KJS DC 5.26
This is the opposite of what leadership looks like in Washington
Last week, the Pope drove the popemobile into a square in southern Italy called the Land of Fires.
People were waving yellow and white Vatican flags. Some were holding up posterboards with pictures of family members who had died. Not politicians. Not donors. Families. Mothers and fathers and children of people killed by toxic waste that the Camorra mafia dumped illegally for decades while authorities looked away. A region the European Court of Human Rights called the Triangle of Death — named for the abnormally high rates of cancer among its residents. S
He didn’t send a representative. He went.
He said he came to “gather the tears” of families who had lost loved ones to related illnesses.
Gather the tears. When was the last time you heard a powerful person say something like that? Not “express condolences.” Not “acknowledge the concerns of.” Gather. The. Tears.
He urged the world to “reject temptations of power and enrichment linked to practices that pollute the land, water, air, and social coexistence.” He called out “the dizzying profits of a few, blind to the needs of people, their work and their future.” He said “unscrupulous people and organizations have been allowed to act with impunity for too long.” The
This is the first American Pope in history. And he is standing in a place where poor people got cancer from mafia waste while governments did nothing, telling 1.4 billion Catholics that profit without conscience is not economics — it is a moral crime.
I love it so much.
On Monday he released his first encyclical. It addresses AI being used in warfare and the erosion of workers’ rights by automation.
Think about that. The most powerful religious leader on earth — a man from Chicago, an Augustinian friar, a former missionary — is releasing a major document next week on algorithmic warfare and economic displacement by technology. Not as a side note. As a primary moral concern for the global Catholic community.
This is the opposite of what leadership looks like in Washington right now.
Washington is approving mango-flavored nicotine pods for children. Barring the IRS from auditing a president forever. Redirecting Palestinian tax money into a reconstruction fund the president personally chairs. Selling access to American foreign policy through a memecoin. Arming a war zone while accepting an olive-wood peace pen from this same Pope.
And Leo — quiet, specific, present — keeps showing up in the places power ignores. Cameroon. Acerra. The Triangle of Death. The AI ethics debate. The war that nobody in Washington wants to call by its name.
He is not performing compassion. He is practicing it. Publicly. Stubbornly. With his body, not just his words.
I am Catholic. I have not always been proud of my church. The institutional failures are real, documented, unforgivable in too many cases. I hold all of that.
And I also hold this: there is a man in a white cassette standing in a square with people holding photographs of their dead, saying the thing that needs to be said, to the people who need to hear it said, on the same day that the most powerful government in the world is busy exempting itself from its own laws.
Love in politics doesn’t look like a bumper sticker. It looks like a four-hour visit to the Triangle of Death on a Saturday morning because the people there needed someone to show up.
He showed up. Presence. Empathy. Justice. There it is.