Promoting Unity, Pope Leo Needs No Divisions

A Day That Proved Trump's Smallness, Leo's Promise

It’s common to call the president the most powerful man on earth. But U.S. power isn’t what it was just six months ago. Hours after Pope Leo’s election, some analysts were making the case that Leo may have become the most powerful American in the world—he had pushed Trump into second place. Yesterday’s spectacle erased all remaining doubts.

Because I attended meetings for planning it, I know that the Archdiocese of Chicago was not trying to counter-program Donald Trump’s June 14 military parade when a celebration and Mass at Sox Park were planned for the same day. The coincidence had more to do with the White Sox’s schedule and ballpark availability. No one was looking for a way to make a statement. No one expected the starkness of the contrast to present itself so easily. Then again, almost no one expected Pope Leo.

The coincidence delivered such a jarring juxtaposition because these two Saturday events, coincidentally, marked the end of such a terrible week. We have seen peaceful protests in Los Angeles called insurrection. We have seen a United States senator forced to the ground and detained. We have seen U.S. Marines arrest an American on American soil. We have seen political assassinations. Donald Trump has escalated his performative abuse of power to a disturbing new degree, and it seems only to be getting worse.

According to estimates, we also saw more than five million Americans go to the streets on June 14 to protest Trump—a staggering rebuke that surely will only incite Trump’s rage further. His military parade drew 3,700 spectators. Maybe ten times more people were at Sox Park than were at the parade.

In a video message played for that crowd at the ballpark, Pope Leo spoke about hope. He urged us to “build up friendship.” He spoke of how God “only asks us to be generous and to share what he has given us with others.”

In his homily for the Mass, Cardinal Blase Cupich was more direct—“Humanity is greatly diminished whenever the unborn or the undocumented, the unemployed, the unhealthy are excluded, uninvited, or unwelcome.” That line drew noisy applause because it spoke to something fundamentally Christian and also reflects the values that have always made America great. People responded naturally to what appeals to their better natures.

It all invites us to reflect a little on the nature of power. While Trump stood over and over to salute the soldiers and military equipment he deployed on his birthday, simple joy and hopefulness on beautiful day at the ballpark seemed to counter-program the military parade even though nobody planned it that way. The greater power of friendship and solidarity invited the comparison all on its own. And, a good case can be made that friendship and solidarity defeated the bleak spectacle that filed joylessly down Constitution Avenue in Washington. The power of that joy was greater.

Joseph Stalin is said to have asked, “How many divisions does the pope have?” He meant to suggest that the pope’s moral power paled next to a national state’s military power. I think we know differently. Power lies in what moves people to action, not what coerces them into compliance. Clutching at power with military spectacles only looks feeble by comparison with the Pope’s smile and welcome.

This pope does just fine without divisions. He knows we all do.