100 Days of Turpitude

 

 Jeffrey St. Clair

+ America finally got its Pope, but not the reactionary the Opus Dei sect was furiously lobbying for. And not an anti-abortion zealot like Cardinal Dolan, either. (Though his views on homosexuality and gender appear to be more orthodox than his predecessor’s.)  Instead, the Vatican’s smokestack spewed white in honor of Robert Prevost, a Chicagoan, whose attitude, at least, seems that of a Southsider (Indeed, the Pope’s brother told WGN that Leo is a White Sox fan! They need all the divine intervention they can get.). For years, Prevost served as the head of the Augustinian Order, whose members, like the Franciscans, are instructed to lead simple lives and devote themselves to the ministration of the poor.

+ Like his mentor, the Hippie Pope, Prevost was in the thick of the South American wars. Francis was in Argentina during the Dirty Wars, and Prevost spent two decades in Peru at the height of the Sendero Luminoso insurgency. Where exactly Prevost stood politically during those bloody years remains unclear, as was the nature of Francis’s relationship to the Argentine Junta. But the new Pope’s attitude towards the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism is much less opaque. He has directly criticized the Catholic convert JD Vance and decried the Trump administration’s treatment of refugees and mass deportation scheme. Whether he shares Francis’s views on Gaza and his affection for the Palestinian people remains to be seen.

+ Greg Grandin on Southside Leo, the America, América Pope [Prevost was born in Chicago and became a citizen of Peru]:

He spoke Spanish and Italian, no English, from the balcony. I know he said he chose Leo because Leo XIII was the first Augustinian pope, but Leo XIII was also known as the “social pope,” or the “labor pope,” and his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) called for a just wage. The text is a rearguard action against socialism, but it also sought to socialize capital. And reads a hell of a lot better than what we have today — “Abundance,” for example: “All masters of labor should be mindful of this – that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine.” And so the wheel turns: Leo XIII influenced Perón, who influenced Francis, who, it seems, handpicked Leo XIV.