Leo XIV’s morality without politics versus President Trump’s politics without morality

On 4 July, the 250th anniversary of the United States, the two most important Americans of our time faced off from a distance. Whilst in Washington Donald Trump was showcasing the power of a nation determined to return to the centre of the world, in Lampedusa Pope Leo XIV was urging us to care for the least among us, setting politics the most ambitious of goals: to give ‘spiritual, cultural, legal, political and economic form to the civilisation of love’. It is an unequal contest: how could we possibly fail to side with the Holy Father? Yet it is precisely this instinctive reaction that should set off alarm bells in our minds. If it seems so obvious to us that reason lies with the Pontiff, then why Trump? Why has he ascended to the White House twice, carried there by tens of millions of votes, and why do voters across the West continue to reward those who resemble him?

By rising to the celestial ethical heights of the civilisation of love, speaking to us of the world as it ought to be and as we would wish it to be, the Holy Father exorcises power. Whereas, looking cynically at the world as it is – rife with fierce conflicts of interest, reprisals and revenge, drones, dollars and blood – Trump is nothing but power. The American Pontiff’s morality without politics is thus mirrored in the American President’s politics without morality. Whilst Rome flees into utopia, Washington flaunts a hyperrealism so extreme that, paradoxically enough, it often loses touch with reality. In any case, this mirroring is emblematic of our age and of the profound political crisis we are currently experiencing.

Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, warns against abstractions and utopian ideals. It rejects the idea that social doctrine can be reduced to a ‘handbook of principles and rules’ and cautions against ‘the illusion of a technique that promises to free us from all fragility’ – what an old tradition of thought would call perfectionism. It recognises that every real transition proceeds in fits and starts, that history is uneven, fragmentary and at times conflictual, and that there is no single model of change nor a universal solution. When it comes to politics, however, this caution vanishes. Whilst rightly sceptical of the salvific claims of the market and technology, when it asks how the world might be governed, "Magnifica Humanitas" instead succumbs to perfectionism.

The encyclical makes very significant demands of public authorities in general, and of states in particular. The list includes, amongst other things, ‘fair rules and effective safeguards’ for the digital sphere, policies for ‘the continuity and quality of employment’, investment in training, protection of families, and the fight against new forms of slavery and the inequalities generated by automation. “In the age of artificial intelligence,” the document summarises, “it is no longer possible to rely solely on the invisible hand of the market”: “politics has the task of steering economic and technological dynamics towards the common good”. Beyond the details, then, the ultimate horizon of the encyclical is the same as that of the Lampedusa address: the civilisation of love. An expression first used by Paul VI in the 1970s and which has since run through the history of the papacy – but without ever, it seems to me, coming so close to becoming a fully-fledged political programme.

Precisely because it is expected to be perfect, politics is, if not forbidden, certainly strongly advised against getting its hands dirty with power. In the encyclical, power appears almost exclusively in pathological forms. The final chapter is entitled “La cultura della potenza e la civiltà dell’amore”, and its first part describes a time when the availability of resources and the capacity to dominate take precedence over the common good. It speaks of a new Babel, of the clash between imperialist forces seeking to preserve or seize supremacy. It denounces “unlimited force”, the technical power that renders us not more capable but isolated and vulnerable, and the opaque power of the digital giants that eludes public scrutiny.

Nor is it merely the brute force of the media that comes under criticism. The only power that Magnifica Humanitas ultimately recognises as good seems to be that which has ceased to be such. It is the power of God that ‘is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Cor 12:9). It is authority broken down almost to the point of disappearing – ‘to each his own section of the wall’ – within the ‘logic of subsidiarity’. They are the ‘servants of the Kingdom to come’, as opposed to the ‘masters of towers destined to collapse’. It is the Magnificat that resounds in the document’s title, with its overturning of the powerful and the lifting up of the humble. In each of these figures, power is accepted only when it renounces itself, becomes weakness and service, and disperses.

This gives rise to a two-pronged movement whose ultimate consequences are dangerously anti-political: on the one hand, the perfect ideal of the civilisation of love, against which any political reality can only appear dramatically deficient and petty; on the other, a power so thoroughly subordinated to ethics that it finds itself deprived not only of legitimacy and autonomy but, ultimately, of any real possibility of action. Chapter Five of the encyclical devotes an entire section to the tools with which to build the civilisation of love, yet we find not a single lever capable of compulsion, not a single mechanism by which a reluctant actor might be compelled. What we find are dispositions of the mind, verbal acts, spiritual practices, ‘responsible planning’, ‘human and social impact assessments’ and ‘inclusion’. Extremely ambitious goals and ineffective tools: the affliction of mature democracies that Michel Crozier denounced as long as half a century ago.

As well as power, Magnifica Humanitas also presents a dual view of realism. On the one hand, it condemns as ‘so-called political realism’ the attitude of those who take war, force and the tragic dimension of the human condition into account, and brands it as a form of surrender, almost a moral failing. On the other hand, it advocates ‘a healthy realism’ which must not reduce politics to morality but must start from interests and power dynamics to calculate what can be achieved. Yet, when it comes to the means, the calculation always stops one step short of coercion: credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, and ultimately, not surrendering to evil and holding on to hope. In short, even realism, to be good, must first cease to be itself.

Let us return for a moment to Donald Trump. The White House’s decision to open hostilities against Iran – which was the main bone of contention between the American President and the American Pontiff – can be discussed on multiple levels. It violated international law. But it pursues the aim of bringing under control a power which, for decades and in total disregard of that law, has been fomenting conflict and fuelling instability across a vast region of crucial global importance, either directly or through proxies. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the military offensive is the best way to rein in Persia, given the impact that drones are having on the war and the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz. The discussion could go on indefinitely, but I have no interest here in developing it, let alone concluding it. I am interested in noting how the Magnifica Humanitas renders it impossible by stifling it at source: since the encyclical permits the use of force only as ‘legitimate defence in the strictest sense’, war against Iran must be condemned pure and simple. Even if, in a few years’ time, we were to discover that Trump had made the Middle East a more stable, peaceful and secure place, or that Iranians were living better lives under a less oppressive regime, the American initiative would still remain illegitimate. Law and morality take precedence over political expediency, and since law and morality exist in the present whilst political expediency is measured in the context of history, the short term prevails over the long term. A statesman, as Alcide De Gasperi loved to say, looks to future generations. But the more morality and the law constrain his capacity for political action, the more he will be forced to limit himself to merely watching.

La Magnifica Humanitas contrasts two biblical archetypes: the vertical pride of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9), an emblem of standardisation and technocratic efficiency, and the horizontal reconstruction of the walls of Jerusalem (Neh 2–6). Nehemiah, who ‘does not impose solutions from above’ and ‘rebuilds bonds even before the stones’, emerges as an icon of subsidiarity and communal redemption. However, this is a reading in which the dimension of political power and repressive force that runs through the biblical text is entirely omitted. In the historical reality of the text, Nehemiah is a military governor acting on behalf of the Persian Empire. Not only does he oversee defence against external enemies, coordinating builders who ‘worked with one hand whilst holding their weapons in the other’ (Neh 4:11), but he also uncompromisingly enforces order within. In the book’s final chapter, collaborative leadership gives way to coercion: ‘I rebuked them, cursed them, beat some of them, and tore out their hair’ (Neh 13:25). By omitting the sword and imperial rigour, the encyclical idealises Nehemiah’s political realism, transforming an ancient account of political obligation into a manifesto of pure relational ecology and fraternal cooperation.

Since the Church is a spiritual guide and not a political entity, one might rightly object: what sense would it make to expect anything else from a pontiff? And indeed, the aim of this argument is not to claim that the Holy Father should have said anything other than what he did, let alone to lecture him on theology. Rather, it is to highlight just how deeply the encyclical is in tune with the culture of anti-politics and anti-authority that has crystallised over the last fifty years and has now entered a crisis. To show that, if it seems obvious to us to agree with "Magnifica Humanitas", it is because we share in its very spirit.

That spirit has a history which I have attempted to reconstruct elsewhere. It stems from the great individualist drive of the 1960s, from the claim that everyone can determine their own existence without having to subordinate it to an authority, a tradition or a community. Initially, that drive took on a political form and sought to revolutionise the world by mobilising the masses in the public sphere. But very soon, subjective autonomy and collective action came into conflict and, with the collapse of the millenarian promise that alone could redeem it, politics began to be perceived increasingly as a disciplining machine – not an instrument for promoting individual authenticity, but a constraint upon it. During the 1970s, the link between politics and revolution that had characterised the twentieth century dissolved, and the state, ‘once perceived as the vehicle of the future’, was transformed ‘into an obsolete monster’.

Utopianism thus takes three apolitical – if not anti-political – paths. The first is ethics: the liberation of the individual becomes a matter of conscience and is entrusted to a universalist morality that does not arise from the concrete bonds of a historical community but is, on the contrary, constructed by rebelling against them. The second is the law: the guarantee of subjective emancipation passes from elected assemblies to magistrates, constitutional courts and independent authorities, and one sphere after another is removed from political decision-making and handed over to the judiciary. The third is the market, regarded as a complete and definitive mechanism, capable of coordinating billions of individual choices better than any government, and all the more generous in distributing wealth the more politics withdraws.

Ethics, law and economics thus converge in what I have proposed to call the ‘radical historical order’. Emancipated individuals will no longer be governed by the discretionary power of a few, however elected they may be, but by systems of abstract and objective rules administered by specialised institutions, courts of justice, central banks and international technocracies. It is a utopian order, which inherits from the 1960s the aspiration towards a final state of perfection and knows neither ultimate conflicts nor irreconcilable rifts: in the long run, the outcomes will all, necessarily, be positive, and whatever the rules fail to resolve will be resolved by economic growth and processes of moralisation.

In the 1990s, following the fall of communism, the utopian drive reached its peak and spread across the entire planet. Born of the West’s revolutionary and universalist vocation, the radical historical order conceived of itself in a de-Westernised form and could therefore dream of extending peacefully to every corner of the globe. The canonical texts of the era state this clearly: in 1999, Thomas Friedman assured us that ‘press freedom will come to China’, driven by the globalisation of markets, whilst Bill Clinton, welcoming Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organisation, promised that ‘freedom will spread through mobile phones and modems’. And so, decade after decade, we have slowly forgotten the true, higher – and more uncomfortable – meaning of politics: the capacity to arbitrate authoritatively between conflicting values and interests, to make a choice and uphold that choice even against those who do not share it. The Magnifica Humanitas brings to fulfilment a disposition that is already within all of us.

It is no coincidence that this provision also has its historical roots in the transformations that have taken place within the culture of the Christian Democrats over recent decades. That culture has always treated the concept of sovereignty with suspicion and reluctance. It has regarded the idea of a separate and transcendent authority governing the body politic from above as a theological error even before a political one, viewing the state as a mere instrument in the service of social pluralism. It has considered power acceptable only if dispersed downwards into communities and families and upwards into a supranational order. In the European constitutions of the post-war period, the Christian Democrats sought to have politics legally constrained by the recognition and enhanced protection of pre-existing and inalienable natural rights, and subsequently promoted the creation of international institutions that would bind national democracies deemed fragile and fickle. In short, they built a complex system designed to eradicate the dimension of absolute power from human reality.

The various strands of Christian Democratic culture experienced the Cold War in different ways. There were those who embraced anti-communism more wholeheartedly and proved more receptive to the need to draw on the tools of Realpolitik to halt and repel the Soviet threat, whilst others remained more sceptical of power and continued to prioritise individual rights and those of civil society organisations. Whilst there is no doubt that, on the whole, the pressing demands of the confrontation between the blocs shaped the relationship between the Christian Democrats and those in power, the situation began to shift as early as the 1960s, due both to the process of transformation set in motion by the Second Vatican Council and to the crystallisation of the conflict in Europe and the gradual decline in the appeal of the Soviet model.

During that decade and the one that followed, the Christian Democratic tradition was forced to confront the overwhelming force of the individualist revolution. It could not embrace it, as individualism remained, in the name of the person rooted in the community, a historical adversary. Yet at the same time, it struggled to counter it, since the traditional social and cultural fabric on which it relied was being rendered increasingly unstable by the processes of secularisation and modernisation. It seems to me that one can argue that the convergence – neither peaceful nor definitive, of course – between the drive towards subjective self-determination of the 1960s and Christian personalism ultimately took place on ethical grounds. If the individual is indeed the holder of rights and an actor in the market but is also the bearer of a robust moral conscience; if their freedom is open to communal solidarity and their horizon extends to the whole of humanity; then they can also be accepted within a Christian Democratic framework.

The history of human rights seems to confirm this hypothesis. According to Samuel Moyn’s interpretation, it was Christians who redefined them in conservative terms between the 1930s and 1940s, orienting them not towards individual autonomy but towards the fulfilment of one’s duties, in a manner that was both anti-totalitarian and anti-liberal. When rights exploded onto the global stage as a now-secularised utopia in the 1970s, secular progressives took credit for promoting them. But Christians were able to integrate into that movement because they recognised it as their own creation. Thus, it became possible for them to find their place within the radical historical order and to share its individualism – provided it was moralised – its distrust of the state, and its supranational vocation.

With the communist adversary no longer a threat, the main reason why the Christian Democrats had maintained an open dialogue with Realpolitik from 1947 onwards finally ceased to exist. Karol Wojtyla, one of the architects of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, became the staunchest moral opponent of the two Iraq wars once the enemy had disappeared. In 1991, he stood almost alone, against Western capitals and Arab governments, in insisting that war was “an adventure from which there is no return”. In 2003, whilst his envoys were rushing between Baghdad and Washington to avert the invasion, he warned that war is “always a defeat for humanity”. Wojtyla was the last great geopolitical pope and personally brought that era of the Church to a close.

Europe has translated the Christian Democrats’ scepticism towards sovereignty into an institutional framework. Without wishing to go back to the origins of the European Communities and the role played there by the great Catholic politicians, the acceleration of the integration process which, between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, led to the European Union was made possible precisely by the decline of politics. This is demonstrated by two otherwise opposing interpretations. According to the first, which takes a democratic perspective, that acceleration was the means by which national ruling classes – following the collapse of the post-war social compromise – shirked their duty to govern their own societies, transferring powers to Brussels and transforming nation states into member states. According to the second, which takes a neoliberal perspective, it represented the victory of rules over discretion: integration that breaks down barriers succeeds, whilst that which is supposed to build a capacity for governance fails. In both cases, a united Europe has grown all the more as political power has retreated, withdrawing matters from sovereign decision-making to hand them over to regulations, judges, central banks and the market.

Right at the start of the 2000s, spurred on by the Second Gulf War and George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’, the idea of Europe as a ‘civilian power’ and later a ‘normative power’ became almost a programme in its own right. It was said at the time that the Americans came from Mars and the Europeans from Venus, and that the postmodern, Kantian paradise in which Europe lived was made possible by the protection of those who remained, in a Hobbesian sense, in the world of force. But the Old Continent turned this accusation into a point of pride: whilst Washington invaded Iraq, advocated pre-emptive war and treated international law as a hindrance, Brussels offered the world not power but its ‘transcendence’, achieved through law and integration, and there were those who promised that the new century would be European.

It is therefore understandable why Europe’s reawakening over the last four years has been so slow and laborious. With its sense of security under attack, the Union is trying to relearn the ‘language of power’: German rearmament, a 150-billion common defence loan fund, a much-cited report calling for competitiveness and a genuine ‘economic foreign policy’, and the redefinition of power as economic security and the reduction of dependencies. But the struggle is structural; it does not depend solely on a lack of resources or procedural delays. A Union that took shape in the era of depoliticisation – and thanks to it – cannot be repoliticised by decree. It was born round in a round world, and now that the world has become square, it cannot manage to become square itself.

It fails, first and foremost, because it cannot decide at which level to take a stand. There are those who would like to politicise the supranational centre, giving the Union a government, a budget and a demos commensurate with its new tasks. There are those who wish to return decision-making to the national capitals in the name of the only truly existing democratic legitimacy: the national one. And then there is the established practice: the intergovernmental approach of summits between heads of state and government. These three approaches paralyse one another because sovereignty would require a single entity, yet Europe has three that are vying for that title.

Added to this is the tally of promises. For three decades, the European public has been assured of a virtually perfect world, if not quite the ‘civilisation of love’: peace as a given, prosperity as the norm, and rights as a perpetually expanding horizon. Now that same public finds itself in a terribly imperfect world and, at the same time, completely unprepared to deal with its imperfections. This is Crozier’s paradox, which we have already mentioned: the impatient demand for miraculous solutions coupled with a reluctance to provide the means without which no solution can be guaranteed. These are the encyclical’s marvellous promises and missing tools, which have arrived on a continental scale thirty years ahead of schedule.

But the deepest difficulty is cultural. Europe is unable to rethink the world in its new form, to envisage a compromise between the universalist ethics in which it is steeped and the forceful resurgence of particularism. It therefore remains suspended between the morality without politics to which it is accustomed and the politics without morality championed by the so-called populist forces, which are enjoying growing success. The power that Europe has exorcised returns to haunt it like a nemesis: the vote cast for those who resemble Trump, on both sides of the Atlantic, expresses the frustrated demand for protection that a powerless Union is unable to satisfy.

Not that politics without morality is a sustainable solution in the medium term, even from a security perspective alone. A deeply interconnected world such as ours cannot do without rules, and for rules to function, they need an ethical foundation. If the old regulatory and moral solutions no longer work, if they have been overburdened with expectations to the point of devouring politics, then it will be necessary to find new ones and strike a different balance. Yet increasing entropy by lashing out in all directions with the raw, unvarnished power politics – whilst it may make sense in dismantling an order no longer suited to its time – certainly does not make sense when it comes to rebuilding an alternative one. On the ridge separating the pars destruens from the construens, the hyperrealism of politics without morality is then turned on its head, becoming a refusal to see our world as it truly is. That is, when it does not degenerate into delusions of omnipotence. And reality thus ends up eluding politicians just as much as it does moralists.

This crisis challenges us all, but particularly those who identify with the European People’s Party, for the reasons these pages have sought to outline. In many ways, they have shaped Europe, and it is their crisis that the right-wing populists are feeding off. The task facing the Christian Democrats is to find a new balance between universalism and particularism, to return to a way of thinking about the conflict between identity and conflicting interests without entirely abandoning a humanitarian moral framework. And the Church is not helping them. The world is no longer what it was in the post-war period, when the communist challenge compelled the Christian Democrats – and with them the Vatican – to adopt a certain degree of Realpolitik. "Magnifica Humanitas" presents us with a pontificate that is entirely skewed towards the universalist side, intent on pointing towards the utopian outcome of the ‘civilisation of love’. It is a great ethical goal but is in no way a guide to action, and it is a discourse which, as we have seen, fuels strong anti-political impulses. Today’s Christian Democrats are called upon to undertake an immense cultural task: the ability to conceive a new Realpolitik that is not devoid of morality but, at the same time, is capable of responding to the concrete demands of European public opinion.