Alex Callinicos: Far right’s rise splits the Catholic Church

The election of Robert Prevost has split the Church (Photo: Wikimedia)

With perfect timing, the left wing US historian Greg Grandin has just published a book called America, América. It’s about the tortuous, often conflictual relationship between the US and Latin America.

By using the English and Spanish names of the continent, Grandin is seeking to subvert the US attempt to appropriate America for itself—in words and sometimes in reality.

So the BBC kept crassly referring to the new Pope, Robert Prevost, as “the first American pope”. He was of course the second, after his Argentinian predecessor Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who reigned as Francis.

Though born and raised in the great US city of Chicago, however, Prevost has ministered mainly in Latin America and is a citizen of Peru. This duality – Grandin calls him “the America, América Pope”—illustrates how the Catholic Church has survived the past 2,000 years.

Prevost has adopted the name Leo XIV. This is a tribute to the late-19th century Pope Leo XIII. He produced a famous papal document called Rerum Novarum, “Of the New Things”. This sought to adapt an institution deeply embedded in the feudal old regime to industrial capitalism. Leo denounced socialism and class struggle and defended private property at length.

But he condemned free market capitalism and gave qualified endorsement to trade unions. And he called on Catholics “to infuse a spirit of equity into the mutual relations of employers and employed”.

The late Pope Francis revived this balancing act. His predecessors—the conservatives John Paul II and Benedict XVI—had crushed the liberation theology movement. Especially in Latin America, this movement sought to align the Church with the revolutionary struggles of the poor.

Bergoglio had followed their lead in Argentina. But as Pope, he adopted a style that expressed some of the spirit of liberation theology, though not its practice. In particular, he championed migrants and the poor and expressed his solidarity with the people of Gaza.

The great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci repeatedly stressed the Church’s “rigidity”. Francis maintained traditional Catholicism’s patriarchal stance on women, the family and trans+ liberation. But he sought to defuse tensions by expressing a more compassionate tone.

Speaking to cardinals, Leo XIV explained he’d chosen this name in the spirit of Rerum Novarum.

He said, “The Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

But, as with Francis, this will probably be more style than substance. The Wall Street Journal newspaper reports that, even before the conclave to choose the Pope began, Prevost had the backing of a bloc of Latin American cardinals.

Apart from his roots in their continent, they liked his commitment to “synodality”. It’s the idea that important decisions shouldn’t be taken by the Pope as absolute monarch but together with bishops and laypeople.

There must also have been a political calculation in choosing a Pope from the US. The Catholic Church in the US is rich and powerful. It’s also deeply split. There is a strong far right wing that was deeply opposed to Francis and that vigorously supports Trump. Its leaders include MAGA orchestrator Steve Bannon and vice president JD Vance.

Prevost famously retweeted a criticism of Vance’s attempt to narrow the scope of Christian love to the family. Nevertheless, there are rumours that two Trump-friendly US cardinals, Timothy Dolan and Raymond Burke, also supported him. They hoped he would be more conciliatory than Francis to conservative Catholics.

Nevertheless, Leo XIV will probably follow in his predecessor’s path. The Catholic Church in the Global South needs to champion the poor if it is to resist the competition of fast-growing right wing evangelicals.

Catholicism is bisected by the global ideological polarisation created by the advance of the far right. The irony is that Francis and Leo XIV have been more robust against Trumpism than mainstream liberals.