I don’t envy Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV. He inherits a modern tradition of Catholic social teaching ill-suited to the 21st century. This tradition was developed to deal with the rise of the aggressive and muscular secular state. The crises of our time will require a new approach, one that addresses the disintegration of social forms, including nation-states.
From the outset, church leaders called for rectitude and virtue in those who rule. In Book V of the City of God, St. Augustine took up the ancient tradition of depicting the ideal ruler, an image of perfection meant to serve as a mirror for princes, goading them to rise above self-interest and love of power and glory to serve justice and promote the common good.
Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, moral exhortation of this sort comprised the main element of Christian political teaching. That the highborn were to rule was taken for granted. The ambition of the church was that they might rule well, loving peace rather than war, executing justice leavened by mercy, and promoting true religion.
The modern era brought great changes. The French Revolution overthrew the ancien régime and its complacent assumptions about whom God ordains to rule. New metrics of social wellbeing emerged, those of liberty, equality, and fraternity. These are political, not moral ideals. They demand the redistribution of power and the reordering of society.
The instrument necessary to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity was the modern state, a legal and bureaucratic machine that does not rely on God for its legitimacy. In revolutionary France, the state subordinated Catholicism to its authority, stripping the church of properties and requiring clergy to swear oaths of allegiance. The state asserted an absolute right to define and enforce the covenant of marriage. It even took possession of time, imposing an entirely new calendar keyed to the birth of revolutionary freedom rather than the birth of Christ.
“Catholicism resisted the modern state.”
Throughout most of the 19th century, Catholicism resisted the modern state and its assertion of controls over spiritual and civic life. The dominant Catholic project was the restoration of the ancien régime and its high ideals of governance based on piety, honor, and noblesse oblige. Yet in the development of this project, leading Catholic thinkers could not help but adopt modern methods. After all, restoration, like revolution, is a political project. It too requires grasping the reins of state power to sweep out the new and replace it with the old. Thus, restoration became a modern “ism,” restorationism, which entered the lists of ideological competition, competing for control over the machinery of state power. After the French Revolution, it would be armies that restored kings to their thrones, not bishops or popes acting on behalf of a higher spiritual power.
By the late 19th century, the state had assumed supreme power over the affairs of men. This was true whether its organs were in the hands of liberal and republican statesmen or hereditary monarchs. Left, right, and center, newspapers became instruments for propaganda and ideology. Wars were justified as political causes.
It was in this context the last Leo on the throne of St. Peter, Leo XIII, put his mind to the task of formulating a social doctrine for the Catholic Church, teachings about the ordering of society, to supplement traditional moral doctrine, which concerns the ordering of souls.
Leo XIII identified the central principles of social health: human dignity, subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good. The principle of subsidiarity militates against the consolidation of power in the state. Authority in society should be differentiated, with parents, schools, fraternities, and other forms of association, especially the Church, ordering human affairs at different levels in accord with their distinct goals and purposes. Solidarity and the common good unite society, drawing together social classes and distinct regions into a body politic that seeks and shares in collective goods.
In his most famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII depicted the new power of capital as a threat to the human dignity of those who labor. He recognized that the traditional ethos of aristocratic paternalism was no match for the new realities of modern economic life. He assigned to the state the task of establishing a proper balance between labor and capital to protect human dignity and secure solidarity among economic classes.
The rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century made limitations on state power urgent. The gravest threat to human dignity was not economic exploitation: It was the secret police, the violence of the state against its own citizens. After the advent of nuclear weapons, the lethal menace of state power became global.
Catholic social teaching did not change, but its emphasis shifted. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Church began to embrace the postwar project of articulating and defending human rights. These rights, expressed most influentially in the 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, were seen as crucial bulwarks against state power, necessary instruments for defending human dignity. In concert with human rights, Catholic leaders endorsed the post-national ambitions of the United Nations, another instrument for defending and promoting human dignity in the nuclear age. Support for both human rights and an international legal authority became official Catholic positions at the Second Vatican Council, encoded into Gaudium et Spes, the innovative conciliar document that outlined the Church’s relation to the rerum novarum, the new things of the 20th century.
John Paul II and Benedict XVI remained loyal to these commitments. But the world was changing. The Soviet Union collapsed before the 20th century ended. With American leadership, a new internationalism was constructed, one based on market principles rather than parliamentary democracy scaled up to serve the world community, as envisioned by the idealists who wrote the charter for the United Nations. Central bankers and management consultants assumed the role of legislators, midwifing the organization of human affairs through the seemingly benign laws of supply and demand.
The defense of human rights also evolved, as did the promotion of the common good, now conceived of on a global scale. A network of non-governmental organizations emerged to address political, social, and environmental issues. The NGOs were staffed by experts and activists trained to apply technical solutions or promote moral causes now framed as natural expansions of basic human rights. Both were understood to transcend the interests of nations and domestic politics.
“The instruments designed to limit the power of the state began to supersede it.”
Put simply, as the 21st century unfolded, the instruments designed to limit the power of the state began to supersede it. This process was made explicit in the establishment of the European Union, a post-national project celebrated as the harbinger of a new world order. In that order, an efficient and equitable distribution of utilities would supplant the always messy and sometimes violent ordering of human affairs by means of political debate and contestation.
At the same time as nations and their political cultures were being transcended by market principles and technocratic management, the moral foundations of politics eroded. Pope Benedict recognized that the West had embraced moral relativism. In his speeches to the British Houses of Parliament and the German Bundestag, he warned that without the metaphysical horizon of truth the noble tradition of law-making devolves into mere exercise of power. How can we debate about which laws are good if we renounce any claim to know what is good?
The combination of post-national, neo-liberal technocracy and (often selective) moral relativism now dissolves nations. On what grounds can I justify my preference for my fellow citizens as opposed to the “world community”? In the face of a climate crisis, isn’t our duty global, not national? Aren’t “best practices” those that are determined by experts who transcend cultural particularities and “follow the science”? Isn’t unlimited immigration a human right?
The same acids dissolve the primordial society of the family. Fertility rates are declining throughout the world. Unprecedented numbers of women will have no children. The chain linking the generations is being broken. In the United States, the institution of marriage has weakened. Twenty-five percent of children grow up without fathers. People are treading water in a liquid world.
The 20th century made people in the West sensitive to the ways in which concentrations of state power threaten human dignity. A prison cell in the KGB headquarters is a fitting emblem of inhumanity. George Orwell gave powerful expression to this fate in his acclaimed novel, 1984.
But Big Brother is not the only peril. Human dignity requires a home, a place and a people to which one belongs. The ancients imposed the penalty of banishment, because they knew that it could be a fate crueler than death. The pathos of the dispossessed refugee can be greater than that of a political prisoner.
Pope Leo XIV will need to revisit the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, especially the mid-20th-century consensus about how to defend human dignity. That consensus presumed the peril of oppression. It was also sensitive to the harms done to human dignity by exclusion of outsiders and indifference toward the needs of strangers.
Pope Francis often expressed this consensus. He urged the faithful to “go to the margins.” He advocated on behalf of migrants, chastising those in the West for lacking a sufficient spirit of Christian charity. In the final months of his pontificate, Pope Francis upbraided the Trump administration for its enforcement of immigration laws and deportation of those illegally in residence in the United States. He tangled with Vice President JD Vance over the proper understanding of the order of our loves, insisting that Christ teaches that we must love the stranger in need first and foremost.
Unfortunately, this consensus not only fails to respond to the distinctive postmodern threats to human dignity, it often provides theological justification for them. Early in his pontificate, Pope Francis described the church as a “field hospital.” This image of a temporary, insubstantial institution undermines the most important role of the church in our increasingly liquid world—to provide a trustworthy, solid, and supernaturally strong home to atomized people deprived of metaphysical anchors.
The 21st century is likely to be characterized by migrations of peoples at an unprecedented scale. Rapid demographic change is among the “new things” of our era. The phenomenon invites Christian moral analysis. We need to give careful consideration to the degree to which citizens of wealthy nations have a duty to share in their abundance. We also need to scrutinize the difference between those fleeing persecution and those seeking better lives. The former enjoy a strong presumption of welcome; the latter impose a less pressing moral demand.
But the Catholic Church must also ponder the political, economic, cultural, and spiritual effects of mass migration, which accelerates the dissolution of nations already weakened by the globalized economy, deracinated by technocratic management, fragmented by multicultural ideology, and derided by utopian internationalism.
One effect has been the rupture of solidarity in the West. In the late 19th century, the Church recognized that the capitalist system threatened to bifurcate society into hostile camps, with owners on one side and workers on the other. Leo XIII urged social policies that would moderate that divide and orient economic affairs toward a living wage and shared prosperity. That ambition was realized to a great degree after World War II, when Catholic-inspired Christian Democratic parties funded social safety nets, encouraged marriage and religious observance, and established a strong economic covenant between labor and capital.
The French speak of the postwar decades as the Trente Glorieuses, the 30 glorious years. This was an era of strong nation states that mastered economic forces, while recognizing the importance of subsidiarity by defending traditional social forms from economic pressure, in many cases by providing them financial subsidies and legal privileges.
Today, societies are divided once again. The West is increasingly riven by an escalating contest between establishment elites and populist insurgents. The global economic system has enriched Western elites while undermining middle class prosperity as capital seeks cheap labor abroad—and imports cheap labor through mass migration. The same elites increasingly identify with international institutions and are embarrassed by patriotic sentiments, which they regard as retrograde and crypto fascist.
One does not need an advanced degree in sociology to recognize that the West is experiencing a crisis of solidarity. Those at the top of society are likely to dismiss the less fortunate among them as racists, while championing the cause of newcomers from alien cultures. Those at the bottom increasingly mistrust establishment leaders. The conditions for liberal democracy are eroding, as the recent judicial nullification of an election in Romania indicates, as well as the judicial disqualification of a leading political candidate in France.
Leo XIV needs to take the full measure of this crisis—and he needs to apply the principles of Catholic social teaching to discern fitting remedies, which will be quite different from the priorities of the past. Here is what I would advise:
Human dignity: Large-scale migration is a major cause of polarization in the West. The social friction it causes does not arise because ordinary people in the West fear or hate “the other,” as too many elites are quick to announce. Nor do objections to mass migration mark a failure to conform to the teachings of Christ. The uproar has intensified because more and more people in the West fear the condition of homelessness born of the disintegration of national cultures.
Demographic pressure on once homogeneous peoples compounds the effects of economic globalization, which have made all of us more vulnerable to economic competition, now conducted on a global scale. If we add secularization and technological change, the situation is dire. A person from the industrial regions of northern France born in 1950 now lives in an economic, cultural, and spiritual world profoundly discontinuous with that of his youth.
St. Augustine urged us to see ourselves as pilgrims in this world, journeying toward our true home in heaven. But this is not the condition of many in the West (or in the developing world). They are stripped of familiar forms of life, disoriented and dispossessed. Rather than pilgrims seeking their true home, they are homeless, enduring a paradoxical banishment-in-place. The Church must defend the human dignity of migrants. But she must also defend the dignity of those in the West who are experiencing other forms of dislocation.
Subsidiarity: The postwar movement to defend human rights has been transformed into a post-national project. NGOs and international courts pinion efforts by national governments to limit migration. But immigration concerns nations and regions, not the “global community.” Migration policies should be developed at the appropriate level in accord with local needs, not abstract notions such as a “right to migrate.” Pope Leo should advocate for the empowerment of national governments to establish limits and enforce borders.
Similar efforts should be made to restore the power of nations over the global economy. It is tempting to seek to erect international institutions to master economic forces that now operate at a global scale. But these measures strengthen the trans-national technocracy and move decision-making away from those affected by the decisions. Moreover, technocrats almost always serve the interests of the global economy.
“Pope Leo should affirm the legitimacy of the nation state.”
We need international institutions. But in 2025, subsidiarity requires combatting the tendency of power to flow upward to these institutions. Put simply, Pope Leo should affirm the legitimacy of the nation state.
Solidarity: In the modern era, the nation emerged as a powerful engine of solidarity. In the late 19th century, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli used nationalism to overcome class divides and enfranchise Britian’s working class. After the end of World War II, strong states oversaw the moderation of economic divisions and renewal of non-state forms of solidarity such as family, local associations, and the Church. But in recent decades, economic and cultural policies have weakened national solidarity. Nationalism has been labelled a grave evil. Technocratic management has replaced nation-based politics. Neoliberal globalization has overmastered the capacity of nations to order economic life. An ideology of human rights is used to prevent governments from according legal privileges to traditional forms of life such as male-female marriage. The upshot has not been an efflorescence of rich, dense communities at a smaller scale. On the contrary, the weakening of nations, which in the modern era has served as a glue to unite citizens, has contributed to the decline in solidarity at every level of society. Here as well, Catholic social doctrine applied to the realities of the 21st century would urge the restoration of national sovereignty and the reconsolidation of peoples united in shared loves and loyalties.
The common good: There are certainly shared global concerns: open seas for trade, care for the environment, protection of human rights, and restraint of nuclear weapons are among them. Cooperation and the establishment of institutions to address these and other concerns is certainly fitting, and in many cases urgent. But the notion of a global common good is at best thin and elusive. Jacques Maritain played a central role in drafting the UN Declaration on Human Rights. He recognized that the diversity of cultures meant that there could be no consensus about the metaphysical foundations for these essential rights. The world, taken as a whole, lacks a united mind about final ends and ultimate purposes. It is for this reason that many forms of internationalism often seem morally noble but are ineffective. They fail to inspire loyalty strong enough to motivate nations or individuals to sacrifice their interests for the sake of a common project.
A vision of the common good gains strength among those who are united in their moral ideals, spiritual aspirations, and metaphysical assumptions. This homogeneity is too often criticized as insular or otherwise prone to sins of exclusion. That may be so. But a strong vision of the common good is a powerful engine of transcendence. It motivates a man to break the bonds of a me-centered existence so that he can serve his wife and children—the common good of the family. In civil society, it draws individuals out of their isolation, joining them in collective projects. Here again, the nation plays a crucial role. It is the forum for working out the common purposes to which people of all social classes are willing to make sacrifices.
We are living in a time of disintegration. A liquid world deprives our imaginations of shared loves, without which we are abandoned to small lives in pursuit of private interests. Pope Leo XIV must take the measure of this condition: its causes and its pathologies. And he needs to recognize that any remedy requires the renewal of solid, trustworthy forms of life.
Think what you wish about the traditional Latin Mass, but the phenomenon of young people flocking to this liturgy bespeaks a desire for the anchoring power of the sacred. We should never sacralize the nation, nor should we divinize the family. But in these domains as well, our age beckons us to strengthen, thicken, and solidify what has been weakened, thinned, and dissolved. In the 21st-century West, the task of Catholic social doctrine is to guide and purify the quest for more substantial community. I pray Pope Leo XIV will help us do so.