Ramble On: Welcome, Pope Leo XIV! (video)

Morning thoughts on the new Pope, and what the white smoke at this latest conclave might herald

Good morning. I recorded today’s ramble yesterday afternoon—before the collective MAGA breakdown concerning Leo XIV (they don’t like the new Pope because the new Pope thinks we should treat immigrants like human beings) and before I knew that Robert Prevost was a Villanova grad who retweeted the basketball program celebrating its victory in the 2016 NCAA tournament (which bodes well for my New York Knickerbockers, who, this past week, have somewhat miraculously defeated the NBA champion Boston Celtics twice, in Boston, in somewhat miraculous fashion both times, and whose starting five features not one not two but three players from the Nova title team). Put it this way: if you’re a long-suffering Knicks fan, these days, you certainly feel like God’s on your side.

Here is today’s ramble:

And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. As I’m recording this, it’s Thursday, May 8th. It is quarter to three in the afternoon. We’ve had white smoke, and we have a new Pope. And that’s what I want to talk about this morning.

I feel pretty good about this, I have to say. There’s a lot of different ways it could go, a lot of bad ways it could go. And while nothing is certain, obviously, I feel like we’re on the right path again. So a couple of points I want to make:

Why is the Pope important? You know, the Catholic Church is an institution that’s been around for 2000 years, almost exactly 2000 years actually. So it’s very ancient, it’s very old, the place where it exists now is literally medieval. Why is it still important?

The influence that the Pope has over the billion and a half Catholics on planet Earth. Even though people are individuals, and everybody has their own opinions that they bring—it’s not a religion, in my experience growing up Catholic, where they order you to do things or behave in certain ways or vote for certain people—there’s still enormous influence. So what we want in the Pope is someone who’s going to be, first of all, fighting fascism, and then, moving the church into the into the…I guess the 20th century as opposed to the 15th, which is where a whole faction of the Cardinals wanted it to go.

I read that the man, the American, Robert Prevost, who is now the Pope, was a compromise candidate. That suggests to me that there were factions in there that couldn’t decide which way they wanted to go. They said this guy would be okay.

People are Catholic insofar as they go to church every week or a couple times a year or whatever, and they believe in the tenets, and they believe in what Jesus taught and how it’s applied in the Church. But there’s also cultural Catholicism. And I think this is an important distinction to make. I am not Catholic anymore, although I was raised Catholic and I am a confirmed Catholic—somewhere in that Vatican, there’s a piece of paper with my name on it. But I’m certainly a cultural Catholic. I celebrate Christmas and, you know, at least acknowledge that Easter happens every year. The way that I was brought up, half Italian, among Italians, and then my father’s side being Polish, Slovak, Eastern European: everybody was Catholic. So the way that I was raised informs who I am and who I became. So you can’t escape that really. So to me, it’s important.

Who the guy is is important, as a personal thing, too. I want the Pope to be somebody good, and it’s looking like it’s going to be somebody good. The very early signs are positive, I think.

You know how they say like, “This is the day that Donald Trump became President,” right? Because the office of the President has so much gravitas and so much power associated with it that it inherently changes the person in that position? (It didn’t change Trump, but it changes most people.) I think the Papacy is exactly that. So who goes into the Papacy isn’t necessarily who we’re going to get once the person is the Pope. All bets are off. The Pope can literally do whatever he wants. And that’s why it’s important, because it really does set the tone for the Church and for a lot of people on this earth.

So a couple of things that I think are positive. First of all, apparently he was tight with Pope Francis. Now, all of these popes—we’re not going to get, like, a progressive liberal, in the American mindset. A Bernie Sanders type is not going to be Pope. But relative to the other Cardinals, relative to the other people in the church, Pope Francis, as Nicolo Majnoni said on the podcast this week, was very progressive. So the fact that the new pope is from that school, I think that’s important.

He’s not Opus Dei, as far as I can tell. Pope Francis was going to, as Gareth Gore has written about and reported, was working on something to, I think, demote the Opus Dei / Leonard Leo faction within the Church, and didn’t get around to it. Maybe this guy will pick it up, right?

He doesn’t like JD Vance. I mean, nobody likes JD Vance, but he did write a piece that was published in the Catholic Register or whatever paper it was, you know, basically bitchslapping Vance in the same way that Francis did. So he’s not pro JD Vance, which is good. [Correction: he didn’t write it himself; he retweeted Kat Armas’s piece at the National Catholic Reporter.]

He’s very, very, as Francis was, pro-immigrant and pro-kindness to strangers. That vein of being an immigrant, right? Anti child separation, anti cruelty to humans. That was a big thing that Francis advocated for, kindness in that way. And it looks like the new Pope is going to be the same.

He’s American, which is very cool. I mean, he’s 69 years old, and he grew up in Chicago. Like, how conservative and weird can he possibly be? (Famous last words,I realize.)

I find all of those things to be very, very encouraging. And last but not least, there’s the name. So what Popes do, they don’t have their real name. They have their Papal name, right?

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. This came into being back when in the earlier days when the papacy was just, you know, kind of like almost like the White House is now—just corrupt. And the guy who was the pope was so corrupt and so disgusting and everyone knew, so he decided he would take a papal name so that when people heard, “It’s Pope Alexander,” they wouldn’t realize it was the same guy. You know, that that was a very, very cynical reason for beginning this tradition, but he began this tradition, and every Pope since then has done so.

Holy See-Saw

And Popes take names historically because they like and they want to emulate earlier Popes who had that name. Not all the time—maybe he just likes a name, who knows. But that’s generally how it’s done. Benedict picked some obscure Pope to name himself after because he was kind of conservative. John Paul II named himself after the Pope who had just died, and it’s sort of in deference to that.

But I said to my mother—we were talking after the white smoke came up, after we found out who it was, but before I found out what name he took—I said, “Well, if he’s Gregory or Leo, we’re going to be okay.” Gregory, because of my dad and me, of course, and also, not for nothing, the best pope that ever was was Gregory the Great.

And then Leo is also a sign of my dad in my mind, because that’s where he went to school: at St. Leo’s. And we had a cat named Leo who just died. But also, and more importantly than my own stuff, Leo XIII, who was the last Pope Leo—this is going to be Leo XIV—Leo XIII was Pope during the last quarter century of the 19th century, like 1875 to 1903, somewhere in there, right? And he was pretty progressive. The guy before him was not. He was pretty progressive, especially for somebody of that time period. He was very pro-working man. He was very pro-labor. He was a good Pope. So the fact that the new Pope took that name, I take as a very good sign.

Now, again, what will happen? God only knows! Because once he’s there, he can literally do whatever he wants. And there’s a lot of problems. There’s a lot of issues in the Church that he can fix. And, you know, maybe he will. He’s 69 years old. In pope years, that’s like being a teenager. Usually these guys are ancient when they come into power. Theoretically, he’s going to have a good 20 years to do stuff, at least, right? He looks pretty healthy. He looks like a nice guy. That’s important, too.

So I think we’re in good hands. It looks promising. And, you know, again, I’m sure a lot of people are like, “My God, who cares? You know, white smoke, whatever. It’s weird.” And yeah, I hear that. And yes, every time we talk about the Church, we have to talk about all of the horrible pedophile crimes that they covered up for years and years—not only covered up, abetted, for years and years. We can’t ever get away from that.

But the fact remains that it’s a major religion. There’s over a billion people who are Catholics. This doesn’t happen very often, that we get a new pope. It happens seldom. But today it happened. We got a new pope. It’s Pope Leo XIV.

As you can see, I took out all my church things. These are all statues that belonged to my grandparents—that they had laying around the house. You know, again, cultural Catholic, right?

And I’m just going to say: Welcome, Leo XIV. Bobby from Chicago! I hope you do a great job and I hope you make all of us proud: as lapsed Catholics, as cultural Catholics, as practicing Catholics, as anti-fascists, and as Americans.

Have a great weekend, everybody. Happy Mother’s Day!

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ICYMI

Another fantastic episode of The Five 8 1/2. Lisa Graves and Nadine Smith had on Jonathan Larsen, founder of The Fucking News, for a fascinating talk on media:

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And tonight, LB and I are back on The Five 8, live at 8pm ET: