Pope Leo XIV addressed the members of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation in Rome on May 17, expressing a concern that “there is so little dialogue around us; shouting often replaces it, not infrequently in the form of fake news and irrational arguments proposed by a few loud voices.”
The pope advised that “deeper reflection and study are essential.” He said that the signs of the times call for a pause, a moment to “rediscover, articulate, and cultivate the [church’s] mission of educating in critical thinking.”
Just days later, the president of the United States offered a vibrant demonstration of the kind of worst-case scenario Pope Leo may have had in mind about the collapse of critical thinking. Somehow undeterred by the previous Oval Office ambush of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, in March, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa came to Washington on May 21, seeking to halt a serious slide in relations between the United States and his nation.
The spectacle the world was treated to suggests Mr. Ramaphosa was not successful. According to The New York Times, after a journalist asked what it would take for Mr. Trump to see that there is no “white genocide” in South Africa, the U.S. president subjected the press, and his distinguished guest, to a video presentation that will live in diplomatic infamy. A gob-smacked Mr. Ramaphosa watched scenes of his political opposition, the Economic Freedom Fighters, throwing red meat to its supporters.
Mr. Trump provided commentary during the show, at one point noting a row of hundreds of white crosses along a South African roadside. “These are burial sites…over 1,000 of white farmers and…those cars aren’t driving, they’re stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Ramaphosa.
That, of course, was not true. The farmers who erected those crosses told BBC News that they marked not burial sites but a protest in memorial for neighbors, Glen and Vida Rafferty, who had been killed on their farm in August 2020. Tragic and unacceptable those killings were, but they don’t constitute evidence of a genocide directed by the South African government. Two local men, in fact, were convicted of robbery and homicide in the Rafferty killings in 2022.
Other “evidence” of white genocide shared by the president was similarly based on erroneous, hyperbolized or completely fabricated reporting collected from dubious sources off the wondrous World Wide Web—including a printed-out blog post with a photo from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and not, as Mr. Trump implied, from South Africa. (America’s Johannesburg correspondent, Russell Pollitt, S.J., reported in February on the rejection of the white genocide accusation by South African Christian leaders.)
But exiting the meeting, Mr. Trump, oblivious to the uproar that followed his treatment of a visiting dignitary, seems as convinced as ever of his Elon Musk-induced fantasy of white genocide in South Africa.
No one would deny that violent crime is a serious problem in contemporary South Africa, including Mr. Ramaphosa, who acknowledged the matter in a fruitless effort to convey some truth about his nation to Mr. Trump during their meeting. South African police recorded 19,696 murders from April 2024 through December 2024, CNN reported.
But according to the data, only a handful of victims were farmers. Only willful distortion can transform those numbers into a charge of genocide.
The president has the best intelligence gathering teams in the world at his disposal, career civil servants and members of the U.S. military who could easily provide evidence for his allegations of white genocide or blow holes in them. Based on his performance this week, he prefers instead to place his trust in dubious reporting harvested from the internet and the poisonous counsel of a high-placed advisor who has demonstrated alarming gullibility in his own consumption and promotion of internet disinformation.
Is Mr. Musk acting out of racist and paranoid tendencies? Is the president? I can’t read their hearts and minds to say so one way or another. Viewers of the spectacle in the White House and consumers of fact-checked and fact-based reporting can draw their own conclusions.
But what comes of official policy when it is based on erroneous, hysterical or conspiracy-addled disinformation? We are watching that play out in real time, and it ain’t pretty.
In his speech to the Centesimus Annus Foundation conference, Pope Leo offered a modern mission statement for leaders and communicators of all stripes: Yield to truth and confound scandal and discord with reason that remains patient and attentive to nuance.
He even suggested a solid new source of “news” and wisdom. The poor, he said, are “a treasure for the church and for humanity. Their viewpoints, though often disregarded, are vital if we are to see the world through God’s eyes.”
The pope seems committed to exploring that world in Rome. Here’s hoping that perspective somehow finds a welcome in Washington as well.
