sent to transform the unjust society. He goes on, the imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within. I mean, come on. I see two braided meanings here. So, first, capitalist imperialism always contains the seeds of its own destruction in the form of class conflict and the crises of inequality. Secondly, the microcosm of this is one's own conscience as one contemplates the ways in which one and everything one loves are exploited and one can no longer pretend it's okay. One's heart becomes disruptive. The violence that until now has been the law is unmasked in Christian terms. Leo is likely referring here to a very old covenant of patriarchal control that's undone by the innocence of the human child. But through Marx, we can think about how genocide and immoral war and extreme exploitation of the poor are not only permitted, but encouraged, incentivized, made to seem normal and inevitable. He goes on. The poor, imprisoned and rejected messiah descends into the darkness of death. And here I see that the worker must experience her labor as alien, her working conditions as hostile, her social relations as transactional. She has to feel the full weight of what capital does to human life, and then things will become clear. Lukacs said that the worker is both the product of capitalist relations and the only agent of its transformation. And so a descent into full alienation is the condition for seeing through it. There's no way out, but through as they said in Andor. And what kind of death are we talking about in liberation theology? This is the death of the naive self that thinks it is free, that thinks it is an autonomous individual who owns its labor and enters contracts voluntarily. The self who believes it's a frustrated millionaire, or who thinks that power will bless you if you are polite and follow the rules. In short, it's a self that believes its freedom is real, its suffering is deserved, and its liberation will come individually and once that false self dies. Here's Leo's last line. He brings a new creation to light. So that was Holy Thursday. At the Good Friday Liturgy of the Stations of the Cross, Leo got even more direct. There's video of him that went viral, carrying a model cross for the more than hour long service. And then there came the quotes from the liturgy itself. Now, for you non Catholics out there, there are 14 stations of the Cross that walk through the scriptural accounts of Jesus. Arrest by Roman soldiers, his kangaroo trial, and then the torture, crucifixion, death, and his disciples laying him to rest. The practice goes back to pilgrimage rituals in Jerusalem, where early Christians walked along what's called the Via Dolorosa, or the route Christ traveled to Calvary. As pilgrimage became impossible for most believers, the devotion was localized to, you know, each church. Franciscans were responsible for that because they took custody of the Holy land sites in 1342, and they became the primary promoters of the Stations of the Cross throughout Europe, erecting outdoor shrine sequences at monasteries and churches. Now, the number of stations has always varied. There's sometimes been seven, there's been as many as 30. But Pope Clement XII standardized 14 stations in 1731, and the devotion has since become central to Catholic piety, serving as a reenactment of the Passion that's accessible to ordinary folk. There are pictures or sculptures at each station, even for those who cannot read. And to this day, the 14 stations are in every church, often arranged so that the last one puts you right in front of the tabernacle. So Leo gets to the eighth station, which is called Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem, and they read that passage from Luke that describes him stopping to speak to the weeping women. And then there is this commentary written by Father Francesco Paton, who is not anyone who's terribly well known, not much on him, but he's written the commentaries for this particular liturgy, and this is what he says about the eighth station. From the beginning of your ministry, Jesus women have followed you and cared for you. They are there even now, standing at the foot of the cross. Women are present wherever there is suffering or need, in hospitals and nursing homes, in communities dedicated to care and providing shelter in foster homes for the most vulnerable children, opening schools and clinics in the most remote mission lands, and tending to the wounded and comforting survivors in war zones and areas of conflict. Women have taken you seriously, and even now they take to heart your demanding words. For centuries, they have wept for themselves and for their children. Children taken away and imprisoned during protests, deported by policies devoid of compassion, shipwrecked on desperate journeys of hope, killed in war zones and wiped out in death camp. Okay, that's the eighth station. At the tenth station, Jesus is stripped of his garments. And here's the commentary. This violation is repeated time and again even today, when authoritarian regimes force prisoners to remain half naked in bare cells or courtyards, when torturers tear away not only clothing, but also skin and flesh, when authorities permit forms of surveillance and intrusion that disregard human dignity, when rapists and abusers reduce their victims to mere objects, when the entertainment industry explodes nudity for the sake of profit, when the media exposes individuals to public opinion, and even when we ourselves, through our curiosity, fail to respect the modesty, intimacy, and privacy of others. So I have to say that as a cradle and now post Catholic, it's kind of extraordinary to watch these guys use these very old rituals to speak directly into the fire of the present. So Trump had to delete the AI Slop icon of himself, but that's not going to stem the tide. About 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and a large portion of them are Christian Zionists. Catholics were much more split in their vote, roughly 50, 50 or 60, 40 on partisan affiliation. And that voting bloc is teetering and adding fuel to the fire. We have far right Catholic converts like Candace Owens who are actively inflaming the Catholic evangelical split by framing opposition to Israel as a distinctly Catholic position while consistently lashing out with anti Semitism. JD Vance, for his part, is trying to quell tensions between Trump and the Pope, but he's also telling the Pope, hey, you should stick to church stuff. There are also reports of quiet quitting among evangelicals and Catholics alike. And what this looks like is, you know, pastors and priests avoiding political sermons, but at the same time helping folks disengage from maga, particularly over images of federal agents arresting immigrants near churches and schools. The Trump administration's decision to lift bans on ICE operations inside churches jolted a lot of those who supported him back in 2024. So here we are with at least three deepening first, the Vatican Trump feud over Iran and immigration, now personalized through an American pope secondly, a deeper evangelical Catholic theological split over Israel and Christian Zionism that Trumpism has just tried to paper over and third, a grassroots disillusionment among moderately religious voters horrified by immigration enforcement atrocities and really bad memes. So it's all very volatile at the moment, and my personal hope is that the progressive churches throughout the US of whatever denomination, are strategizing hard currently to think about how they're going to provide spaces of welcome for the inevitable flood of refugees that will stream out of this impending Trump MAGA church implosion. As somebody who's done a lot of journalism on cults and people recovering from cultic dynamics, I know that there's going to be a lot of people who need a place to land. Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
