Manuel Medina/AP Photo
A woman holds up a photo of Bishop Robert Prevost, who was elected Pope Leo XIV, in front of the Cathedral of Chiclayo, Peru, May 8, 2025, where he served as bishop for several years.
In March of 1996, while covering the Republican presidential primaries for L.A. Weekly, I spent a week traveling with Pat Buchanan, the right-wing columnist and MAGA progenitor, who was conducting his second part-protest-part-real campaign for his party’s nomination (losing the first, in 1992, to George H.W. Bush and in the process of losing the second to Bob Dole). My Buchanan week came complete with events that prefigured the Trump campaigns, including crowds many of whose members were clad in army fatigues (one of whom stood at attention through the entirety of Pat’s speech) and all of whom made clear that if they could have gotten away with it, they would have beat the hell out of the traveling press corps.
But the most surreal day on the Buchanan trail came on St. Patrick’s Day in the union hall of an Operating Engineers local. (Operating engineers operate the cranes, forklifts, and what have you on building sites.) Buchanan was there because the local, which—despite (or because of) Chicago’s multiracial working class—was openly all-white, had broken ranks with the rest of American labor to endorse him.
In his office, the local’s president explained why they liked Buchanan, but like the rest of the traveling press, I was mainly gaping at all the stuffed animals in the office, most of which the president had shot while on African safaris (most horrifyingly, a baby giraffe). The union president noted that the local had made just one solitary request of Buchanan: that he go on record opposing the efforts of some congressional Republicans to make “right to work” a federal law, rather than merely an option that the individual states could enact. Buchanan, the president told us, had complied.
Later that day, I asked Buchanan about his position on this, and he cited Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which the pope had condemned both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism and said that Church doctrine compelled the Church to support both a living wage (sufficient to support a family) and workers’ rights to form and join unions. In 1992, Buchanan had proclaimed from the Republic National Convention’s podium that our nation had descended into a “culture war”—the first use of those words to reach a nationwide audience—in which the duty of Republicans and conservatives was to oppose liberal views on race, gender, and women’s rights, and those who espoused such views, Democratic pols in particular. The party’s traditional economic concerns barely made it into his harangue.
That speech had come just one year after the Soviet Union had collapsed, robbing Republicans of what had been their defining and unifying enemy, particularly since they had routinely conflated mere liberalism with communism. Buchanan sensed a need for the party to anoint a new archenemy, and if accusations of liberals’ softness on communism no longer carried the weight they once had, then liberals’ support for women in nontraditional roles and racial minorities, gays, and lesbians in any roles would have to become the central focus of Republicans’ attacks.
Buchanan came by these beliefs honestly; he was raised in an obstreperously Catholic household that supported Francisco Franco’s fascist legions in the Spanish Civil War. But his words carried weight beyond the fascist fringe. Over the two following years, Newt Gingrich used his clout as the first Republican House Speaker in 40 years to reposition the party on Buchananite grounds. In the first decade of the current century, Buchanan broke new doctrinal ground again, penning a column that argued that Vladimir Putin’s war on gays and liberals made him a suitable partner for Republican culture warriors. And just as Gingrich had enrolled the party in the domestic culture war, so Trump would come along and at least try to take the culture war global, embracing such gay-bashing autocrats as Putin and Viktor Orbán.
But on that day in the Operating Engineers hall, Buchanan gingerly addressed the complications of a culture-war politics: specifically, the fact that there were many in the working class who strongly opposed more egalitarian changes to cultural, racial, and gender norms, but were also repelled by the laissez-faire capitalism that was traditional Republican fare. If one union local was so racist that it supported even him, the least Buchanan could do was give them a little economic ground to stand on, a position they could stomach on right-to-work. In the decades since, this semi-shift in economics has proved to be a harder sell to the Republican establishment than culture-war politics and even Putin-philia, but at least some Republicans—writer Oren Cass, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley—seem to be following Buchanan’s lead.
But it required Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to get him there. Old Pope Leo, who reigned from 1878 to 1903, was very much a traditional Catholic, but he was also the first to serve in the papacy when parts of the world, chiefly Europe and the United States, underwent conversion to industrial capitalism—at that time, almost entirely laissez-faire—featuring newfangled entities like private corporations, which employed many thousands of powerless workers who occasionally waged unsuccessful strikes that were violently repressed.
So while explicitly condemning socialism and stating that the right to securely hold property was affirmed in Church doctrine, Leo nonetheless assailed the capitalism of his day in terms that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have to alter much today. “Some opportune remedy must be found quickly,” the Pope decreed,
for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition … [T]he hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.
The capitalism Leo condemned in passages such as that one bore a pretty close resemblance to the capitalism that Marx and Engels had condemned half a century earlier. But just as that form of capitalism was routine in the early periods of industrialization, so the socialism Leo condemned was also distinctly 19th-century socialism—a doctrine, a theory, that no nation had yet put into practice. As such, it was a socialism that, despite its many varieties, still basically called for abolition of private property, and frequently came complete with a side order of atheism. As democratic socialist parties subsequently came to power over the next hundred years, they produced social democracies that Leo just might have supported. For that matter, his beliefs also came to characterize postwar Europe’s Christian Democratic parties, which now and then have run coalition governments alongside Social Democratic parties. The ideas of Rerum Novarum, while no longer necessarily theologized, spread pretty widely.
In 1906, 15 years after Leo’s encyclical, a Pittsburgh-based priest, John Ryan, implanted Rerum Novarum in American Catholic doctrine with the publication of A Living Wage, which also laid much of the groundwork for such foundational New Deal legislation as the legalization of collective bargaining and the establishment of a federal minimum wage. His arguments were also resurrected by the municipal living-wage movements of the 1990s and 2000s. And while well-heeled sectors of American Catholicism have occasionally opposed them (notably, Nixon-Ford Treasury Secretary William Simon, who favored a shotgun marriage of Pope Leo and Ayn Rand), any American Catholic clergy and laity concerned with social justice have viewed Rerum Novarum as foundational to Catholic belief and practice.
Today, many American Catholics concerned with social justice, or repulsed by the emphasis that a growing share of Catholic clergy put on right-wing culture-war politics, or just revolted by the Church’s myriad sex-abuse scandals, have left the pews and, in many cases, the Church as well. Francis sought to invigorate and extend the faith’s commitment to social justice, and his elevation of Chicago-born Peruvian Archbishop Robert Francis Prevost to cardinal and to head of the committee that elevates priests to bishops now looks to be part of Francis’s push for that social justice focus. Prevost demonstrably shared Francis’s emphasis on the rights of immigrants and the condemnation of those, like Donald Trump and JD Vance, who’ve denigrated and sought to expel them. How much of Francis’s relative inclusivity in matters of sex and gender Prevost shares remains to be seen: Prevost put three women on his who-gets-to-be-bishop committee, but also opined, during the pre-Francis papacy of Benedict, that gays and lesbians were beyond the fold of the Church’s blessings. But as for Francis’s commitment to workers and the poor, for a pastoral church working alongside them even in struggle, Prevost has clearly passed muster.
And just as Francis gave a sense of where he was headed by the choice of his name as pope, so Prevost—whom his friends apparently call “Bob”—gave a sense of his own trajectory when he took the name of Rerum Novarum’s author to become Leo XIV. For some Catholics, as Pat Buchanan indicated, you can back some worker concerns, some preservation of a welfare state, and still insist their scope be limited to the native-born or to whites only. That’s pretty much the position of some of Europe’s current nationalist, xenophobic right, like the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen. But absent the racism and xenophobia—and if we know anything about new Pope Leo, it’s that this Chicagoan-Peruvian doesn’t have a racist or xenophobic bone in his body—Old Leo’s heritage, as interpreted by the new Leo, is that of support for the borderless, universal working class.
In this time of immense economic inequality, America could use an American working-class pope. We may just have got one.
