Should the American Pope Debate the American President? Jack Hanson on the Radical Reformation of the Catholic Church

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Should the American Pope debate the American president about good and evil? The shameless Trump, one suspects, would relish a noisy cage match with a rival American celebrity. But Leo XIV has quietly declined the invitation — a refusal that the Catholic scholar Jack Hanson insists is neither cowardice nor convenience. Rather, as Hanson argues in this month’s Harper’s cover story, “Radical Reformation,” it’s because the church has become the last global institution able to provide a coherent moral compass for our rootless times.

The great irony, Hanson notes, is that the church was the first victim of the legitimacy conflagration now engulfing every other institution. His history begins in 1870, when Rome lost the Papal States and, for the first time in a millennium, had no earthly kingdom to defend. Ever since, the church has been reorienting itself — lately, against political, economic and military power.

That opposition to worldly power was always a strand within the apostolic tradition, Hanson reminds us. Thus the Gospel’s “antinomian communists” who stayed behind in plague cities, Thomas More’s attack on private property, the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day, liberation theology. What’s new is that the Vatican itself has embraced this political tradition of questioning Caesar.

Then came 9/11. In the war on terror, Hanson argues, the secular West redefined its enemy not as a rival religion but as religion itself — and the church stopped being Western civilization’s moral crown jewel. John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraq War was a preview. Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI — Magnifica Humanitas, complete with an apology for the church’s role in slavery — is a more mature realization of this radical reformation.

No wonder, then, that Leo has no interest in a cage match with Trump. “A direct debate with a president who’s going to be out of office in a couple of years isn’t in his interest. It’s too small a task,” Hanson explains. As the latest in a very long line of God’s representatives on earth, Leo is playing the long game. He can afford to wait out a noisy Caesar or two.

Five Takeaways

• The Last Moral Voice. Institutional legitimacy — of churches, states, the organs of governance and community — is in free fall, and the great historical irony, Hanson argues, is that the Catholic Church was the first institution to face that crisis. When Rome lost the Papal States in 1870, it lost a thousand years of political centrality and has been reorienting itself ever since. Over the last twenty years, the church has ceased to see the West as its spiritual home and reconfigured itself as a genuinely global institution — positioned, almost paradoxically, against power as such. Which is how the paragon of institutional crisis has returned as maybe the last moral voice on the global stage.

• The Radical Tradition Was Always There. The subversive strain Hanson traces runs from the Gospel itself — the early Christians as “antinomian communists” who held everything in common and stayed behind in plague cities — through Thomas More’s attack on the enclosures (the first great critique of private property in Western history), Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, and Latin American liberation theology. Hanson doesn’t flinch from the two Thomas Mores problem — the property radical was also a persecutor of heretics — because the church is full of sinners; you wouldn’t need one otherwise. What’s new is that the Vatican itself now orients toward the radical tradition rather than serving as the avatar of institutional power.