Meeting diplomats, pope highlights inequality, injustice
VATICAN CITY: Pope Leo XIV recalled his immigrant roots as he spoke out on Friday against global inequality and injustice, including "unworthy" working conditions, in a speech to diplomats accredited to the Vatican. The 69-year-old, who became the first US head of the Catholic Church on May 8, also highlighted climate change, migration and artificial intelligence as some of the world's key challenges. "In this time of epochal change, the Holy See cannot fail to make its voice heard in the face of the many imbalances and injustices that lead, not least, to unworthy working conditions and increasingly fragmented and conflict-ridden societies," the pontiff said. "Every effort should be made to overcome the global inequalities — between opulence and destitution — that are carving deep divides between continents, countries and even within individual societies."
The son of a father of French and Italian descent and a mother with Spanish origins, the Chicago-born pontiff recalled how "my own story is that of a citizen, the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate". "All of us, in the course of our lives, can find ourselves healthy or sick, employed or unemployed, living in our native land or in a foreign country, yet our dignity always remains unchanged: it is the dignity of a creature willed and loved by God."
The pope, who spent around two decades as a missionary in Peru, added that "my own life experience, which has spanned North America, South America and Europe, has been marked by this aspiration to transcend borders in order to encounter different peoples and cultures". He highlighted as "challenges of our time" issues including "migration, the ethical use of artificial intelligence and the protection of our beloved planet Earth". Leo has made several calls for peace in his first week as pontiff, echoing his late predecessor, Pope Francis.
Within this context, he said there was "a need to give new life to multilateral diplomacy and to those international institutions conceived and designed primarily to remedy eventual disputes within the international community". Citing traditional Catholic values, he emphasised the importance of "investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman". He also encouraged "respect for the dignity of every person, especially the most frail and vulnerable, from the unborn to the elderly, from the sick to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants alike". Although the audience was private, the audio of Leo's speech was relayed to journalists in the Vatican press office, with an official transcript provided. — AFP
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Whether the debate is occasioned by a polemical book or a movie like last year's 'Civil War', I consistently take the negative on the question of whether the United States is headed for a genuine civil war. In those debates, it's usually liberals warning that populism or Trumpism is steering the United States towards the abyss. But with European politics the pattern is different: In France and Britain; and among American observers of the continent, a preoccupation with looming civil war tends to be more common among conservatives. For years, figures associated with the French right and French military have warned of an impending civil conflict driven by the country's failure to assimilate immigrants from the Muslim world. (The great reactionary novelist Michel Houellebecq's 'Submission' famously imagines this war being averted by the sudden conversion of French elites to Islam.) Lately there has been a similar discussion around Britain touched off by an essay by military historian David Betz that argues that multicultural Britain is in danger of tearing itself apart and lately taken up by political strategist, Brexit-campaign architect and former Boris Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings in an essay warning that British elites are increasingly fearful of organised violence from nativists and radicalised immigrants alike. When I've written skeptically about scenarios for a US civil war, I've tended to stress several realities: the absence of a clear geographical division between our contending factions; the diminishment, not exacerbation, of racial and ethnic polarisation in the Trump era; the fact that we're rich, aging and comfortable, not poor, young and desperate, giving even groups that hate each other a stake in the system and elites strong reasons to sustain it; the absence of enthusiasm for organised communal violence as opposed to lone-wolf forays. Does the European landscape look different? On some fronts, maybe. Tensions between natives and new arrivals are common on both sides of the Atlantic, but ethnic and religious differences arguably loom larger in Europe than they do in the US: There is more intense cultural separatism in immigrant communities in suburban Paris or Marseilles than in Los Angeles or Chicago, more simmering discontent that easily turns to riots. At the same time, British and French elites have been more successful than American elites at keeping populist forces out of power, but their tools — not just the exclusion of populists from government, but an increasingly authoritarian throttling of free speech — have markedly diminished their own legitimacy among discontented natives. This means that neither underassimilated immigrants nor working-class whites feel especially invested in the system, making multiple forms of political violence more plausible: pitting immigrant or native rebels against the government, or pitting immigrants against natives with the government trying to suppress the conflict, or, finally, pitting different immigrant groups against one another. (English cities have already played host to bursts of Muslim-Hindu violence.) Then, too, Western Europe's economies have grown more sluggishly than America's for the last decade, reducing ordinary people's stake in the current order and encouraging alienation and resistance. Finally, there are arguably geographic concentrations of discontent — in the north of England, or in immigrant-dominated cities that Betz warns could become ungovernable — that don't exist in quite the same way in the US. All of this adds up, I would say, to a useful corrective to the progressive tendency to regard America in the Trump era as a great outlier, uniquely divided and deranged and threatened by factional strife, while liberal politics continues more or less as usual among our respectable and stable European allies. Not so: There are clearly ways in which Europe's problems and divides are deeper than our own, with economic and demographic trends that portend darker possibilities and the establishment attempt to keep populist forces at bay may end up remembered as accelerating liberal Europe's downfall. Yet many of the reasons to doubt the imminence of civil war in America still apply to Western Europe. The continent is more stagnant than the US but still rich, comfortable and aged; there's enthusiasm for rioting but rather less for organised violence; and for all the palpable disillusionment, it is hard to glimpse any elite faction yet emerging — right or left, nativist or 'Islamo-Gauchiste' — that would see violent revolution as an obvious means to its ambitions. Meanwhile, there are distinctive European conditions that make civil war less likely there than in the US: Smaller nations with more centralised political systems generally find it easier to police dissent and there's no Second Amendment or American-style gun culture to challenge the European state's monopoly on force. Ultimately, I agree with British writer Aris Roussinos, a pessimist but not a catastrophist, when he writes that the most likely near-future scenarios involve increasing 'outbursts of violent disorder' but not the kind of collapse of central government authority, complete with ethnic cleansing and refugee flows, that the language of 'civil war' implies. And that imprecision matters: As I've suggested before, if you use a civil-war framing to describe a world where rioting is more commonplace and assassination attempts and random forms of terrorism make a comeback, you're describing realities that big diverse societies often have to live with, using terms that misleadingly or hysterically evoke Antietam or Guernica. I don't think America in the 1960s and 1970s experienced a civil war, even though those were certainly chaotic decades. I don't think modern France, with its long tradition of student protests and urban riots, has existed in a perpetual state of civil war. And as we face a future that's clearly more destabilised than the post-Cold War era, it still behooves us to be realistic about the most plausible scenarios: We are still far more likely to be navigating a more chaotic landscape together, as fellow citizens, than shooting at one another across a sectional divide. — The New York Times
