Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Matt McManus: Yeah, it’s a real pleasure to be here.
McManus: Well, I’m sure we’re going to learn a lot more about the new pope’s views over the next couple days as people scour everything he is ever written and everything that he is ever said. The choice of the name Leo is itself significant. Pope Leo was widely regarded as the “People’s Pope” or the “Workers’ Pope” because he is one of the founders of Catholic social teaching. Now, to be clear, the O.G. Pope Leo was by no means a socialist or a Marxist, the way they, say Laura Loomer, is trying to imply that the current Pope Leo is a Marxist. But he did stress that there were significant problems with capitalism that led to the emergence of things like atheistic socialism and atheistic Marxism and called for a conciliation between workers and capitalists that would favor the workers—or at least better their conditions. So I think that in itself is telling about the direction that he is planning on going in.
Sargent: Well, MAGA is not happy about any of it. Charlie Kirk accused the pope of “retweeting George Floyd propaganda.” Laura Loomer erupted over the idea that the Pope seemed to endorse the need to pray for Floyd, calling him a “career criminal” and “drug addict.” MAGA figure Sean Davis called the Pope anti-Trump and pro–open borders. Listen to this from MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec.
Sargent: So the problem with the pope is apparently that he doesn’t hate criminal illegals enough and attacks the idea of states having borders. Matt, I don’t claim to know that much about Catholic teaching, but it sure seems like these MAGA types don’t know much about it either. Can you talk a little bit about what Catholic doctrine says about our duty to immigrants?
Sargent: Well, I want to bring up JD Vance here because he got into a direct dustup—if you can get into a dustup with a pope—with Francis. Vance is a high-profile convert to Catholicism. Recently, he claimed that the Trump-MAGA agenda can be defended with the Catholic doctrine known as ordo amoris, which refers to the ordering of our ethical obligations outward. The basic idea is that even if God calls on us to love all people, the practical limitations on the help we can offer to others requires us to prioritize aid to those nearest to us. That’s theoretically the idea anyway. Now, the previous pope criticized this and the new pope tweeted out an article that also criticizes it. Matt, it seems to me that you can’t defend the Trump-MAGA agenda this way because it’s not as if Trump is carefully ordering our ethical obligations outward. He systematically abandoning any and all obligations to the global poor across the board. Can you talk about that in the context of Catholic teaching?
Let’s be very clear, even by this constipated understanding of what ordo amoris stands for, the current administration isn’t doing a particularly good job ’cause it’s not exactly like JD Vance and the Trump administration are showing an awful lot of love to their fellow American citizens. I don’t think that shopping Medicare and Medicaid benefits to the very poor or sending American citizens to rot in jails far away from here is exactly expressing a great deal of love to our fellow citizens.
McManus: Yeah, absolutely. There’s always a way of defending anything, right? There are people who have defended Nazism, fascism, you name it, over the course of history, Marxist authoritarianism. But I think that any person who is genuinely concerned to get Catholic social teaching, or just basic ethics, right will look at what the administration is doing and say, Not no way, not no how. Just to give one good example, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of our current age is Charles Taylor from McGill University, formative influence on me amongst others. Taylor has reprimanded the Trump administration time and time again for a lack of ethical seriousness. And that’s not meant to be a joke, right? It’s not like there’s anything funny about this. These are people who just think about the basic moral duties that most of us have and see them as not applying to them. And I think that any person who is concerned to be a good person—let alone a good Christian—should take a pause and think about whether or not it’s right to support this administration given all that.
McManus: Oh God, yes, to coin a bad pun there. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is taught to every Christian child from a very young age; I think I got my first crack at it when I was four or five or something when they gave me one of those kids books on the Bible. And the basic injunction there is: Someone is attacked on a road and several of his own countrymen basically walk by and don’t want to have anything to do with them, and then the Samaritan comes and sees that this person needs help and helps him out. And the lesson is, according to Christ, when you’re asked, “Who is my neighbor?” the answer is anyone who acts like your neighbor. And you’re supposed to act like everyone’s neighbor, if at all possible, right? Now again, that does not mean that you’re supposed to be so self-denying that you don’t look after yourself or you don’t look after your family or you don’t look after your kids or whatever it happens to be ’cause you’re so busy sending money to someone else’s kids. It’s Mrs. Jellyby altitude like we find in Charles Dickens.
Sargent: Right. Isn’t the basic concept that you’re supposed to, through meditation and reflection, try to appreciate the situation, the plight, the humanity of people on evermore distant rings of these concentric circles? Isn’t that the concept?
Sargent: Well, let’s close this out by talking about post-liberalism more broadly, which you write wonderfully about. Matt, I thank you for all your work on that stuff. I have learned so much from it, I can’t tell you. I recommend it to people. So what would the post-liberals say in response to us? Obviously, there’s a heavy Catholic component to a lot of the post-liberal thinkers. What would they respond to our characterization of MAGA and the inapplicability of Catholic doctrine to it?
Sargent: Matt, what happened to Athens after that?
Sargent: Well, MAGA is certainly not a movement that embraces humility in any sense, is it?
Sargent: And Trumpism as well. I just want to make a point about this, which is that MAGA and Trumpism thrives—it gets its energy, its spiritual energy, if that’s the right term for it—from meanness to the outsider, hostility to the outsider, demonization of the outsider. -liberal rights simply won’t reckon with this in any real sense, will they? What do they say about that obvious fact? Do they have anything to say about it at all?
Sargent: Well, MAGA America, anyway. That’s the topic of worship.
Sargent: Well, just to finish up, all these MAGA influencers are not what you would call intellectuals, but they actually do drink pretty heavily from the stream of post-liberalism in some sense, right? If you look at someone like Charlie Kirk or Jack Posobiec, or even Laura Loomer, the ones we talked about and the things they’re saying now, what’s the continuity between the intellectual roots of the post-liberal right and what we see from these rather colorful figures there?
Sargent: When these right-wingers say things like the new Pope is a George Floyd fanatic, and George Floyd was a drug dealer and a criminal, and that the new pope is pro–open borders and pro-illegals, isn’t that itself downstream from these intellectual movements? How do you draw that link from the intellectual roots of the new right, the post-liberal right? How does that flow right into the ugliness we see from these influencers?
Sargent: So the heaping of disdain and abuse on immigrants illegals, George Floyd, that’s downstream of Christian nationalism, basically.
Sargent: Matt McManus, thank you so much for coming on. I recommend Matt’s books to all of you, and his articles. Like I said, I’ve learned a ton from him. Thanks so much for coming on, Matt.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: MAGA Fury Boils Over at New Pope’s “Anti-Trump” Views )
Also on site :