Every so often a single image does the work of twenty speeches.
This week’s image was the old photograph of young Robert Prevost in 1983, marching in Comiso, Sicily, in protest against the Cruise missiles installed under Ronald Reagan. That protest was organized by the Italian Communist Party. The old photograph fits the man now sitting in Rome with unnerving precision. It looks like an early disclosure.
Plenty of men did foolish things in youth. Plenty of old photos deserve to stay old. This one does not. This one matters because the instincts visible in the background of that march have never really left the stage. The moral vocabulary may be dressed up now in ecclesiastical language. The slogans may be softened into “peace,” “dialogue,” “encounter,” and “the Gospel.” The old left-wing reflex is still there all the same. Suspicion of the West. Suspicion of political realism. Suspicion of force even in the face of aggression. Moral preening in place of judgment. Humanitarian abstraction where Catholic order should stand.
Conservatives who spent the first weeks of this pontificate soothing themselves with the thought that Leo would somehow be a corrective to Francis now have to deal with a problem they cannot laugh away. The old photo has explanatory power. It helps make sense of the present.
Leo XIV Joined a Communist March Against Ronald Reagan in 1983
Go Pope Muddler II
See also “Vatican’s China Deal AIDED Persecution Of Christians”
Pope Muddler I