Lhe New Pope is therefore Robert Francis Prevost, born in Chicago in 1955, of American and Peruvian nationality. At the announcement of its name and origin, the very first reflex of many was undoubtedly disappointed. As if her election conferred by herself an undeserved honor in the country managed since January by Donald Trump, or even provided implicit support to a president whose Pope Francis had been the first, and the only one, to reject migration and social policy in a letter to the American bishops, his last public text.
The name that Robert F. Prevost, the first American pope, gave himself to reign over the stone throne should however reassure those that his nationality worries. Because the choice of “Léon XIV” is unequivocal: the new pope is part of the parentage of Léon XIII (Pope from 1878 to 1903), the “inventor”, in 1891, of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church with the encyclical Rerum novarumfirst in a long series of Catholic social texts for over a hundred and thirty years, on the socio-economic realities of the time and “Solutions” to bring them.
Too moderate and “third way” obscuring capitalism for some, the encyclicals have long been perceived as criticism above all of the socialist tradition (and a fortiori communist). We noticed more recently how much they also denounced, from the start, the excesses and misdeeds of economic and financial laissez-faire, the scandalous inequalities created by Liberalism without brakes, “The concentration, in the hands of a few, of industry and trade, which have become the sharing of a small number of rich and opulents, who thus impose an almost servile yoke with the infinite multitude of proletarians” (Rerum novarum§ 2.2).
A strange wink in history
It is not the place here to enter into the discussion of social doctrine, the objective of which is to illuminate and promote the most universal common good as the Church conceives by interpreting the message of the Gospel. Distinguished minds will always find it too moral, too idealistic, incompetent and irresponsible on these subjects.
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Source: Lemonde