Where the New Pope Came From: The Pope he named himself after gives us a hint of where he plans to go

In the five years since I began writing the Twilight Patriot Substack, I’ve had occasion to mention only one pope — and that was the medieval Pope Innocent III, who appears briefly in my essay on the Magna Carta.

If you’re a Catholic and you believe that these men are chosen with the aid of the Holy Spirit, then the reason for refusing to put them in political boxes should be obvious. If, like me, you’re merely an astute observer of events, then just remember how John Paul II annoyed the traditionalists by kissing the Quran as a gesture of friendship to Muslims, and how Francis annoyed the liberals by complaining about the frociaggine (i.e., “faggotry”) in the Vatican. These “factions” in the Church, and their respective popes, are not as different from each other as the news industry tries to make us think!

This was also the reason that, when the American Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected last week and became Pope Leo XIV, I wasn’t at all surprised by the regnal name he chose. After all, popes and cardinals and bishops are also annoyed by the attempts by outsiders to cast everything they do in a factional light, and every new pope naturally wants to emphasize unity and make it clear that he’s a pope for the whole Church. But reusing the name of any recent pontiff — for instance, by becoming Pius XIII, John Paul III, Benedict XVII, or Francis II — would align oneself with a faction.

Francis tried to get around this problem by naming himself after a saint (Francis of Assisi) whose name had yet to be used by any popes. But this was a radical enough move that if the next pope had done the same thing,

Parts of the article are pretty dense (esp. the quotes from "Rerum Novarum").

Bottom line: the best way to harmonize labor and capital is for the Church to mediate along moral lines, recognizing that all human beings have different abilities and talents, but also that the laborer is worthy of his hire and should not be exploited.

Pretty straightforward. You can call it classical liberalism or libertarianism or moral capitalism. But essentially it's the intent to preserve every individual's right to liberty and property.

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