The Social World

Tag: Pope Francis

  • Pope Leo is following in Francis’s footsteps

    Pope Leo is following in Francis’s footsteps

    Since Pope Leo XIV’s election in May, Catholics have wondered whether he would continue Pope Francis’s radical agenda or ignite a more conservative reaction. After five months, the verdict appears clear. Leo will not only promote the principal policies in Francis’s agenda, but work to solidify them. This includes suppressing traditionalist theology and liturgy while bolstering activism on the environment, migration and same-sex relationships.

    Traditionalists initially viewed Leo with hope. They noted his ability to recite the Latin Mass, his choice of papal livery favored by Pope Benedict XVI and his meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke, who supports maintaining the Latin Mass.

    But the new pope refuses to discipline bishops who move against traditionalists. On May 23, just two weeks after Leo’s election, Bishop Michael Martin announced he would end the Latin Mass at four traditionalist parishes in his Charlotte, North Carolina, diocese. The diocese would build a centrally located chapel for the Latin Mass, a lonely new location that would create a two-hour trek for many communicants. More importantly, Catholics would not receive six of the church’s seven sacraments there.

    In Knoxville, Tennessee, Bishop James Mark Beckman went further. On October 7, he said Latin Masses would be discontinued by the end of the year.

    In July, Detroit Archbishop Edward Weisenburger made the most arbitrary move, dismissing three theologians from the archdiocese’s seminary for criticizing Pope Francis. One, Edward Peters, a renowned canon lawyer, said on X he had “retained counsel.”

    When Ralph Martin, another of the three, asked Weisenburger for an explanation, “he said he didn’t think it would be helpful to give any specifics but mentioned something about having concerns about my theological perspectives.”

    Martin, Peters and Eduardo Echeverria questioned Francis’s commitment to orthodoxy, his tendency to stir theological confusion and his refusal to confront clerical sex abuse. Weisenburger, appointed by Francis in February, supports the late pope’s stances on traditionalist worship and migration.

    Detroit’s new archbishop limited the Latin Mass to four chapels in his archdiocese and suggested “canonical penalties” – including excommunication – for Catholics who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Border Patrol, or even support harsh immigration policies.

    Leo provided the velvet glove for Weisenburger’s and Martin’s iron fists in a homily during an October 12 Mass: “Some forms of worship do not foster communion with others and can numb our hearts. In these cases, we fail to encounter the people God has placed in our lives. We fail to contribute, as Mary did, to changing the world…”

    “Changing the world” to reflect Pope Francis’s image describes Leo’s political agenda. The new pope reinforced the commitment to environmental activism while commemorating Francis’s environmentalist encyclical, Laudato si’. He also quoted Francis’s apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum, to disparage opponents. That entreaty, said Leo, “noted that ‘some have chosen to deride’ the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ‘ridicule those who speak of global warming’ and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most.” As part of the festivities, Leo blessed a block of ice.

    On migration, the new pope imitates Francis’s position down to the melodramatic rhetoric. In his October 5 sermon, Leo decried “the coldness of indifference” and “the stigma of discrimination” awaiting migrants with “eyes filled with anguish and hope.”

    Francis denounced “the globalization of indifference” toward migrants during a pastoral visit in 2013 to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where thousands fleeing Libya’s civil war were detained. Ten years later in Marseille, he criticized the “fanaticism of indifference” shown by European governments restricting migration. When it comes to his native land, the Chicago-born pope slammed Donald Trump’s “inhuman treatment of immigrants” being deported in an interview on September 30 and told immigration advocates visiting him on October 8 that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops must become involved: “The church cannot be silent.”

    Leo’s embrace of same-sex relationships appears similar to his predecessor’s, as he showed in late summer. On August 28, Leo met with Sister Lucía Caram, a backer of homosexual marriage. “I would be in favor of homosexuals getting married in the church because God always blesses love,” she said back in 2023.

    Three days later, Leo received the Revd James Martin, the editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America, founder of the Catholic LGBTQ ministry Outreach and a papal communications advisor. Martin promotes LGBTQ ideology, endorses transgender medical procedures for children and opposes biblical teaching against homosexuality.

    On X, Martin wrote he was “moved to hear the same message I heard from Pope Francis on LGBTQ Catholics, which is one of openness and welcome. For me, it was a deeply consoling meeting.”

    Then on September 6, Leo opened St. Peter’s Basilica to LGBTQ pilgrims for a Mass marking the Holy Year Jubilee. More than 1,000 pilgrims participated, with rainbow regalia everywhere. By contrast, the Vatican prohibited another Catholic organization supporting homosexuality, Dignity-USA, from the 2000 Holy Year Jubilee.

    Leo’s most important divergence concerns finances. Unlike Francis, Leo will permit outside agencies to manage the Vatican’s investments to reduce an annual deficit of between €50 million and €90 million. But that divergence generates minimal passion.

    Leo’s papal name offers insight into his agenda. When the College of Cardinals elected Jorge Bergoglio in 2013, the archbishop of Buenos Aires named himself “Francis” to honor St. Francis of Assisi. Leo was that Italian saint’s most devoted acolyte.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Gossip is good for you… so I’m told

    Gossip is good for you… so I’m told

    The late Pope Francis hated gossip. In his Christmas message to his Vatican advisors last year, he warned that it is “an evil that destroys social life.” It wasn’t the first time he’d attacked rumor-spreading. He once compared gossips to terrorists because “he or she throws a bomb and leaves.”

    His condemnations are of particular concern for me because I was recently accused of being a “notorious gossip.” I vehemently reject the charge, but if it were true, at least I’d be following a proud journalistic tradition. In fact, if it were not for gossip, this very magazine might not exist. The original Spectator’s founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, filled the 1711 incarnation by hovering around coffee-houses, picking up gossip for stories. Coffee-houses had become so hated by the establishment that Charles II denounced them as “places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers.”

    Rumor has it that the first example of gossip dates back to 1500 BC. According to the journalist Roger Wilkes, who wrote a history of scandal, cuneiform tablets describe a Mesopotamian mayor having an affair with a married woman. While the details remain unclear – Mesopotamian languages are hard to interpret – this anecdote suggests that humans have always been fascinated by the lives of others, par-tic-u-larly when a story involves betrayal or impropriety. Gossip in ancient Mesopotamia didn’t just circulate privately, it was often formalized in public records, scratched into clay for all eternity.

    So why do we gossip? The word itself descended from godsibb (“God sibling”), an Old English term for women who would support a friend or relative through childbirth. The term lost its positive connotations over the centuries, as exemplified by a 16th-century Scottish torture instrument called a “gossip’s bridle,” a horrifying spiked muzzle that was clamped down on to the tongues of women accused of witchcraft.

    Yet anthropologists believe the innate desire to gossip might not be bad for society; indeed, it has some evolutionary advantages. One study argues that human society would not be sustainable if it weren’t for gossip, as for much of our history it was the only way to spread information over large groups. Another paper says that gossip reinforces and polices cultural norms and keeps members of the tribe in check. The most recent paper on the subject agrees, finding that “dissemination of information about individuals’ reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others’ reputations.” In other words, gossip is evolution’s way of saying “Don’t be a dick.”

    I hear gossip’s good for our health, too. One 2012 study found that when participants were gossiping about an antisocial person or behavior, their heart rates reduced and the activity “calmed the body.” Another set of experiments shows that sharing rumors activates the ventral striatum – a part of the brain’s reward and motivation system – while another study found that gossipers going through tough situations had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than those better at keeping secrets. So gossiping is quite literally good for body, mind and maybe even soul.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.