Continuity and Rebalancing in the Multipolar Papacy
The Church needs to know how to address a humanity disoriented by the crisis in the world order
. According to Vatican sources, this was one of the outcomes of the Congregazioni generali
(General congregations
), or pre-Conclave meetings, the debates among the cardinals who will vote for the election of the new pontiff.
It is useful to return to another juncture of the crisis in the world order, more than 30 years ago, when the implosion of the USSR, German reunification, and finally the First Gulf War marked the end of the Yalta partition. The consequences were comparable to a third world war in terms of strategic consequences and the devaluation of capital in the USSR, but not in terms of the human cost, which, at 500,000 victims, was one hundredth that of the Second World War. It was, if you like, half a Second World War, since between 1989 and 1991 it was only the balance of power in Europe that was overturned, while between 1939 and 1945, two wars were combined, one in the Old Continent and one in the Asia-Pacific. The wars that broke up Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and even today's war in Ukraine, are aftershocks of that strategic break.
In 1991, faced with the contradictory movements of the Italian frontier bourgeoisie
and a prevailing political passivity
, the Catholic Church stepped into the political vacuum, shifting the centre of gravity of foreign policy to the Vatican. This was Arrigo Cervetto's assessment in Contraddizioni sociali e passività politiche
(Social contradictions and political passivity
):
The Vatican State is no longer an Atlanticist stronghold, as it was in the past. Its lines of resistance and expansion are expressed:
1) in a Third-world position that aims to preserve its space in areas of growing religious rivalry, especially after the loss of its Lebanese outpost;
2) in a march towards Eastern Europe to carve out a sphere of influence in the disintegrating Soviet empire;
3) in a Europeanist line that exploits the weight of Catholic parties and leaders, as well as the fears about the gap between birth rates and immigration.
Furthermore, the pacifist campaign promoted by the Church was influenced by the fact that the anti-Saddam coalition was led by the Protestant administrations of the United States and Great Britain.
The influence achieved by the Vatican in Italy in this circumstance was greater than at any other time in recent history. Defeated in the Risorgimento, the papacy has always used wars to regain ground. In 1917, Benedict XV attempted to appeal against the useless slaughter
of WWI, but his efforts were thwarted by the defeat at Caporetto. The Church had to wait until 1943 to return directly and openly to the political arena through a Catholic party.
The novelty of that pacifist campaign was that the papacy succeeded in attracting the scattered troops of the traditional Russian party
– the Italian Communist Party (PCI) – with a form of left-wing papism
, resulting in the latest transformation of a sad and disordered opportunism
.
This episode helps us to reflect on the reasons for Marxist science's attention not just to religion in general, from a materialist point of view, but specifically to the Catholic Church, in terms of its political action and strategic vision.
The most obvious answer is that the Church is the greatest political force of the ruling class and the only one with a global presence, and therefore must be studied. With around 400,000 priests, 600,000 nuns, 5,000 bishops, a Senate of 250 cardinals from 94 countries, and a centralised leadership through the Petrine Primacy and the Roman Curia, the Church is unrivalled by other religious denominations, which lack an international centre, let alone by flimsy inter-party organisations such as the Socialist or Christian-Democrat Internationals. Although its roots in different regions are unequal, no other organisation has a million officials and five thousand senior managers. Above all, no other force is capable of establishing a unified strategic direction on such a scale, in the dialectic between the supranational centre and the plurality of local churches, which in turn are related to the political superstructures of the States.
Bearing in mind the fundamental difference between proletarian internationalism and the Catholic International in terms of their class position, there are similarities that deserve attention regarding the action of organised minorities on the world stage and the conception of strategy as a dynamic link between classes and States – over long times and on an international scale.
The strategic break of 1989-91 had a specific impact in Italy. As illustrated by the example of left-wing papism
, the disarray of the Russian party and, shortly afterwards, the collapse of the entire Italian parliamentary party system left the Church as the only force with political capacity and a sense of strategic perspective. The Marxist school offered little previous material for elaboration. Therefore, the issue was to start a serious study of the Catholic organisation, waging a political battle to show clearly its role as guarantor of social conservation, while escaping the infantile disorder of maximalist anti-clericalism.
Today, a further specific task has been added in the new situation characterised by Atlantic decline and the emergence of Asia. This involves studying the multipolar Church as a force and an ideological reserve for unitary imperialism in the crisis in the world order and its wars.
Robert Prevost, addressing the diplomatic corps as Pope Leo XIV, recalled the plural dimensions of his own experience, shaped across North America, South America, and Europe
. This international character is also reflected in the leadership of the Augustinian order, where he served as prior, and in his current role within the Roman Curia overseeing episcopal appointments since 2023. This role has increased his organisational stature in Rome – thus helping to address the criticism of sectors of the Curia who complained about a lack of connection between the Church's governing body and Jorge Mario Bergoglio – and has also brought him into direct contact with episcopal conferences worldwide. In Germany, he helped to stem, or at least temper, the insidious Protestant drift of the German Church's synodal path; and it is likely that his dicastery has also been involved in the sensitive dossier of bishop appointments in China.
A provisional conclusion is that Prevost's election to the papacy signals a degree of continuity in the rebalancing following Bergoglio's pontificate.
However, the commentary linking the Conclave's decision to the strategic knot of Atlantic decline – and of US decline in particular – touches on a crucial point, particularly as it relates to the crisis within the American Church. In this context, the rebalancing in fact marks a greater discontinuity, given that there has never before been an American pope. While some interpret Prevost's election as a counterattack against the conservative wing of the US bishops, it is more plausible that it reflects a compromise. Elements within the Church in the US and Europe who felt sidelined during the Bergoglian papacy are now framing the renewed emphasis on collegial-ity as a welcome development. After all, even proponents of calculated discontinuity, who aimed to shift the centre of gravity of the international Catholic organisation from its historical roots in the West towards a multipolar Church, acknowledged the need for rebalancing.
Massimo Faggioli, who teaches at Villanova University in Philadelphia – the same Augustinian centre where Prevost received his formation – writes in Avvenire that the Conclave has, in effect, reintroduced Augustinianism as a theological point of reference from which to interpret and confront the present global political crisis. St. Augustine, after all, was the thinker of the Roman Empire's final phase; it is as if the cardinals were saying: We need a new Augustine to help us make sense of the collapse of our Western world
.
According to Faggioli, the crisis that has manifested itself through the Trumpian chaos
has paradoxically made convergence on an American pope feasible. In the past, it was thought that the United States, a symbol of the Western world and at the heart of NATO, could not also
have a pontiff in the Vatican. Then, with Donald Trump's presidency, all the rules were thrown out the window; today, no one knows where America is headed
, no one knows, for example, whether it is allied with Europe or not
.
Faggioli adds that Prevost, knowing the American Church, will be able to tackle its crisis. In his view, the rift between conservative and progressive Catholics has developed into a sort of liquid schism
, a creeping division that is very difficult to deal with; Prevost will be able to be heard by all
American Catholics. Faggioli has just published Da Dio a Trump. Crisi cattolica e politica americana (From God to Trump. The Catholic crisis and American politics
) in which he denounces the risk of a nationalisation of American Catholicism
caught up in the illusion of being able to go its own way, along a kind of Sonderweg that is not German but American
. He also criticises the European illusion of being able to do without the Church in the United States
, an institution which is indispensable for its cultural, political, and financial influence
.
Two dimensions of the American papacy can be glimpsed here. One is the Vatican's political offer in the context of Atlantic decline. This is an issue we addressed at the time of Joseph Ratzinger's pontificate and Camillo Ruini's presidency of the Italian Episcopal Conference, but the reflection needs to be updated to the current convulsions of the American decline and the risk that these might severe the US from Europe. The other dimension is the crisis of the American Church. In Da Dio a Trump, acquiescence to Trumpism is seen as extremism in the service of a political project
and also as Catholicism reduced to a brand
, a trademark exploited in operations that echo the style of Protestant Churches.
Leo XIII is quoted for his encyclical Rerum Novarum, conveniently ignoring the fact that it targeted not only socialism, but also the class struggle itself through strikes. But Pope Pecci, in his very conditioned openness to modernity, was also the pontiff who in 1899 blocked Americanism, a pragmatic deviation of the American bishops that today would be defined as liberal. In the current crisis, the roles appear to be reversed, and we can glimpse a conservative Americanism of the opposite type. What the two different Americanisms have in common from one century to the next is that the specific American conditions seize the local Church. Yesterday's conditions were those of optimism and of the practical sense of action typical of an emerging power, that saw the constraints of old Europe as a hindrance. Today, they are the pessimistic or revanchist conditions of a power that feels itself in decline and accuses the Church's laxity on principles and its surrendering to the spirit of the times – to liberalism and its morals, to anti-Western multipolarism, to atheist China imposing its own bishops – of being a contributing cause of such decline. J. D. Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, is supported by Peter Thiel, the proponent of a sort of high-tech evangelical revival in Silicon Valley. Their ultimate reproach to Europe is that it does not want to enlist in the Americanist, anti-Chinese fight against the decline of the West.
However, we imagine that both in Rome and among American bishops, including conservatives, the images of Trump praying in the White House – his hands clasped with the pastor of prosperity theology and surrounded by religious figures including the televangelists of evangelical megachurches – have not been viewed lightly.
The risk that the very notion of the West will be degraded, or that the unity between the European West and the American West will be compromised, may explain why even conservative figures such as Timothy Dolan, cardinal and archbishop of New York, have joined the compromise, or at least declare that they appreciate the choice of rebalancing.
The same can be said for the positions represented by Ruini, a key figure in the CEI (Italian Episcopal Conference) during the papacies of Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger. Massimo Franco, writing in Corriere della Sera, clearly sees in the appointment of Prevost, an American, a rebalancing – also due to the re-evaluation of the Curia's experience – but also a response to the intrusive attempts of the Trumpian world.
For the Church, breaking the taboo that seemed to prevent the United States, the leading nuclear and capitalist power, from providing a Pope, means showing surprising courage and self-confidence
. After more than a century, the name of Leo XIV indicates openness to the world and at the same time firmness on principles
. And it disarms those who in recent years have thought they could use a supposedly weakened Church for their own interests
.
Therefore, there is a link between the crisis the Church is going through and the Atlantic decline, and this is even more evident in the crisis in the world order and in its wars. The question of how much the Church can offer itself to the world's ruling class with the ambition of representing its moment of unity, in the dialectic of unity and scission, needs to be clearly defined. Andrea Riccardi wrote that war is an almost impossible condition
for the Catholic international
, or, in another version, that it is a very accident-prone condition
.
The fact is that the Catholic conception is not that of Karl Kautsky, or not only that; there is no belief that inter-imperialist
alliances or super-imperialism
can avoid the moment of scission. You can hold it back, but you cannot avoid it.
We addressed this question twenty years ago, considering the Vatican's cards in the new strategic phase
. The Vatican's advantage over reformism is that it can grasp both modernity and its crisis factors at the same time:
In this, religious ideology has more arrows in its quiver than reformism. It can follow the same social practice, but it does not need to apologise for progress or to absolutise the reconcilability of capitalist contradictions. In the Catholic vision, there is ultimately room for political catastrophe, for crises, for war, and for the irreconcilability of the conflicts on which the State is built, because everything is referred to a Supreme Reconciliation that is not of this world. Augustine's City of God cannot be identified with the Earthly City, one might add today.In this sense, the ideology of resignation is in step with the times. Its ultimate task, as the last century has shown, is to accompany the unfolding of those crises and wars, dosing out grieving compassion, preaching resignation, but also playing a role of order and mobilisation in maintaining social cohesion.
Riccardi's La guerra del silenzio (The war of silence
), published in 2022, uses new archival documents to investigate the controversial question of Pius XII's silence
on Nazism and the Holocaust, but in doing so, it seems rather to want to make a more general point about the Vatican and war. It reconstructs how the group around Pope Pacelli, based on the experience of the First World War, developed its strategy in the changed conditions of the Second. The choice was to leave it to the national Churches to decide how to deal with the various collaborationist governments, and not to place German Catholics in the contradiction of double obedience to the Church and to the State.
What unites the strategy in the two world wars, we believe, is that allowing oneself to be divided becomes the condition for representing unity. In the Second World War, this meant preserving the very existence of the Church, of course, but in general it means offering oneself to the ruling class at all junctures of the dialectic of unity and scission. Only in this way would it remain interchangeably compatible with the post-war reconfiguration of the system of powers.
It would be reductive to see only duplicity and hypocrisy in this position. It seems to us that in their conception, in their true false consciousness, it is a matter of realism about the human condition, one that knows how to discern the lesser evil, how to conceive of the carrying of the cross by the local Churches, and knows that brothers have always killed each other as Cain killed Abel, and so on. Our position that war can be prevented with the communist revolution is, in their eyes, the anthropological error of believing that man alone can be the architect of his own salvation, a temptation of the Devil.
One question remains to be answered. As the crisis in the world order deepens, we see two possible developments: a chain of regional crises and wars or a conflict between great powers. Perhaps historians will remember 1989-91, with its effects of half a world war on the European chessboard, as the beginning of the world war in pieces that Bergoglio spoke of; after all, it was then that the irruption of Asia and China began to accumulate tensions for the other half of the strategic confrontation, i.e., the Asian chessboard.
Augustine wrote The City of God in the final phase of the Empire, after Rome had been sacked by Alaric's Visigoths in 410 CE; the vances of paganism blamed Christianity and the abandonment of the ancient gods for that catastrophe. That political theology is also a theology of decline. Today, Leo XIV, the pope of multipolarism, is also Augustine as the American pope, since America is no longer the superpower that guarantees order. Is the Vatican's perception of the decline of the United States and its consequences – including war – in the crisis in the world order so acute? And is that why they are consulting the archives on the Vatican and war?