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On the 4th of July last, on the occasion of the United States’ 250th anniversary, the two most influential Americans of our era faced off from afar. While Donald Trump staged the might of a nation determined to reclaim center stage in Washington, Pope Leo XIV urged, from the island of Lampedusa, to care for the most vulnerable by setting politics the most ambitious goal possible: to give a spiritual, cultural, legal, political, and economic form to a civilization of love. This encounter is unequal: how can one not align with the pope? Yet it is precisely this instinctive reaction that should give us pause. If reason seems so obvious to us, then why Trump? How is it that he found himself at the White House twice, carried by tens of millions of votes, and why do voters across the Western world keep rewarding those who resemble him?
By elevating to the dizzying ethical height of the civilization of love, by speaking to us of the world as it should be and as we would want it to be, the pope exorcises power. While Trump is merely power, looking cynically at the world as it is—steeped in fierce conflicts of interest, retaliations and vendettas, drones, dollars, and blood—the moral politics of the American pontiff thus reflects in the amoral politics of the United States’ president. While Rome retreats into utopia, Washington displays a hyperrealism so exaggerated that, paradoxically, it often loses touch with reality: this mirrors an era and a deep political crisis we are living through.
The Morality Without Politics of Pope Leo
The papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas denounces abstractions and utopias. It rejects the idea that social doctrine could be reduced to a “manual of principles and norms” and warns against “the illusion of a technique promising to liberate us from all fragility,” a conception one might label perfectionist in the sense of an old line of thought. The encyclical acknowledges that real transitions occur through discontinuities, that history is uneven, fragmentary, and sometimes conflict-ridden, and that there is no single model of change or global solution. Yet when it comes to politics, this caution vanishes. Skeptical of the salvific claims of market and technology, Magnifica Humanitas yields to perfectionism when it contemplates how to govern the world.
The morality without politics of the American pontiff thus reflects in the politics without morality of the United States president.
Giovanni Orsina
The public authorities are not exempt from the encyclical’s demands. The list includes “fair rules and effective protections” for the digital realm, policies ensuring “the continuity and quality of employment,” as well as investments in education, family protection, the fight against new forms of slavery, and the inequalities brought about by automation. “Moreover, in the age of AI and robotics, one can no longer rely solely on the market’s ‘invisible hand,’” the text states, adding: “Politics has the mission of steering economico-technological dynamics toward the common good.” At bottom, the encyclical’s ultimate horizon is the same as the Lampedusa discourse: the “civilization of love.” An expression also used by Paul VI in the 1970s, which since has traversed papal history, without ever having been so close to becoming a genuine political program.
It is precisely because it asks politics to be perfect that politics is forbidden, or at least strongly discouraged, from getting its hands dirty with power. In the encyclical, power appears almost exclusively in pathological forms. The final chapter, titled “The Culture of Power and the Civilization of Love,” describes an era in which resource abundance and the capacity to dominate take precedence over the common good. It tells of a new Babel, a tale of a clash between imperialisms seeking to preserve or seize supremacy. It condemns “unbounded force,” the technical might that does not make us more capable but rather isolates and exposes us to vulnerability, as well as the opaque power of the digital giants that escapes public control.
Not only is the brute force of means called into question. The only power Magnifica Humanitas recognizes as good is the power that has ceased to be. It is the power of God that “manifests itself fully in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). It is authority so fragmented that it nearly disappears, according to the “logic of subsidiarity,” “to each his share of the wall.” It is the “servants of the coming Kingdom,” opposed to the “masters of towers doomed to collapse.” The Magnificat resonates in the encyclical’s title, with its reversal of the mighty and the exaltation of the humble. In each of these figures, power is only legitimate when it renounces itself, becomes weakness and service, and disperses itself.
The only power Magnifica Humanitas recognizes as good is the power that has ceased to be.
Giovanni Orsina
Thus emerges a double movement whose ultimate consequences are dangerously antipolitical: on the one hand, the perfect horizon of the “civilization of love,” against which any political reality can only appear as profoundly insufficient and petty; on the other hand, a power so subordinated to ethics that it is deprived not only of legitimacy and autonomy, but ultimately of any real capacity to act. Chapter V of the encyclical devotes a full section to the tools for building the civilization of love, yet there is not a single lever of power or any constraining mechanism. Instead, there are dispositions of mind, verbal acts, spiritual practices, “responsible planning,” “human and social impact assessments,” and “inclusion.” Extremely ambitious objectives paired with ineffective tools: the malaise of mature democracies that Michel Crozier warned about half a century ago.
Like power, Magnifica Humanitas also doubles down on realism. On one hand, it condemns as a “so-called political realism” the attitude of those who take into account war, the use of force, and the tragic dimension of the human condition. It denounces this as a capitulation, even a moral fault. On the other hand, it asserts a “healthy realism” that does not reduce politics to morality but starts from interests and power relations to judge what can be obtained. However, when it comes to the means to be employed, the reasoning always stops just before coercion: credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, and above all, not yielding to evil and keeping hope. In short, even realism must first cease to be itself in order to be virtuous.
Returning briefly to Donald Trump. The White House decision to open hostilities against Iran, a central point of disagreement between the American president and the pope, can be discussed on several levels. The American administration violated international law. Yet it pursues the aim of subduing a power that, for decades, has flouted international law by stoking conflict and fueling instability in a vast region of crucial importance, directly or via proxies. On the other hand, one may doubt that military offense is the best way to end Iran’s influence, given the prominence of cheap drones in the conflict and the strategic importance of the Hormuz Strait. The discussion could go on, and if the objective is neither to deepen it nor to end it, one must simply note how Magnifica Humanitas makes it impossible by smothering it from the start. In the encyclical, the resort to force is allowed only as “self-defense in its strictest sense,” which by definition condemns any war against Iran. Even if, a few years hence, we found that Trump had made the Middle East more stable, more peaceful, and safer—or that Iranians live a better life under a less oppressive regime—the American initiative would nonetheless remain illegitimate. Law and morality trump political opportunism. And since law and morality are anchored in the present, while political opportunity is measured over time, it is the short term that overtakes the long term. Alcide De Gasperi was fond of repeating that a statesman turns to future generations. But the more morality and law limit his political maneuvering, the more he is forced to content himself with mere observation.
Even realism must first cease to be itself in order to be virtuous.
Giovanni Orsina
Magnifica Humanitas pits two biblical archetypes against each other: the vertical pride of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9), emblem of homogenization and technocratic efficiency, and the horizontal rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls (Nehemiah 2-6). Nehemiah, who “does not impose solutions from above” and “rebuilds relations before stones,” appears here as an icon of subsidiarity and communal redemption. Yet this reading erases the political power and coercive force threaded through the biblical text. In the historical setting of the text, Nehemiah is a military governor acting on behalf of the Persian Empire. Not only does he secure defense against external enemies by coordinating workers who “worked with one hand and held their weapon with the other” (Nehemiah 4:11), but he also imposes order internally with unwavering resolve. In the book’s final chapter, collaborative leadership gives way to coercion: “I rebuked them, and I cursed them; I struck some of them, and pulled out their hair” (Nehemiah 13:25). By omitting imperial severity and its sword, the encyclical idealizes Nehemiah’s political realism and transforms an ancient tale of political duty into a manifesto of relational ecology and fraternal cooperation.
The Civilization of Antipolitics
Since the Church is a spiritual guide and not a political entity, one might legitimately wonder what sense there is in expecting anything different from a pope. The aim here is not to demand he say something other than what he has said, nor to lecture him on theology, but to highlight how the encyclical aligns with the civilization of antipolitics and anti-power that has crystallized over the last fifty years and is currently in crisis. If we agree with Magnifica Humanitas, it is because we share its spirit.
This spirit has a history I have already tried to trace. It was born from the great individualistic wave of the 1960s, the belief that everyone could determine their own destiny without having to submit to an authority, a tradition, or a community. At first, this wave took shape in a political tendency that sought to revolutionize the world by mobilizing the masses in the public sphere.
But very quickly, subjective autonomy and collective action clashed. Once the millenarian promise fell, politics came to be seen more and more as a disciplinary machine. Not an instrument for promoting authentic individuality, but a constraint on it. In the 1970s, the link between politics and revolution, which had traversed the 20th century, broke, and the State, “once seen as the vector of the future,” became “an obsolete monster.”
Utopianism then veered toward three apolitical, indeed antipolitical paths. The first is ethics: the liberation of the individual becomes a matter of conscience and is entrusted to universalist morality, not derived from the concrete ties of a historical community, but constructed by rebelling against them. The second is the law: the guarantee of subjective emancipation is entrusted to magistrates, constitutional courts, and independent authorities, and, domain by domain, it is removed from political decision-making to be entrusted to the judiciary. The third is the market, considered as a mature and definitive mechanism, able to coordinate billions of individual choices better than any government, and to generate more wealth if politics withdraws.
Decade after decade, we have gradually unlearned politics in its most noble and disturbing sense.
Giovanni Orsina
Ethics, law, and economics thus converge toward what I have called the “radical historical order.” Emancipated individuals will no longer be governed by the discretionary power of a minority, however elected, but by systems of abstract and objective rules administered by specialized institutions, courts of justice, central banks, or international technocracies. This is a utopian order that, inheriting from the 1960s, aspires to a final state of perfection. It knows neither irreconcilable conflicts nor irreparable fractures: in the long run, all games will inevitably yield positive results, and what the rules cannot improve will be corrected by economic growth and processes of moralization.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of communism, this utopian impulse reached its apex and spread to the entire planet. Born from the revolutionary and universalist vocation of the West, this new radical historical order conceived itself in a de-Westernized form and could thus dream of peaceful expansion to the rest of the world. The era’s reference texts state this clearly: in 1999, Thomas Friedman claimed that “freedom of the press would arrive in China,” propelled by market globalization, and Bill Clinton, applauding China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, promised that “freedom would spread thanks to mobile phones and modems.” Thus, decade after decade, we gradually unlearned politics in its most noble and troubling sense: the capacity to arbitrate with authority between conflicting values and interests, to make choices and to enforce them, even for those who do not share them. Magnifica Humanitas brings to fruition an attitude already rooted in each of us.
Democratic Christian Europe
It is no accident that this disposition traces its historical origins to the transformations that have marked the culture of democratic Christians in recent decades. Indeed, they have always approached sovereignty with suspicion and difficulty and viewed the idea of a distinct, transcendent authority governing the political body from above as a theological error, before it is a political error. For them, the state is merely an instrument in service of social pluralism. Christian democracy judged power acceptable only if it was distributed downward, within communities and families, and upward, within a supranational order. In postwar European constitutions, representatives of this tradition sought to legally constrain politics by recognizing and strengthening protection of preexisting natural rights, and then fostered the creation of international institutions to constrain national democracies deemed fragile and unstable. They thus built, brick by brick, a complex system aimed at eliminating the dimension of power from human reality.
The different strands of Christian democracy experienced the Cold War in various ways. Some leaned more deeply into anti-communism and deemed it necessary to resort to Realpolitik tools to push back the Soviet threat, while others remained more critical of power and continued to prioritize human rights and intermediate bodies. If the confrontation between blocs undeniably conditioned relations between Christian democrats and power, the balances began to shift as early as the 1960s, under the influence of the transformation process launched by the Second Vatican Council, the crystallization of conflict in Europe, and the gradual crisis of the Soviet model.
During this decade and the next, the Christian democratic tradition faced the power of the individualist revolution. It could not embrace it, for individualism remained, in the name of the person rooted in the community, a historic adversary. Yet it also struggled to oppose it, for the traditional social and cultural fabric on which it relied was increasingly weakened by secularization and modernization. One can thus say that the convergence—neither peaceful nor definitive, of course—between the drive toward subjective self-determination of the 1960s and Christian personalism ultimately occurred on ethical grounds. If the individual holds rights, acts in the market, but also carries a solid moral conscience, if their freedom opens to communal solidarity and their horizon broadens to all humanity, then one can accept it, even from a Christian democratic perspective.
The history of human rights confirms this hypothesis. According to Samuel Moyn’s interpretation, it is the Christians who founded them in a conservative frame, between the 1930s and 1940s, guiding them not toward the autonomy of the individual, but toward the achievement of duties, in an anti-totalitarian and anti-liberal perspective. When rights experienced a rapid global rise in the 1970s, secular progressives claimed their promotion. But Christians were able to integrate into this movement, because they recognized their own work in it. It thus became possible for them to adapt to this radical historical order and share its values, provided they are moralized: individualism, distrust of the State, and a supra-national vocation.
John Paul II was the last great geopolitical pope.
Giovanni Orsina
With the collapse of the common communist adversary, the main reason Christian democrats kept talking with Realpolitik since 1947 finally ceased to exist. John Paul II, one of the architects of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, became, once the enemy had disappeared, the most persistent opponent of the two Iraq wars. In 1991, he found himself almost alone, facing Western capitals and Arab governments, insisting that war is “an adventure with no return.” In 2003, as his emissaries shuttle between Baghdad and Washington to try to prevent the invasion, he warned that war is “always a defeat for humanity.” John Paul II was the last great geopolitical pope and marked the end of this period for the Church.
The Europe that emerged into an institutional framework the Christians’ distrust of sovereignty. Without tracing back to the origins of the European Communities and the role played there by Catholic political leaders, the acceleration of integration, between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, which led to the European Union, was made possible precisely by the decline of the political. This is demonstrated by two interpretations that are, to be sure, opposed. According to the first, democratic in spirit, this acceleration was the means by which national ruling classes, after the collapse of the postwar social compromise, evaded their duty to govern their own societies by transferring power to Brussels and turning nation-states into member states. According to the second, liberal in inspiration, it represented the victory of rules over discretionary power: integration that removes barriers is a success, while the integration aimed at building governing capacity is destined to fail. In either case, a united Europe grew all the more as political power withdrew, delegating competencies from sovereign decision to norms, to judges, to central banks, and to the market.
In the early 2000s, under the impulse of the second Gulf War and the “war on terror” led by George W. Bush, the idea of a Europe as a “civilian power,” then a “normative power,” became almost programmatic. Some said that Americans came from Mars and Europeans from Venus, and that the postmodern Kantian paradise in which Europe lived was made possible by the shield of those who remained, in a Hobbesian sense, in the realm of force. Europeans turned this accusation into pride: while Washington invaded Iraq, claimed the right to wage preventive wars, and treated international law as an obstacle, Brussels offered the world not power but its “transcendence,” achieved by the path of law and integration. Some even promised that the new century would be European.
Return of the Universe
One then understands why Europe’s recent four-year awakening, since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, is so slow and laborious. A Union breached in its security tries to relearn the “language of power”: German rearmament, a 150-billion defense fund, the now famous report prescribing competitiveness and a genuine “foreign economic policy,” redefining power in terms of economic security and reduced dependencies. But this difficulty is structural; it does not stem solely from scarce resources or slow procedures. A Union formed in an era of depoliticization and shaped by it cannot be politicized by decree. It was born round in a round world, and now that the world has become square, it cannot transform itself.
It fails to do so, first because it does not know at what level to reshape itself into a square. Some would politicize the supranational center by equipping the Union with a government, a budget, and a people worthy of its new missions. Others wish to restore decision-making power to the capitals, in the name of the only truly existing democratic legitimacy: national legitimacy. There is also the intergovernmental practice of summits between heads of state and government. These three answers paralyze each other, for sovereignty would require a single subject, while there are three in Europe contending for that title.
It was born round in a round world, and now that the world has become square, it cannot transform.
Giovanni Orsina
To this adds the heavy record of unkept promises. For three decades, Europeans were assured that they lived in a quasi-perfect world, even in a civilization of love: peace was secured, prosperity was a trend, and rights were in perpetual expansion. Today, that same public finds itself in a terribly imperfect world, utterly defenseless against these imperfections. This is Crozier’s failure: on the one hand, an impatient demand for miraculous solutions, and on the other, a reluctance to provide the means without which no solution can be guaranteed. We find the wondrous promises and missing tools of the encyclical, but now on a continental scale, with thirty years of lag.
The deepest difficulty is cultural. Europe struggles to rethink the world in its new configuration and to imagine a compromise between the universalist ethics that underpins it and the reassertion of particularisms. It remains suspended between morality without politics to which it is accustomed and politics without morality, which the populist forces wield with growing success. The power it exorcised returns to haunt it: the vote for those who resemble Trump, on both sides of the Atlantic, expresses a frustrated demand for protection that a powerless Union cannot satisfy.
We have built, brick by brick, a complex system aimed at eliminating the dimension of power from human reality, yet the exorcised power comes back to haunt us.
Giovanni Orsina
That does not mean that a morality-free politics is a viable medium-term solution, even from a security standpoint. A world as deeply interconnected as ours cannot live without rules, and those rules require an ethical foundation to function. If the old normative and moral solutions no longer work, if they have been overloaded with expectations to the point of devouring politics, then new ones must be found and a different balance must be struck.
Increasing entropy by unleashing crude power politics may make sense to demolish an order that is no longer fit for its time; yet it makes no sense when it comes to rebuilding another. On the line between the pars destruens and the pars construens, the hyperrealism of a morality-free policy turns against itself, leading to a refusal to see our world as it really is. It can even degenerate into a delirium of omnipotence. And reality ends up eluding both politicians and moralists.
This crisis speaks to everyone, but especially to the political forces aligned with the European People’s Party. It is they who built Europe, and it is from their crisis that right-wing populists feed. The task facing Christian democrats is to find a new balance between universalism and particularism, and to relearn how to confront the conflict between identities and opposing interests without fully renouncing a humanitarian morality.
The Church does not assist them on this point. The world is no longer that of the postwar era, when the communist challenge compelled Christian democrats, and the Vatican with them, to a certain dose of political realism. Magnifica Humanitas presents us with a pontificate that is completely unbalanced toward universalism, eager to indicate the utopian culmination of the civilization of love. It is a grand ethical aim, but not at all a guide to action, and it is a discourse that feeds strong antipolitical impulses, as we have seen. Today’s Christian democrats are thus called to undertake a vast cultural project and to conceive a new Realpolitik that is not devoid of morality, but that can also respond to the concrete demands of European public opinion.