“Catholicism outlived the Roman Empire. We’ll outlive the American Empire too.” So a Jesuit priest once told me at a pub in New York during my time as an O’Hare fellow at America. Those words have been ringing in my ears lately because, for better or for worse, it seems that the U.S.-led global order is coming to an end.
President Trump is likely more a symptom than a cause, but few would dispute that the global influence of the United States is waning. In Yemen, the Houthi militant group appears to have waved off our bombing campaign, with President Trump even commending their bravery. The American defeat in Afghanistan still reverberates, while U.S. support for Israel even as the latter starves out Gaza undermines our moral authority and diplomatic standing around the world. Lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia seems as distant as ever, but these days, no one really expects the U.S. government to be the one to successfully mediate such conflicts.
Into this age of American decline comes the first American pope. He is really more of our second Latin American pope, having Peruvian in addition to U.S. citizenship and speaking Spanish but not English during his first blessing from St. Peter’s balcony. His south-of-the-border perspective surely helped the College of Cardinals get over the taboo against picking an American. But perhaps so did the realization that the age of uncontested American power is coming to an end.
The pope’s selection of his name seems especially relevant in this context. Pope Leo XIV himself has acknowledged that his selection of the name was inspired in part by Pope Leo XIII, who wrote “Rerum Novarum,” the encyclical that affirmed the church’s support for workers and labor unions. But the name also evokes Leo I, known as Leo the Great, who bore the burden of the papacy during the final death spiral of the Western Roman Empire. Venerated as a saint, Leo I is credited with the miracle of convincing Attila the Hun to abandon his invasion of Italy in 452. It is said that at Mantua, in what is now northern Italy, Leo I rode out, with no army of his own, to meet Attila face to face.
We will never know exactly what was said in that meeting. Some claim Attila saw a vision of St. Peter and St. Paul wielding swords; at least that’s how it looks in Raphael’s fresco of the scene in the Vatican. Modern historians have proposed that disease had already begun to eat away at Attila’s army and that the retreat after the meeting with Leo was a perfectly rational strategic choice. But the Huns being defeated by microbes could very well have been an act of God. We can say that Pope Leo I saved Rome, not with the power of the sword, but with the power of his faith, which was rewarded.
Three years later, even with Attila dead and gone, Rome was in worse shape. The emperor Valentinian III had ordered the assassination of General Flavius Aetius, Rome’s most competent military leader, who had previously defeated Attila’s invasion of Gaul. Valentinian was in due course himself assassinated by Aetius’ friends. The next emperor, a wealthy Roman oligarch named Petronius Maximus, sought to solidify power by marrying his son to the daughter of the slain Valentinian—breaking a previous treaty with the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa, wherein Valentinian’s daughter had been promised to the son of King Gaiseric, the ruler of the Vandals. A Vandal army was soon at Rome’s gates, and Petronius Maximus was murdered by a Roman mob for cowardice while attempting to flee the city.
Into this vacuum of leadership, Pope Leo I again stepped in. Though he was unable to repeat the feat of convincing the invaders to turn back, he did secure a promise from King Gaiseric to spare the civilian population during the Vandals’ sack of Rome. The first St. Peter’s Basilica became a refuge throughout the Vandal invasion, and the people of Rome avoided much of the violence that would otherwise have been inflicted.
I have often imagined Pope Leo I celebrating the first Mass in Rome after the Vandal invasion, gathering the humbled elite alongside those who had always been poor, and maybe even a handful of the barbarian invaders. He may have reminded the Romans that the important things would always be there, and to get on with living as God intended, even amid the ruins.
It is this moment, perhaps more than his miracle with Attila, that truly makes Pope Leo great. The Catholic faith had already made the remarkable journey from a small and persecuted sect in Roman Palestine in the time of the Emperor Augustus to the state religion of the Roman Empire. The title pontifex maximus, or high priest of Rome, which Augustus had claimed for himself as emperor, had passed to bishops of Rome, the successors of St. Peter, who now led a church from the very spot where Peter had been crucified upside down. But the path Pope Leo I started the church on was just as remarkable, and even longer lasting: the transition from an imperial state religion to a universal church above any temporal power. It was the leadership of men like Pope Leo that ensured Catholicism would endure far longer than the Roman Empire would, with consequences even Pope Leo I could not have foreseen.
A miraculous endurance
This ability to survive the rise and fall of world orders would pave the way for Catholicism to become the largest religion across the Americas, the continents that have given us our two most recent popes. If the Roman Empire converting to Catholicism was a miracle, Catholicism enduring beyond the Roman Empire’s fall was even more miraculous.
Leo is thus a fitting name for a pope to bear in our current age of imperial decline. It is a reminder that our faith rises above contemporary politics and above temporal authority.
Pundits have been quick to parse Leo XIV’s statements, his biography and his social media accounts for clues to his political leanings. I received numerous texts from friends, Catholic and non-Catholic, asking if the new pope is liberal or conservative, left or right. The very question, implying the notion that individuals must first know the pope’s policy positions before deciding whether we respect his authority, is a decidedly modern instinct, where duty and loyalty is always chosen and contingent, never inherited or unconditional.
But Catholicism’s great strength is that it draws on a moral tradition that is older than any modern social order. The church is perfectly situated to critique the unjust society of our times precisely because it is able to draw on values that preceded us. The church can be with us, in the here and now, confronting the poverty, violence and misery of the world around us. And yet it can transcend our world too, because it is not of it.
So remember: Our pope wants us to be good to migrants and the poor not because he wants any particular candidate to win an election, but because they are also equally divine beings, worthy of mercy and possessing the inherent dignity of being made in God’s image. The current political moment is simply not his concern. Like his namesake, Pope Leo XIV is here to shepherd us through all the crises to come with our focus fixed on the things that last.
It’s quite the thing to outlive the age you were born into—in our case, the era of American global hegemony. We cannot know what the rest of the 21st century will bring, but there will surely be winners and losers in the transformations, just as there were winners and losers in the fall of the Roman Empire. Whether we play Vandals, Huns or Romans, our first American pope can offer comfort in the fact that our church, which predates and will outlive the country of his and my birth, will always be there for us, even as one empire inevitably gives way to the next.
