Viva Papa Leo!

Well, strike me pink! An American! The Holy Spirit, ever full of surprises, does the only thing I was certain he would not do. Shows you what I know.

On the other hand, he did fulfill my expectation that the main response I would have to the new Pope would be, “Who?”

It began with the glad image of white smoke.

Followed an hourish later with the announcement that something something Latin was taking the name of “Leo XIV”.

“Who?” I thought.

Then the reporter on the live AP feed dropped the bombshell: Robert Francis Prevost, history’s first American Pope.

When I picked my jaw up off the floor, my next thought was, “Who?”

So, like everybody else I went on-line to find out about the guy.

Of course, you have to wade past the dangerous Fire Swamps of Dumb with their deadly RUS’s (Researchers of Unusual Stupidity) asking questions like

But very soon useful information started to pop up:

That was promising. Like Francis…

…Leo was shepherd enough to let this grotesque toady to nihilist power and racism know that his attempt to torture Catholic teaching into a 007 for white supremacy richly deserved the personalized MIT BRENNENDER SORGE Francis had addressed to him.

And that just got better and better the deeper I delved:

And that’s just the beginning of the good news! Cardinal Prevost had an on-line presence that he used sparingly (unlike some other bishops I could think of who really need to get off social media and go do bishop stuff). But when he did use it, he did so for good and not for evil:

Also, very good is the regnal name he chose: Leo XIV (though I mourn the loss of the chance to have a “Papa John Pizzaballa”). Leo XIII essentially invented the organization of Catholic Social Teaching into a body of doctrine with the publication of Rerum Novarum. He is also the theological and spiritual father of the Labor Movement and got the Church off on the right foot in pastoring it. If you love Karl Malden’s tough, earthy priest in ON THE WATERFRONT, thank Pope Leo XIII.

More than this, Leo XIII condemned the heresy of Americanism (which is to say, the Christian Nationalism that is the beating heart of the entire MAGA movement). This is not due to a special hostility of the Church to America, but rather due to the hostility of the gospel to the periodic tendency of nation-states to try to divinize themselves when they are either feeling their oats or become dreadfully fevered with some nutty conviction that they are God’s Holy Nation. An American Pope is especially well-positioned to say that to our deeply spiritually diseased country in this moment of Trumpian tyranny and Christian Nationalist Satan worship.

Better still, Leo was created a cardinal by none other than Pope Francis, with whom he appears to have had a close sense of brotherhood. Indeed, yet another promising harbinger of things to come is that Brother Leo was St. Francis’ closest and most devoted friend and supporter. All the signs I have seen so far–from their kindred love of Latin America (he has both US and Peruvian citizenship), his concern for the least of these and his vocal hostility to the same Trumpian cruelties Francis opposed)–suggest abundant cause for hope!

Also hopeful is that God chose to elevate to the papacy a man whom the Tyrant of the United States and his sycophantic MAGA Catholic toady of a Veep went out of their way to slander–with all his Haitian and Creole ancestors–as a Dog Eater. God just loves reminding the powerful that what they do to the Least of These they do to him.

Oh, and Peru is the origin of “Pachamama”, a Marian image venerated as Our Lady of the Amazon which the racist reactionary MAGA Catholic Freak Show tried to weaponize into a pogrom against Amazonian Catholics a few years ago for the grave sin of being brown and having an non-European aesthetic. Some of these bigots, like superstitious medievals blaming Jews for the Black Death, even tried to pin the COVID epidemic on Amazonian Catholics when it was they themselves who moronically helped kill millions with their pig-headed refusal to observe elementary health precautions:

He has cast down the mighty in their arrogance and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, but the rich he has sent away empty. – Our Lady of the Amazon

Indeed, Leo also appears to be blessed with the right enemies just as Francis was:

And my personal favorite:

Indeed, Loomer was so exercised (but, alas, not exorcised) that she felt the need to unburden herself of her intense MAGA hatred for the new pope twice:

It all made me think of the old hymn:

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear
and hear their death knells ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?

Speaking of Tyrants, he tweeted:

I too tingle with anticipation for when you meet, sir, though probably not for the reasons you think. The last time a Pope Leo met a man like you, it was Attila the Hun.

I, for one, would love to have a bucket of popcorn while Attila the Shunned gets an earful from this guy:

In April, [Leo] reposted Catholic writer Rocco Palmo, who wrote, “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to [aid] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident, once an undoc-ed Salvadorean himself, now-[Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington, D.C.] asks, “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”

Pope Leo was also critical of Trump’s family separation policy. In 2018, he retweeted a scathing post from Cardinal Cupich: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”

The new pope also has multiple reposts showing sympathy and support for George Floyd, the Black man whose police murder was a catalyst for racial justice movements in 2020. He reposted words in opposition to Trump’s refugee ban and Muslim ban, as well as articles on “rivers of blood” flowing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russian attack on a Catholic missionary headquarters in Mariupol.

The pope is expected to strike a Francis-like chord on issues of immigration and poverty, two things the current administration is directly opposed to.

All this has been a shattering disappointment to MAGA Catholic American moneybags who went to Rome in the vain attempt to sway the election with the best spirituality money can buy. The Holy Spirit, as Simon Magus discovered (cf. Acts 8:9–24), is an honorary Canadian: He too is not for sale.

So for all the attempted bribery, glad-handing, and pressure, the MAGA Cult got worse than nothing for their crude efforts. They got this autopsy on their scheme delivered by this coroner of all people:

It’s not surprising that Fr. Martin gets Pope Leo since they see eye-to-eye on so much while the MAGA Cult is unfailingly so wrong about so much so many times for so long that only a fool would trust their judgment about anything in the world:

That’s because the Cult, having chosen to be People of the Lie, have been systematically cocooning themselves from reality. Here they are, talking to the egregious Frank Pavone and wanly hoping that Leo will say with him, “We have no king but Trump”. They remind me of nothing so much as the Polish Commie apparatchiks, breathing into paper bags and trying to reassure Moscow that the election of John Paul II will be just fine and everythingwillbejustfineandit’salljustfine while the Soviet regime was whipsawing between setting their hair on fire and going on a two week bender because they knew it was a colossal catastrophe.

Bottom line: All that American MAGA Catholic money wasted on trying to bend the Holy Spirit to their puny human wills. To quote MAGA’s patron saint Judas Iscariot, “Why were these things not given to the poor?”

Which reminds me. I was not the only person stunned by the election of an American pope. However, once once Bishop Robert Barron inadvertently explained it, the light began to break across my mind as to why this pope now:

When God speaks to you through your own words, Bishop Barron, you should really reconsider making yourself a lackey and stooge of the Architect of that decline. There can be few more powerful diagnoses of the utter failure of the MAGA Catholic movement than when the Church looks America dead in the eye, assesses us to be a nation in radical decline, and sends us a Pope who is one of our own to try to rescue the world from the mortal threat we pose and to rescue us from ourselves. May our new Holy Father succeed in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord, despite all we have done and are doing to call down judgment on our own heads.

Lord Jesus Christ, who said to your Apostles: Peace I leave you, my peace I give you, look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church, and graciously grant her peace and unity in accordance with your will.

By the way, exactly 80 years ago yesterday, the Nazi regime was defeated. History does not repeat, but it’s hard to deny that it certainly does rhyme sometimes.

Viva Pope Leo, Champion of Catholic Social Teaching and of the Least of These, Friend and Co-laborer with Pope Francis of Blessed Memory, and Enemy of Americanist Heresy.

PS: Here is a nifty podcast that was done a couple of years ago on Cardinal Prevost.