On Religion and Public Policy: Pope Leo on Dumping

The Terra dei Fuochi, or “land of fires,” is a region in southern Italy where “decades of illegal dumping, burying and burning of waste” had been devastating by the time Pope Leo paid Acerra a visit in May, 2026.[1] Lest visual images of hell’s fires reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons come to mind, the devastation was squarely in the this-worldly domain of public policy. The pope’s speech can thus be viewed as an over-reach from the standpoint of his native fauna—the sui generis domain of religion, whose referent transcends not only the limits of cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion), but also Creation itself![2]

Departing from religion as transcendent experience, the pope “called for a rethink of current economic and social models, urging those present to try to rediscover values centered on solidarity and respect for the land.”[3] As I, like that pope, was born and raised in the Midwest (both of us in northern Illinois, in neighboring regions), I can perhaps be too direct, even blunt, in stating that all of the theological education in the world does not include expertise in socio-economic models. Accordingly, liberation theology is open to criticism for dogmatically reducing the kingdom of God to one economic model. Similarly, Arthur Rich’s attempt to apply seven criteria of justice based on Karl Barth’s theology of creation—even though Christology is much more salient in Barth’s writings—to economic systems warrants a suspicious eye, especially as he, a German, concluded that the social-market economy of Germany to be the most just. Bad air! Yet another of Nietzsche’s expressions also comes to mind: human, all too human. For a theologian or cleric to jaunt over to political economy as if one were an expert in that field of knowledge can indeed be said to be human, all too human. 

Even basing a call for respect for the land on a Creation theology (i.e., God created the land) may be a stretch. To the extent that God orders by separating as the Creator, we too, who are in the image of God, separate uses of land. Just as it is not possible, even in the best of all possible worlds, for everyone to be above average, so consuming organic beings such as humans must lay waste, though of course there is a limit to everything and responsibility can reasonably be inferred. The Biblical Book of Genesis can be interpreted as including Yahweh ordering rather than merely as creating ex nihilo. To be sure, “God created the heavens and the earth,” but the emphasis in chapter 1 extends to separating, and thus on distinguishing. Even creating the heavens and the earth implies that the two are distinguished. Furthermore, in Genesis we read, “God separated the light from the darkness,” created a sky that separated “the waters from the waters,” and “let dry land appear” such that the seas were separated. Accordingly, we can separate lands from lands as per different uses. Furthermore, theological concept of Logos, which refers to God’s rational activity in creating, is more applicable to distinguishing than to making something out of nothing (other than the initial decision to make at all, rather than continue to be self-complacent). Accordingly, we can apply reason to stewardship of the land. Even though stewardship of the land follows from even such an expansive interpretation of Creation as including ordering, the specificity of the pope can be viewed as dogmatic, even ideological, and thus better categorized under public policy. For example, the pope applauded “broad awareness of the seriousness of the criminal activity and the indifference that has left room for these crimes.”[4] He was undoubtedly referring to illegal dumping of chemical waste. I submit that a broad theological argument against such waste as criminal is a stretch.

Similarly, even though the social principle of solidarity, which is a political principle that is widely valued in the E.U. (but not in the U.S.!), can be related to Paul’s writings on Christians being of one spiritual body in Christ Jesus, the tight link between solidarity and social policy, such as affordable housing for the poor, puts the word solidarity firmly in the domain of politics rather than religion. Jesus’ conception of neighbor-love, or benevolentia universalis, in interpersonal in nature, rather than communal, as in the solidarity of a people. Likewise, the Gospels’ espousal of “love thy neighbor” would lose its flavor if put in terms of the political concept of the common good. “Let us learn, then,” the pope said on his visit, “to be rich in a different way: more attentive to relationships, more intent on fostering the common good, more attached to the local area, more grateful in welcoming and integrating those who come to live among us.”[5] In reference to land, the common good harkens back to land that towns separated off from private property for public use. Your horse could feed on the grass there, but not in your neighbor’s front yard! This is a civic rather than a theological distinction.

To be sure, the pope was on firmer ground in referring to interpersonal relationships and even on marginalizing certain people, for “neighbor-love” exists between persons, and Jesus in the Gospels advocates compassion to the marginalized, even a prostitute (which is not Mary Magdalene). So the pope spoke closer to home (i.e., the religious domain) in a specifically Christian motif in observing that the “name ‘Terra dei Fuochi’ refers to the fires lit on the edges of cities, sometimes by small, rejected and marginalized minorities of brothers and sisters whom few know or value.”[6] Compassionately reaching out to the human needs of another person, especially when doing so is inconvenient because of dislike or even hatred, is the very substance of the kingdom of God, according to the American theologian, Samuel Hopkins, who was Jonathan Edwards’ protégé. So Jesus of the Gospels would be proud of the pope for saying, “Marginalization always breeds insecurity: the steep path s to combat marginalization, not the marginalized, to break the entire chain, not to strike only its last link.”[7] But the Christian way of breaking the entire chain is not through public policy, but, rather, one person at a time, through compassionate reaching out to value even as others are repudiating and distancing. Put another way, the Way into the kingdom of Heaven within is not through public policy or even urging solidarity for the common good. To be sure, it is easy to get sidetracked.

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1. Fortunato Pinto, “Pope Leo XIV Visits Southern Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’,” Euronews.com, 23 May, 2026.
2. I am borrowing here from Pseudo-Dionysius, a sixth-century Christian theologian, who wrote on what I would call God’s radical transcendence. Relatedly, God has been thought of as being wholly other. In both of these characterizations, it follows that the domain of religion is not only distinct from every other domain, but also unique.
3. Pinto, “Pope Leo XIV Visits Southern Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’.”
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Pope Leo: Poised against Plutocracy?

Poised as the “new Leonine era,” worded as if gilding the proverbial lily as if a golden ring, the installation of Pope Leo XIV reinvigorated Pope Francis’s preachments on the poor and economic inequality because Robert Prevost chose Leo in large part because of Pope Leo XIII of the late nineteenth century, whose “historic encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”[1] Due to “his choice of pontifical name and his mathematical and legal training, Pope Leo XIV has awakened hope and curiosity among the faithful and the more secular world about the influence the Catholic Church could exert on the economic world during his pontificate.”[2] In the exuberance of a new pontificate, it is easy to get carried away with excitement as to possibilities. Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s crime against humanity in Gaza, no one could be blamed for seeking out hope wherever it could be found. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind just how marginal the calls of conscience can be, given the onslaught of greed not only in the present day represented by powerful corporate (and related) governmental interests, but also in greed’s institutional accretions built up over time that have a force of their own in protecting the economic (and political) status quo.

The practical impact of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, promulgated in 1891, should not be overstated. To be sure, it “laid the foundations of the social doctrine of the Church that inspired Catholic trade unionism, and, some 30 years later, the creation of the Christian Democratic parties that contributed decisively to the civil and material reconstruction of Europe after World War II.”[3] Calling “for workers’ rights without resorting to the class struggle promoted by Marxist doctrine” by instead focusing on “the balance of fair wages and equal economic relations,” Rerum Novarum can be said to have been prudent and eminently practical.[4] Even so, a focus on microeconomics can only do so much when the macro political-economy structure is left intact, and that structure, specifically in its huge concentrations of private capital in modern corporations and their economic-turned-political power in the halls of government amid elected representatives seeking campaign-reelection donations and lucrative jobs in the future, plays a crucial role in perpetuating and even aggravating huge economic disparities and the corruption of democracy by plutocracy.

“Pope Leo XIII questioned the concentrations of economic industrial power and was immediately attacked,” says Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, a banker and former president of the Institute for Religious Works, the corrupt Vatican financial institution.[5] Tedeschi attributed the anti-trust legislation in the United States to the encyclical, but he left out the ensuing fecklessness with which the U.S. Justice Department has used the Sherman Act to break up oligopolies and monopolies (e.g., Facebook, Amazon, General Motors, etc) undoubtedly because of “political pressure.” Even though the Sherman Act was passed “to curb the power of cartels that had created a near-monopoly regime with serious social repercussions” does not mean that much curbing actually took place.[6] Because “serious social repercussions” stem from anti-competitive economic industries, the staying power of the latter even decades into the twenty-first century means that even prior efforts to fortify labor unions fell short of the aims of Rerum Novarum. The proof, in order words, is in the pudding.

That Pope Leo XIV sought to build on established Catholic social teaching such as Rerum Novarum “to respond to another industrial revolution and to developments in artificial intelligence that bring new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and work” may have been putting the cart before the horse, given the social repercussions still occurring in 2025 from the gigantic economic and political power of the mega multinational corporations.[7] Indeed, “economic data” showed “growing crises and imbalances between average incomes and the cost of living” in the E.U. and U.S., which a focus on AI would not address.[8]

In the U.S., the pope’s home country, for example, the federal House of Representatives was in the midst of cutting the budget of Medicaid, which funds healthcare for the poor and disabled. Just days before the inaugural Mass of the new pope, a group of conservative Republican lawmakers blocked a bill with cuts to the program because they were not large enough, given the president’s proposed tax-cut (amid a federal budget debt at the time of $36.21 trillion). That any tax cut would even be proposed amid such a debt (with Moody’s recently having reduced the U.S.’s credit rating) defies fiscal logic and prudence. Cutting health-care for the poor without cutting military spending conjures up “social repercussions” in terms of values that presumably violate those of Rerum Novarum and thus Popes Leo XIII and XIV.

I submit that the Roman Catholic Church still had work to do on the question of human dignity, well-being, and justice in the context of human nature’s incompatibility with holding so much economic and political power in such concentrations that human nature itself may be warped as in the case of an addiction. The incarnation of billionaires who could not possibly spend such wealth in their respective lifetimes (and their survival from want is virtually assured) is something that Pope Leo XIII could not have dealt with, as businessmen such as JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were the millionaire “titans” of the Gilded Age. Having broken up Standard Oil in 1913 (without changing the ownership) does not mean much as the U.S. Justice Department stood by through the rest of the twentieth century as more and more American industries turned into oligopolies and even de facto monopolies. The practical impact of Rerum Novarum hardly justifies moving on the AI without taking another stab at the political-economic regime that has perpetuated and even extenuated massive economic inequality and price-setting “inflation” by companies.

Just days before Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate officially began, Walmart’s chief financial manager told the media that the company “had no choice” in raising prices due to new tariffs. Were Walmart’s industry competitive rather than oligopolistic, Walmart would be a price-taker, such that market discipline (i.e., choices by consumers) could mean that Walmart would “have no choice” but to accept lower profit by absorbing some of the supply-cost increases rather than passing them all on to the consumers. As U.S. President Trump said, Walmart had made billions of dollars in 2024, and thus could afford to absorb some of the impact of the tariffs. Put another way, we have no choice but pass on the increases onto the consumer is itself not only a lie, but also an indication of the company’s perception of its industry as less than subject to competitive forces wherein consumers can vote with their wallets and purses by buying elsewhere rather than being forced to pay more at Walmart.

If anything, the economic (and related political) regime that supports excessive economic rents being paid by consumers as large corporations continue to profit greatly has endured and even prospered as the status quo since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891. Oligopolies came to populate even the high-tech industry, including social media, at the expense of competitive markets and thus consumers as well as workers. Restructuring the underlying political-economic regime lies beyond the purview of labor unions; even the voice of Catholic conscience may be insufficient, given how the regime is fed by and feeds greed. In shifting from a strict anti-wealth paradigm to a pro-wealth paradigm wherein wealth is decoupled from greed (i.e., liberality and munificence vindicating even fortunes as camels slip through narrow places), Christianity had arguably compromised itself with respect to being a normative obstacle to greed.[9]

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1. Sergio Cantone, “How the Pontificate of Pope Leo XIV Could Influence the World Economy,” Euronews.com, May 18, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. See Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.

The Pope on AI: On the Ethical (Rather than Religious) Dimension

In June, 2024 at the international political meeting of the G7, a group of seven industrial nations, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, spoke on the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence, or machine-learning. Regarding what the Pope called the “techno-human condition,” machines capable of AI are yet another manifestation of human propensity, which our species has had since its inception, to use tools to mediate with the environment. Although tools can be thought of as an extension of our arms ad legs, it is important to distinguish the human from the machine, even as we posit human characteristics onto some advanced machines, such as computers. In the film, 2001, the computer Hal sounds human, and may even seem to have human motivations, but any such attributions come to an abrupt end when Hal is shut down. To say that Hal dies is to commit a basic category mistake. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that Hal has an after-life. So too, I submit, is there a category mistake in taking the Pope’s talk on the ethics of AI as being religious in nature. Just as it is easy to imprint the human mind on a machine-learning computer, it can be tempting to superimpose the religious domain onto another. The Pope overreached in arbitrarily bringing in religious garb on what is actually an ethical matter in the “techno-human” world.

At its core, the human-machine distinction regarding decision-making comes down to AI making only “algorithmic choices,” that is, “technical choices ‘among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences,” whereas the human heart is capable of influencing the choices that we make and so only we can have wisdom.[1] The Pope’s definition of wisdom differs from that which describes wisdom as the combination of experience with knowledge. Even if experience comes into the equation as intuition, that is distinct from the proverbial heart. If statistical inferences don’t reach human intuition, then either conception of human wisdom suffices to distinguish human from (machine-learning) machine. In the philosophy of mind field, the difference between man and “thinking” machine can be put into the following question: Is understanding merely the manipulation of symbols according to rules? Do I, whose languages do not include Chinese, understand the answers I write to questions if I use a chart that indicates which Chinese characters to write if I’m presented with other Chinese characters? If understanding is more than merely the manipulation of symbols according to (linguistic) rules, then how much more different is human experience from statistical inference (and even learning itself), and how much even greater is the difference between human emotion, such as empathy or compassion, and AI. To the extent that ethical judgment is, as David Hume claimed, a sentiment of disapprobation (i.e., a visceral emotional reaction of disapproval), ethics can only be on the human side, where the heart resides.

The ethical dimension is salient in the advantages and (especially) the disadvantages of AI. On the one hand, the Pope said, AI has potential in regard to the “democratization of access to knowledge,” the “exponential advancement of scientific research,” and a reduction in “demanding and arduous work.”[2] Given the absolute value of reason (which assigns value to things), according to Kant, rational beings should be treated not just as means, but also as ends in ourselves. For all the advantages of specialization of labor as discussed in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, at some point rote repetition of the same small action conflicts with Kant’s ethical imperative. In contrast, opening up knowledge and advancing it are fully in line both with rational nature and us being regarded as ends in ourselves and not merely means to other ends.

Even so, as the Pope pointed out, AI could also contribute towards a “greater injustice between advanced and developing nations or between dominant and oppressed social classes.”[3] Such a consequence would certainly violate Rawls’ ethical theory of justice in which societal systems, whether political, economic, or social, should be designed in such a way to disproportionately benefit the people at the bottom rather than disproportionately harm them.

Public policy enters the picture because we want to protect and perhaps even encourage the advantages and minimize or obviate the downsides by government policy. From Rawls theory, for instance, legislators might propose a law making college free for poor students in a society in which AI has a significant presence. Another law could mandate that the state provide computers to poor people free of charge. Rather than being technical policy prescriptions having the semblance of objectivity, these examples stem from the ethical dimension of AI.

Being that the Pope is the head of a religious institution, it is only natural that he would attempt to tack on the religious dimension. I submit that in doing so, he over-stepped. In discussing wisdom, for example, his addition of “listening to Sacred Scripture” in regard to the ancient Greek notion of phronesis (a type of intelligence concerned with practical action) doesn’t really fit, or is not pertinent.[4] It does not make phronesis religious in nature. Furthermore, he describes algorithms in terms of only being able to “examine realities formalized in numerical terms.”[5] The metaphysical term, realities, is out of place here. The Pope’s choice of the term was no accident. He sourced the mediating role of tools between us and our environment from us being “inclined to what lies outside of us,” which, and here is the stretch, in turn is in term so us being beings “radically open to the beyond.”[6] Such a beyond, as suggested by the use of the word radically, is transcendent, and thus in reference to God being wholly other rather than just immanent in Creation. In making this leap from humans needing to relate to the environment in which we live (e.g., for food) to humans having an aptitude for transcendence in a religious sense, the Pope jumped to another domain that is not relevant. For we do not use tools to grow or get food, for example, because we have an aptitude to transcend the limits of conception, perception, and emotion to posit or yearn for another world. AI pertains to what the Pope himself called the “techno-human condition.”[7] In contrast, the religious domain is sourced in, and thus relates to—as its reference point—that which transcends that condition. Even though AI represents “a true cognitive-industrial revolution” that will lead to “complex epochal transformations,” that revolution and the reverberating transformations emanating from it are firmly in this world. Even the ethical dimension of AI is likewise in the human condition; we need not be creatures radically open to beyondness to be able to address the ethical implications of AI.

I conclude, moreover, that only the religious domain includes the radically transcendent and in fact can be defined or characterized in terms of it. This is not to say that the domain cannot influence or be influenced by other domains; rather, that which makes domains distinct should not be skipped over lest category mistakes and faulty overreaches occur. Historically, the Church has overreached in superimposing the religious domain on that of natural science (e.g., astronomy). Likewise, the domain of history has been allowed to overreach in serving as a litmus test for religious truth or meaning, as if the latter were only valid pending credible historical evidence of an event or a person. Several neighborhood children at play who run onto the front yard of an elderly couple’s house and make noise—something I remember from my own childhood—is one thing; should they start moving the lawn furniture around and demand that the couple keep the chairs in their new positions—would be much worse. Imposing from one’s own domain implies a basic lack of recognition (or respect) of boundaries and thus of domains as distinct territories. The ethics house may be next door to the religious house, but the two are distinct. Similarly, AI might be next to human understanding, but the two are distinct. That algorithms are “neither objective nor neutral” does not men that they share in human subjectivity.[8] In fact, the Pope claimed that AI is not even really generative; it does not “develop new analyses or concepts.”[9] Instead, it “repeats those that it finds, giving them an appealing form.”[10] Whether this is so or not is beyond my fields of study, but my point is merely that a fundamental qualitative distinction between us and machines exists, and that the ethical dimension, as distinct from the religious, pertains to AI from our side.

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1, Joseph Tulloch, “Pope to G7: AI Is ‘Neither Objective nor Neutral,” Vatican News, June 14, 2024.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

Political Ideology and Religious Doctrine: Pope Francis and His American Critics

Political ideology and religious doctrine are distinct, yet confusion can justifiably exist because ideology can seep into doctrine or be claimed to be such when it is not. This interlarding of political ideology into religious doctrine, or theology, is perhaps best demonstrated in Christian liberation theology, which includes political (e.g., justice) and economic (e.g., equality of income or wealth) prescriptions in the future Kingdom of God manifest on Earth. Generally speaking, political (and economic) ideology can legitimately be viewed as being human, all too human, and thus as fundamentally distinct from religious revelation and even doctrine (though even these may be influenced and even distorted on our end by the taint of human nature). Put another way, the source of revelation and even doctrine comes from “above,” whereas political (and economic) ideology are human artifacts. Therefore to infuse such artifacts into religious doctrine risks polluting it such that the religious or spiritual auspices are impaired. David Hume suggests in his Natural History of Religion that the human mind cannot long hold onto the divine idea manifesting purely as simplicity, so we attach other ideas—anthropomorphic ones—to our conceptions of the divine. Such ideas are of human traits or characteristics, hence “from below.” Sadly, we rarely recognize this human activity; rather, we take God to have such characteristics.[1] The criticism of Pope Francis by “ultraconservative” American Catholics, including some notable clergy, illustrates just how problematic the admixture of political ideology and religious doctrine can be.

“Faced with sustained opposition from Catholic conservatives in the United States who accuse him of driving traditionalists to break with the church, Pope Francis said on [September 9, 2019] that he hopes it doesn’t come to that, but isn’t afraid of it either.”[2] He said he was praying that there would not be any schisms, but he was not afraid. With the priorities of his papacy including “reaching out to the poor, advocating justice for migrants and other marginalized people and protecting the environment from capitalism run amok,” the pope had “alienated some conservatives—especially in the United States—who [were saying that he was] promoting an anti-American, anticapitalist agenda and drifting from the core teachings of the Church.”[3] Interestingly, both the papal priorities and the criticism contain both doctrine and ideology. Regarding the priorities, reaching out to the marginalized resonates with Jesus’ preaching and example, whereas protecting the environment from harmful economic externalities fits squarely with a political ideology. If religious doctrine is indeed distinct from the domain of political ideology, the pope had gone overstepped from his basis in the distinctly religious domain. Yet so too had his critics who criticized not just the pope’s handling of religious doctrine—especially the doctrines on marriage and homosexuality—but also his “anti-American, anticapitalist agenda.” The pope “lamented that politicized ideology had seeped into doctrine and driven some of the critiques in the American church and beyond.”[4] I wonder if the pope included his own doctrine! The plank is always bigger in the other person’s eye than one’s own.

Even so, the pope’s pastoral care of divorced and gay Catholics was part of his effort to emulate Jesus with regard to the marginalized; it was thus doctrinal rather than part of the pro-gay political agenda. In fact, the pope also emulated Jesus in helping enemies—a Commandment rarely seen in operation even in the religion of love founded by Jesus. In the interview on September 9, 2019, the pope “suggested that some of his most ardent critics were working out their own problems by lashing out. ‘We have to be gentle, gentle with the people tempted by these attacks, by these things,’ he said. ‘Because they are going through problems and we should accompany them with gentleness.”[5] This pastoral care extended even to enemies lies at the core of Jesus’ preaching and example—far more important than getting into the Kingdom of God than any immigration position or economic ideology. Francis’s critics in the American clergy could have responded by stepping into the religious domain by offering pastoral care to the pope. Instead, Cardinal Raymond Burke criticized the pope’s “emphasis on inclusiveness” for confusing Catholics on doctrine.[6] Carlo Vigano, a bishop, went so far as to blame Pope Francis for the child sex-abuse scandal because of the pope’s pastoral care of gays, even though the sainted Pope John Paul II ignored the problem and his fellow conservative Pope Benedict actually was part of the scandal.[7]

It is admittedly tempting to anthropomorphise religion by including political ideology; holding onto the idea of God as transcending what we can think of and perceive (and feel) is difficult.[8] It is easy, in other words, to craft the Kingdom of God on Earth as distinctly like they ways of our world, rather than turning those ways upside-down as in caring for a detractor or even enemy (without giving in). Both Pope Francis and his American detractors have treated political ideology and religious doctrine as if they were closely related and in the religious domain where the Church has a nativist legitimacy. I submit, therefore, that both sides would have done better by first willowing down the papal priorities and content of the criticism to religious doctrine. Besides realizing that the papacy sets the Church’s priorities, the critics could have followed their pope by emulating Jesus too.   

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[1] Pseudo-Dionysus, or St. Denis, of the 6^th century argued that because God transcends the limits of human cognition and perception, characteristics of this world, including human attributes, do not go far enough.

[2] Jason Horowitz, “Pope Francis: ‘I Pray There Are No Schisms,” The New York Times, September 10, 2019.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] As archbishop of Munich, that pope urged in a letter (published by the New York Times) that a pedophile priest be transferred to another parish (where he would work as a youth minister!) because the taint of defrocking that priest would harm the reputation of the universal Church. American conservative Catholic clergy and laity were silent in response. One volunteer at a Catholic church in Illinois told me she thought the newspaper had fabricated the letter.

[8] I suggest in Spiritual Leadership in Business that focusing on religious experience that transcends is something that we can hold onto, although the requisite intensity of concentration delimits the amount of time per session.

Being Partisan in the Pulpit: Going the Extra Mile

The Johnson Amendment, which became law in the U.S. in 1954 and was named for Lyndon Johnson, then a U.S. Senator, “is a provision in the tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations from openly supporting political candidates. In the words of the tax code, ‘all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”[1] I submit that it is in a cleric’s interest to expand this prohibition to include advocating for (or opposing) particular public policies. This general principle would of course be subject to exceptions in which a proposed or enacted policy is strongly anathema to the religious principles of the given religious organization or religion.

Generally speaking, it is in the medium- and long-term interest of both clerics and their religious organizations to resist the temptation to preach along partisan lines. That such preaching is a temptation should signal the presence of a bad odor, and yet it is almost always overlooked or dismissed out of hand. Besides turning off members who are good fits religiously speaking but do not agree with the particular political ideology being preached, the stain of partisan ideology can make the cleric seem self-obsessed. In other words, that such preachments are convenient to the speakers themselves can easily be translated into self-idolatry in religious terms.

One cleric, not of one of the Abrahamic religions, in my hometown once told me that according to his religion, certain social structures are sacred. In particular, only those sociological/economic/political systems that are egalitarian and thus just in this way can be sacred. The use of this overtly religious term takes human artifacts to have divine status. By implication, the social, economic, or political ideology in play is also divine. I submit that such a position counts as self-idolatry—the worship of the human as itself being sacred, or divine. Put another way, if the societal systems we design are sacred, then the makers themselves must also be sacred—essentially little gods admiring their handiwork. I submit that when the cleric preaches on socio-economic and political policies or systems thereof as sacred, he is engaging in self-idolatry. Religion for him has become too comfortable, too easy. Absent is the wholly other, or absolutely different, quality of the divine, which is transcendent as well as immanent. Declaring a human artifact to be sacred eclipses the transcendent.

Unfortunately, the temptation to make the preachment as fitting as possible to the preacher’s own ideology can easily exploit good exceptions, where the public policy is anathema to a major religious teaching. Roman Catholicism’s doctrine of humanae vitae (i.e., on the sanctity of human life) arguably justifies preaching in opposition to abortion and capital punishment. To be sure, the doctrine’s salience relative to the Incarnation and the Resurrection can be subject to critique, such that the political opposition may actually be ideological in nature. In other words, the doctrine of the sanctity of human life—which does not imply that human beings are sacred!—could be used as a subterfuge allowing for the true, subterranean motive: political influence in line with a particular moral/political ideology.

Even if the allowance of good exceptions has a tendency of being exploited, it is indeed possible that public policies run contrary to significant religious beliefs, and such opposition is legitimate in the pulpit.  The task for the conscientious cleric writing a sermon is to be on guard—like the disciples presumably on the night Jesus is handed over to the Roman guard—for the slithering motions of self-idolatry under the subterfuge of pious religion.

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[1] Randall Balmer, “The Peril of Being Partisan at the Pulpit,” Stars and Stripes, February 7, 2017.

Pope Francis on Youth Unemployment, War, and the Idolatry of Money

It is not often that the global economy’s military-industrial complex is tied to youth unemployment and, moreover, to the idolatry of money. Yet this is precisely the thread woven by the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church. While the pope’s comments risk a certain overreach from the theological to the terrain of international political economy, which proffers its own body of knowledge, it can also be said that having a transcendent referent as one’s focus enables a person to make subtle taken-for-granted assumptions in our economic, social, and political systems transparent. In articulating an economic (and related political) center and giving it a distinctly theological interpretation stemming from the Biblical passage, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,”[1] the Roman pope provides the world with a way to do political economy from a distinctly religious vantage-point.

“At the center of all economic systems must be man, man and woman,” the pope asserts; “everything else must be in service to this man.[2] In itself, this claim is not religious in nature. Rather, the tone is philosophical, reminiscent perhaps of Kant’s “kingdom of ends” in which morality means respecting rational beings as objective ends in themselves, rather than only using them as means. For Kant, a lack of goodwill, due to pathology, lies behind the lack of adequate respect that would otherwise put people first—hence the need for public legal justice. This is not to say that Kant secularizes the matter completely; any rational creature is an end in itself “by virtue of the autonomy of his freedom he is the subject of the moral law, which is holy.”[3]  Using reason, the rational being is an assigner of value; such a being thus has absolute value (hence deserving to be treated as an end in itself, rather than merely a means to someone else’s agenda). Now a rational being is uniquely free to subject himself to his own law, which, given the necessity that lies in reason itself, binds him.  “The moral law is holy (inviolable),” Kant writes; “the humanity in his person must be holy to him.”[4] For Kant, the humanity is the rational nature, which makes the moral law sacred because reason cannot be bent out of sheer caprice. Put another way, rational beings have absolute value in that we use reason to hold ourselves as if by necessity (though freely) to that which we assign value to.

Pope Francis can be read as substituting love for reason—that men and women are made out of love, and thus inherently to be loved rather than used as mere means. Here we can discern glimpses of Leibniz’s claim that human beings are due love as a matter of justice as per the extent of being or existence that we have, and Augustine’s emphasis on caritas, or human love that can be sublimated to love of God.

Whereas Kant points to pathological self-love as thwarting the respect due beings of love, Pope Francis argues in terms similar to Aquina’s misordered concupiscence—placing a lower good above a higher one. “(W)e have put money at the center, the god of money,” the pope claims. “We have fallen into a sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money.”[5] Where your treasure is, there may be found your heart. In this case, money, which Aristotle calls barren metal, has come to be loved rather than other people, not to mention God, which as Augustine stresses, is love itself. The basic problem, in other words, is warped priorities.

Not surprisingly, greed is not far away, lying behind money as a god at the center of all. “The economy is moved by the ambition of having more.”[6] That ambition is an end in itself, so no amount of money is ever enough. Interestingly, we can distinguish ever-lasting here from the eternal; whereas love cuts through time in having value, greed is of infinite, or unlimited, desire. Value that cuts through time, such as holds with love, gets expunged by the all-consuming god of money. Put in Kantian terms, people are treated as mere means rather than also as ends in themselves.

It is no wonder that the young and old are tossed to the wayside because of their relatively low utility. Regarding youth unemployment, the pope had this to say. “(W)e are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can’t hold up anymore, a system that to survive must make war, as the great empires have always done.”[7] The system, being designed to funnel money, must be protected, and it is no accident that the people-as-means, or human resources, attribute so easily translates into an economy of war. Rather than being at the center, the human being is reduced to collateral damage, or targeted outright.

Because “a Third World War can’t be done, they make [regional] wars,” the pope explains.[8] This involves the production and sale of weapons, which sorts out “the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money.”[9] Here the pope explicitly relates making money an idol of inviolable worth and sacrificing people as if they are worthless. Barren metal, in other words, is put over beings capable of holding themselves to a moral law and of loving themselves and others—even those who would sacrifice them on an altar of gold. Not unexpectedly, an international political economy oriented to sustaining an arms trade divides economies—even sorting them reductively along the lines of weapons production and consumption. The United States is a “superpower,” whereas Africa has value only in as much as it has the wherewithal to purchase weapons and sustain its intestine squabbles.

Once held up as a coming cacophony of diversity “like a polyhedron, all united but each preserving its particularity, its wealth, its identity,” globalization has become impoverished, “a sphere in which all points are equidistant from the center” whose sheer gravity “takes away the wealth of diversity of thought and therefore the wealth of a dialogue between peoples.”[10] That is to say, the reductionistic, weapons-oriented organizing principle of the global military-industrial complex saps globalization of its many differences, essentially nullifying this sort of wealth in favor of a more banal form in which the dark hole of a bank vault functions as a god with a suffocating embrace.

Beware the military industrial complex. U.S. President Eisenhower delivered this starkly public warning as he embraced some free speech in his farewell address in 1960. It is dangerous to have so much financial and related political interest lined up on the side of war. This is hardly unknown, yet we tolerate it because the interests of capital have beguiled us into supposing that they have labor’s back. In other words, we have been made to fear the onslaught of mass unemployment that would ensue from a structural realignment off the weapons trade. 

In his interview in 2014, Pope Francis takes a more subtler look at what is really at stake. Whereas historically religion and then morality operated as viable constraints on the profit motive, the god of money seems to have a relatively free hand as of the early twenty-first century at least; correspondingly, people are secondary, and thus expendable, in the system designed and inhabited by the same. Money has come to be regarded as an absolute, with the worth of persons being defined exclusively according to its measure. Put another way, the unit of measurement has become an end in itself—inviolable, and thus an idol—while the measurers—the assigners of value—have come to accept their place as mere means, or human resources. 

Living in the “system”— an artifice entirely changeable even in its basic contours—many people just assume that the constantly-felt subterranean, subtly existential instability or uncertainty is a necessary part of life. Life means being expendable. Life means that money rules. From a transcendental referent point, a spiritual person can see the world differently—atypically—and thus make transparent our systems’ basic premises. Once recognized, they can be changed; the changers can take back their innate power to set the priorities for the systems, whether they are social, economic, or political in nature, and to see to it that the designs are in sync with those priorities. Where our treasures are, there too are our gods.

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[1] Luke 12:34; Matthew 6:21. Not being in Mark, the source is likely the book of Q (which stands for Quelle, or “source” in German), a book of Jesus sayings hypothesized to have been a source used by the writers of Luke and Matthew.

[2] “Full Text of Pope Francis’ Interview with ‘La Vanguardia,” Patheos, June 13, 2014.

[3] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Full Text of Pope Francis’ Interview with ‘La Vanguardia,” Patheos, June 13, 2014.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

Catholic Social Ethics:The Free Market as an Idol

In June of 2014, Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, a “prince” of the Roman Catholic Church, of the free-market system as “a new idol” that increases inequalities of wealth and excludes the poor.[1] Pope Francis had already claimed that personal charity is not sufficient as a remedy—that solidarity with the poor necessitates, in the Cardinal’s words, “dealing with the structural causes of poverty and injustice.”[2] As theorized by Thomas Piketty, that structure includes a tendency under typical circumstances for the rate of return on capital to exceed the growth rate in incomes (and GNP). Faith in the market’s invisible hand and people’s charitable giving do not suffice to counter this tilt. Indeed, Catholic social ethics would have it that faith in perfect competition as an ideal is tantamount to idolatry that operates at the expense particularly of the down-trodden and poor.

We might postulate more generally that idolatry is a faith that operates at the expense of compassion, or is impotent to amass any. If a faith that transcends the limits of human conception and perception sensitizes a person to existence itself, and thus to the plight of others who suffer, then a faith fixed on a phenomenon in the world we have created could be expected to come up short with respect to intensifying compassion.

It is only fair to ask, therefore, whether the insufficiency of the free market and charity risk turning government into a savior?  That is to say, might such a faith in government turn out to be yet another form of idolatry? If so, would not the promised compassion be illusionary in the end? Even in a theocracy, government is not transcendent; rather, it is quite of the earthly kingdom even if presumed to be informed from on high.

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[1] David Gibson, “Cartinal Maradiaga Slams Free Market Libertarianism: ‘This Economy Kills’,” The Huffington Post, June 4, 2014.

[2] Ibid.