For God’s Sake Don’t Save the Pope
by Corey David
Similar to King Charles’ lavish coronation, the new Pope and the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed endless mass media coverage and fanfare during the Vatican’s recent succession exercise. World leaders’ fawning congratulations attempted to reinvigorate this thoroughly disgraced and increasingly irrelevant institution. Branded as anti-Trump, but also as “America’s guy”, Pope Leo presents the mirage of a political balancing act. He started his reign by denouncing the atrocities inflicted by the Zionist state in Gaza, while offering no meaningful material support to its victims, totally in line with his western counterparts.
Unfortunately, continuing attacks on public services and a world pushed deeper into crisis are creating an opportunity for the Church. The evidence of the under funding of public schools is the deteriorating conditions in classrooms. A failing economic system and unaddressed societal challenges condemn more people to live in poverty. War and raw resource exploitation generate refugees and humanitarian crisis. At a time of growing unrest and profound uncertainty, the Church is ready, once more, to mystify the nature of power and obscure the truth for the benefit of the ruling rich. Jesus must have rolled over in his cave when Pope Leo met with JD Vance, an architect of mass deportation of migrant workers perpetrated by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). The Pope, it seems, prioritizes the powerful over the meek.
The institution is political. It organizes anti-abortion activities around the world. It runs publicly-funded schools that promote Catholic dogma, and which reserve the right to discriminate on that basis. It now officially teaches that women are equal to men, but it denies women membership in the priesthood and full equality within the eminently patriarchal organization. Pope Francis’s humanist attempts at recognizing LGTBQ peoples’ rights and his rescinding of the Doctrine of Discovery (the Church's blessing of colonization) did nothing to challenge the Church as a bastion of conservative power. Its immense wealth and property, much of which was stolen from Indigenous people or amassed via conquest in religious wars, remains intact.
As public schools deteriorate and are the targets of conservative propaganda, some parents say the Catholic Church-run schools seem to be a safer or superior environment for their children -- this despite a history of institutional, internally concealed child abuse. In 2021, in memory of residential school victims, little shoes were placed at the entrance to Catholic churches across Canada. The symbolic protest was part of a general movement of Indigenous justice-seekers centered on residential schools and pointing to the countless missing and murdered Indigenous women. Despite formal public inquiries, solemn apologies, and small compensation payments, governments and the church made none of the harmed peoples whole again. The popes, the church and the state refuse to declare themselves guilty while they continue the criminalization of those same disenfranchised peoples.
Religion is cultural and individual, but it is not a licit tool for persecution. Of course, the Catholic Church is not the only criminal religious body to lay waste to whole peoples. It is, however, a sanctified authority within the Canadian establishment. Catholics, too, have suffered violence and persecution. It is everyone’s inherent right to espouse a faith or no faith, and to associate freely. Originating in the time of St. Peter as a rebel underground movement in Rome, it has for the majority of its 2,000-year history been an instrument of empire, a weapon of discrimination, imposing the shackles of subjugation across almost the entire world at one time or another. Catholicism was forced on peoples, from the bloody civil wars across Europe to the near complete destruction of native society and culture in the Americas, Philippines, Australia, and parts of Africa and India. Though it was tied to various empires, it was often a full-fledged partner in brutal crimes of oppression and plunder. So, while ecclesiastical reforms that move in the direction of justice warrant support, the Church remains an oppressor of women and queer people. It persists as a thief and subjugator of colonized nations, acting at the behest of state power with which its roots are tightly intertwined.
Movements to reclaim stolen culture are growing as consciousness of the reality of the Catholic church is increasingly exposed, and its position is weakened. Needed is a wholesale rejection of the criminal capitalist system that takes advantage of the fear, insecurity, judgement and supremacy preached by the church pushing substitution of this life for lofty ideas of eternal salvation. With a few partial exceptions, church and state are partners in diverting dispossessed, marginalized and working class people from organizing for a fundamentally just and equitable world. People anxious about the future will find no lasting solutions from those who promote their absolute faith in justice in the hereafter. Workers and communities must come together, to understand each other and the world, to confront the material conditions, and to build a force that can uproot the manufactured inequity, to dismantle the system, its pseudo-kings and their agencies. The associated producers can build a better world for all through organized, purposeful community and labour. The prospect of liberation may not offer immediate comfort in abundance, but it is a path wrought in the experience of history. There are no saviours, and there is no substitute for the masses in the work of liberation.