An ‘Aide-Memoire’ for Pope Leo

Offering advice to a pope is a presumptuous thing – for anyone. In the Church of synodality, however, where everyone is supposed to have a voice – and be listened to – perhaps not so presumptuous as once upon a time. Still, such counsel should be offered in a spirit of loyalty and concern, as a kind of aide-memoire – in the classic diplomatic sense of providing a leader with information and analysis. Not about dogmas, Creeds, and long-settled matters such as any pope should already know. But as a help in understanding how things, important things, stand, which a pontiff may not be adequately aware of, shaped as he is by what the French elegantly call a déformation professionelle, and what we Americans, more technologically minded, regard as an “information silo.”

So let me embark on this diplomatic task, just as a personal exercise (as if one had been asked), made slightly more complicated by the fact that Pope Leo is an American who has mostly lived abroad for much of his adult life. And half-sees, perhaps half doesn’t, what I’m about to say.

I start from the recent controversy over the relationship between Europe and America, because it’s about much more than politics – and is revealing. I’m in perfect agreement with the pope’s recent remarks that the Transatlantic Alliance is of the utmost importance. And I concur that some of the ways that the Trump Administration has couched its recent National Security Strategy (NSS) might give an unsympathetic or hasty reader the impression that America is about to give up on Europe.

But this would be to overlook a deeper commitment to Europe, indeed to something cultural and – dare one say – religious, far more important than political, economic, and military policies, which come and go. As the NSS says early in a section titled “What Do We Want”: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” (Emphasis added.) And, therefore, what the NSS is seeking to promote, as well as to warn about, is – more properly understood – something about which the Roman Pontiff himself should be concerned. Deeply.

Where the NSS is critical of “Europe,” it’s mostly speaking of the progressive and unaccountable European Commission, which is the real policy-maker in the European Union. The EU is a body developed over decades in the aftermath of the disaster of  World War II with the hope of forever banishing such intra-European destruction. And to a large degree and for a long time, it worked, thanks to the influence of three heroic Catholic figures: Konrad Adenauer in Germany, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy (the latter two now up for formal sainthood, not just for their political contributions, but the holiness of their lives).

And behind them all stood the Christian Democracy elaborated by the great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, which exposed and rebutted the anti-human principles of the twentieth-century totalitarianisms – Communism, Fascism, Nazism. And also sought to make clear what has now become painfully evident: that even Western “democracies” will fail if they don’t recognize how they depend on a Christian vision of human persons and society.

Christian Democracy, as an organized political movement, has gone the way of all flesh since the disappearance of the Soviet Union. But in its day was an important bulwark in keeping Communism out of Italy, France, and even parts of Latin America. It even made backstage contributions to the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights via various actors.

The world has moved on, however, and it would be a very idealistic Christian today who would regard the UN or the EU as incarnations of a Christian vision or even a classical secular understanding of human affairs. Indeed, the opposite would be closer to the truth. And amid their current leaders there are no future saints.

All this is deadly serious – yet has been mostly absent from public discourse until JD Vance in his Munich speech and now the NSS. As a British commentator put it (there are good reasons why Britain “Brexited” the European Union), the EU today – which is to say, again, the globalist EU bureaucracy, not the European nations as such – operates as if it were being run by America’s terminally woke National Public Radio.

Its pieties are not Christian or classical. The older forms privilege the family as the first cell of society, subsidiarity and localism, a solidarity that is robust but doesn’t only express itself through the state (a one-sided focus that historically runs the risk of “soft” tyranny). Rather, the EU has become an engine for toxic novelties such as the LGBT agenda, even seeking to force it on member countries whose sovereignty is guaranteed by subsidiarity in the European charter and where democratic majorities have repeatedly rejected that recent sexual concoction.

And then there is the question of massive immigration. Much of Europe is now waking up to the unwisdom of admitting millions of Muslims whose culture cannot be squared with Western mores. Indeed, uncomfortable as it is to say in nations where we hoped religious pluralism for all could flourish, Islam itself is, in large historical perspective and despite all the necessary qualifications, a threat to Western ways. The question of relations with Islam cannot be resolved by simply repeating the false mantra that it’s a “religion of peace.” It is, but only after conversion, conquest, or submission.

The pope, like his predecessor, has a soft spot for migrants. And both have encouraged a new title for the Virgin Mary, Comfort of Migrants. But sympathy should not decline into sentimentality. And especially in Europe, which was invaded and threatened by Islam for over a thousand years, history matters.

And yet the European Commission, which is not transparent or responsive to democratic pressures, tries to make it appear that pushing back against woke pieties or defending national cultures – populist reactions that have parallels in America – are threats to democracy and a rejection of common European values. The NSS argues, persuasively, that the opposite is closer to the truth.

Pope Leo, too, has suggested that the “populism” ascendent everywhere in Europe now, from Ireland to Poland, Sweden to Sicily, is using fear of Islam to oppose immigration. One may appreciate his desire to protect vulnerable people in flight from evil regimes. But this is precisely backwards. People fear Islamic immigration for good reasons. Few fear immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, or India.

It’s the presence of millions, often enough militant Islamists – along with the massacres at Paris’ Bataclan Theater and Charlie Hebdo, the martyrdoms of Christians in European churches, those same churches being burned (2 per month in France), the assaults on Christmas markets, hand grenade attacks in Stockholm, knife attacks and rapes in Germany and the UK, 2,000 documented anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe in 2024 alone. And there’s the spinelessness of mainstream European politicians – Paris just canceled its New Year celebrations out of “security concerns” – that has turned ordinary people who would be happy to live and let live into dedicated opponents of further assaults on their cultures and very lives.

The United States is right to ask in the NSS whether the EU bureaucracy as currently constituted or particular European countries, if they continue to bow to Muslim pressures within, will remain reliable allies. It’s no secret to anyone who travels often in Europe these days that you get quite an earful in private, even from people who are mainstream liberals, but who fear speaking out in public. Several European governments now charge people with “hate speech” or creating “community tensions” for merely saying what everyone knows.

Pope Leo has taken a strong stand against what he’s termed “false mercy” in the wholesale granting of marriage annulments. But there are other forms of that same impulse that have taken hold in the Church, above all, the belief that “dialogue” and openness are remedies for everything. They aren’t, even inside the Church, as anyone with eyes can see in the endless self-absorption of the synodal way

And outside, reality confronts us. Venezuela has become a crossroad for regime-enabled criminality – drugs, human trafficking, repression, attacks on the Church. And all that along with providing a welcome to Russian, Iranian, and Chinese agents, terrorists linked to Hamas and Hezbollah – as Nobel Prize Laureate Maria Corina Machado, a brave Catholic woman, has pointed out. Is “dialogue” really an effective stance against such evildoers? Machado doesn’t think so, hence her support for American pressure.

All this points to a need for a different aggiornamento in the Church – and a more robust Catholicity. It’s good to worry about the possible future dangers of AI or the environment. But there are present dangers that cannot be dealt with by clinging to an obsolete globalist vision of openness and tolerance of many things that seemed plausible in the 1990s and early 2000s, but are no longer tolerable.

There’s some kind of large turning point happening in our world, though its shape is still unclear. But it’s a spiritual as well as worldly turning. And the Church – and especially a pope – should be fully aware of it. And on what should be the rare occasions when a pope should speak about worldly matters, leading it.