Learning to Rehuman: On Pope Leo XIV

A father suited for the world as it is.

St. Peter’s in Rome, 2022

My last piece was about the death Pope Francis. (Start there if you’d like.) Today, I’m following it up with this piece on our new leader, Pope Leo XIV. This is not a Catholic piece, though I’m Catholic. You all know the drill: comments are open.

This is a reader supported newsletter, so if you like what you’re reading,

1.

All nature can be observed, examined, turned over in fingers as a coin. We—all of us—are nature, and so, we can also be turned again and again as a ring. We can be measured, observed, and contemplated. Words can be written about us. Those words can be true or not. This is the way of language. This is also the way of humans. Truth and lies can share a common core.

During the great and heaving pandemic of 2020, everything coughed and sputtered. Businesses shuttered. Grocery stores emptied. People worked, connected with family, and practiced their religion via Zoom or Google. YouTube exploded. Algorithms fed us our preferences as we watched the world enter a modern dark age.

In that great fit of global wheezing, Amber and I lived on the side of a funky hill the locals call Mount Sequoyah. Our house was once topped with a minaret, we were told, before the remodel years earlier. The house up the hill flew Tibetan prayer flags. One home looked as if it was abandoned, except for the eight dogs that lay in the front yard and came in and out of a perpetually open door. Our neighbors were professors, businessmen, grade school teachers, former hippies, and restaurateurs. Before the pandemic, Republicans (my neighbors to the east) and Democrats (my neighbors to the west) watched each other’s front doors and watered plants during vacation.

Deer ran through the woods on that funky hill, and chipmunks darted across the blacktop in the mornings and early evenings. It was both wild and tame, feral and neighborly.

In 2020, though, that hill was smothered in great silence, much like the rest of the world. It was the kind of silence that drives some to madness. In the middle of that silence, in some feral fit, a lonely neighbor opened their front door one evening—was it 6:00?—and let out a wild howl. Another neighbor responded, raising her own great Yawp. Then another. And another. Amber made her way to the front porch, cold concrete under bare feet, and she let out her own great noise. It was a tiny way of signaling to the pack—we are still here.

Christmas came, and the yuletide trees and twinkle lights went up in the windows. The new year came, and the trees on the street didn’t come down. January rolled into February. February rolled into March. The months passed as months do—so forth and so on—and by the late days of spring, the pack had made a silent but collective decision. The Christmas trees and twinkle lights would not come down anytime soon. The trees would blinker in all their glory night after night, sending that same reminder to the night walkers—We are still here.

We finally emerged in earnest sometime in March 2021. Restaurant restrictions lifted, return-to-work initiatives initiated. And as the great winter thawed, as we began rubbing shoulders with humans again, I noticed something different. The shift.

I cannot say how it happened exactly, at least not with any provable data points, but here is what I believe to be true: isolated as we were for as long as we were, we became whatever algorithm we consumed during that pandemic year. Some became sourdough aficionados on account of Jack the Baker or photographers on account of Peter McKinnon. But others—and this I experienced first-hand—consumed darker algorithms. Some drank from the well of conspiracy or fundamentalism or political ideology. Some became woke or anti-woke or Neo-con or anti-neo-con. They became and became and became until their pre-pandemic person was a shadow. A memory. Maybe a specter.

Without a shepherd, the consumers had become consumed by their lesser angels.

Consume pleasure. Consume ideology. Consume sourdough or photography or porn or MAGA or anti-MAGA or Never Trump or Christian Nationalism or whatever. Consume until the virus of your choosing infects every part of you. Become radicalized. See the other as the enemy. Cast them as Marxists or Fascists or Nazis or rapists or murderers or animals.

I am no sociologist, so I cannot prove this, but maybe we became a new species during the pandemic lockdown, an algorithmized species who’s capacity for humaning had been hijacked by big-data companies located on the West Coast or the Left Coast or the Silicon Mecca or whatever you’d like to call it. And though we were free to mingle in restaurants, worship in church, and belt out-of-key renditions of “Sweet Caroline (Ba! Ba! Ba!)” in karaoke bars, some weren’t quite sure how to reenter the world without carrying our radicalized baggage with us. Some of us weren’t sure how to deal with those who carried that baggage because our anti-radicalization was its own sort of radicalization. We were struggling for language—whether truth or lies—so we entered as toddlers.

It’s only been a handful of years since our reemergence, and here we are, kindergartners learning to interact again. And we’re doing such a marvelous job of it.

Okay boomer.

Whatever, gen-exer.

Quit crying millennial.

Touch grass, boomer.

Shut up iPad kid.

And just as we’ve gotten our walking legs under us, the Lords of Silicon gave us a shiny new object. AI.

Hang with me. This is going somewhere.

2.

In the liminal space between Pope Francis’ death and Pope Leo’s birth, Titus and I were driving the farm roads between Springdale and Goshen. Our conversation meandered to pointed question—Dad, how can I know whether something someone says about the Bible is true? I rattled off something that sounded spiritual—reading the scriptures, pray for wisdom, maybe use a commentary, yada yada yada.

Sure, he said, but shouldn’t we also listen to the priests and Cardinals and Pope? I mean, those guys have spent their whole lives studying spiritual stuff.

Spiritual stuff.

I conceded his point. They certainly know better than I do, I said.

I carried Titus’s comments into the following morning. There, I sat at my desk with a livestream of the Vatican smoke stack piping into my third computer monitor. In the late morning, a steady stream of white smoke emerged.

Habemus papam!

We—the toddlers—have a Pope.

The announcement was made. Cardinal Robert Prevost was the new papa, and he’d take the name Pope Leo XIV. Then, I did what the pandemic trained me to do. I turned on YouTube and Twitter and streamed hours of commentary about this new Pope. I’d never heard of him. Neither had most of the talking heads on social media, and still, the opinions streamed across platforms as opinions do. (Who needs to be an expert to have an opinion anymore?)

Those streams were filled with the noise of toddlers. Some declared him a progressive, a continuation of the Francis socialist agenda. Less than forty-eight hours later, many of those voices would flip-flop, declaring him a true conservative and the vicar of Christ because he offered a prayer in Latin. (If you know, you know.) Many voices called him the Pope for our time. Days later, those same voices declared him out of touch when they discovered he’d spoken out against same-sex marriage.

The opinions were formed by what? I suppose they were formed by what some call “research,” which is a fancy way of saying I hopped on Google or ChatGPT, asked a few questions, and formed an opinion within minutes. Such is the way of the talking heads; such is the way of people.

Humans—all of us—turned and turned through the fingers of God.

3.

In one of his first public addresses, our new Pope—Leo XIV—spoke about why he’d chosen his name. Looking back to history, he noted the similarities of this age to the age of the last Pope Leo—Leo XIII. Pope Leo XIII’s day was marked by the exploitation of the worker during the Industrial Revolution, the co-opting of human freedom by those who controlled the machines. He turned his pen to the topic, writing a papal encyclical entitled “Rerum Novarum” (or The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor).

I’ve now read that encyclical, and as the kids say, it’s gas. It’s conservative in that it espouses the rights of private land ownership and the private means of production. It’s progressive in that it begs the wealthy to protect the welfare of the workers, to not let the machines turn people into machines. Put another way: It’s difficult to categorize in modern political boxes.

In “Rerum Novarum” Pople Leo XIII wrote:

Now, for the provision of such commodities, the labor of the working class - the exercise of their skill, and the employment of their strength, in the cultivation of the land, and in the workshops of trade - is especially responsible and quite indispensable. Indeed, their co-operation is in this respect so important that it may be truly said that it is only by the labor of working men that States grow rich. Justice, therefore, demands that the interests of the working classes should be carefully watched over by the administration, so that they who contribute so largely to the advantage of the community may themselves share in the benefits which they create-that being housed, clothed, and bodily fit, they may find their life less hard and more endurable. It follows that whatever shall appear to prove conducive to the well-being of those who work should obtain favorable consideration.

In explaining his choice of name, Pope Leo XIV spoke of the similarities of this age and the age of his predecessor:

Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.

Pope Leo XIV understands the times. He understands the children who are part of it. We—all of us—live as toddlers in this new age, an age marked by technological revolution and algorithmic human hijacking. We futz around with AI and automation and robots and social media under the great promise of an emerging technocratic oligarchy: These things will make everyday life easier, more connected, more productivity; they will lead to a massive economic boom, universal income without labor, maybe even a utopia. But if we turn the algorithm through our fingers, if we’re honest, what do we find? The world has become darker, more disconnected, infinitely more cynical. The algorithm is un-humaning us. Put another way, we’re becoming chimps wielding loaded guns. We need a re-humanizing force; a father for our age.

4.

For a brief season, the world lay awake in the night, fatherless. Now, we’ve been fathered again. And though he may not be your religious leader, though you may be Baptist or Methodist or Muslim or Atheist, this does not mean that his wisdom does not outstrip our own.

---

The Examine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.