The Lion that will guard Francis' Legacy

Donald Trump and Dina Boluarte knew how to accept with greater poise and composure what, without a doubt, must have been bad news for them: the consecration of Robert Prevost as head of the Catholic Church. On the contrary, when Cristina Kirchner was informed in 2013 that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio had become Pope, the then-president couldn't handle what she was feeling and barely concealed her discomfort . Hours later, the official artillery began firing horrific disqualifications, such as accusing the new pontiff of having been complicit in the crimes of the bloody military dictatorship that began in 1976.

Instead, the White House chief of staff and the Peruvian president were able to smile and say what they surely didn't feel when they learned that the Chicago priest, who spent three decades in pastoral work in the South American country, had sat on the throne of Peter.

This news, so welcome and sincerely welcomed by the people of Peru, could not have been welcome to the president, whom she harshly criticized for the bloody repression with which she crushed the peasant protests against the fall and imprisonment of Pedro Castillo. Nor could it have been welcome news to her shadow political partner, Keiko Fujimori, whose father Prevost publicly questioned for the crimes committed by the authoritarian regime he led in the 1990s.

Trump, too, swallowed his saliva and smiled when he publicly announced his congratulations to the first American to rise to the highest leadership of global Catholicism. He wanted the new Pope to be the ultraconservative Cardinal Raymond Burke or the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, two fervent defenders of the current US president. Another option for the New York tycoon was Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, an ultra-Orthodox figure who surpassed Burke and Dolan in the number and aggressiveness of his attacks on Francis's reforms.

But the American cardinal closest to the Argentine Pope won. He also possesses Bergoglio's charisma, with an image that radiates humility, compassion, and sensitivity—the opposite of the arrogance, aggression, and supremacism conveyed by Trump and many of his ultraconservative colleagues in other countries.

Prevost has two identities that repel the ideology that glorifies mega-millionaires as a superior class with the right to also exercise political power. The new Pope is an Augustinian, a priest belonging to the mendicant Order of Saint Augustine, created in the 13th century by Pope Innocent IV, uniting communities of hermits in Tuscany.

Hermits were mystics who isolated themselves in solitude and silence, devoting themselves solely to meditation, even without bathing or eating. These solitary ascetics multiplied in the High Middle Ages, spreading their extreme asceticism and considering luxury and riches as despicable abjections.

The order, based on the preaching of Augustine of Hippo, is mendicant and intended to accompany the poorest.

The other sign of the new papacy is the papal name chosen by Prevost: Leo XIV. In other words, he is a follower of Pope Leo XIII, who in the 19th century wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which he spoke out against unbridled capitalism that generates exploitation of the proletarians by the owners.

Leo XIII described the social order generated by the Industrial Revolution, emphasizing the need to prevent abuses by the powerful over the weaker classes through the creation of unions and the promulgation of labor laws within the framework of a socially present State.

In this way, proclaiming oneself in the path of Leo XIII is proclaiming oneself close to the values ​​of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that founded the Social Doctrine of the Church, but not from Marxism or anarchism , but from Aristotelian Thomism, the philosophy of the scholastic Church that is opposed to dialectical materialism.

Belonging to a mendicant order and adhering to the Church's social doctrine are signs that paint a profile exactly opposite to the tenets of rising ultra-conservatism. Therefore, it's hard to imagine that Trump and the rulers and leaders of other latitudes who identify with him were overjoyed to receive the news of the new Pope's consecration.

Although with a personalistic bent, Francis was a moderate who opened the Church to sectors that had always been marginalized and condemned, such as homosexuals and divorced people, among others. Franciscans like the Italian Cardinal Matteo Zuppi or the Filipino Antonio Tagle would have launched themselves from the Throne of Peter to expand and deepen that legacy. But the moderate Robert Prevost guarantees the continuity of the Argentine Pope's legacy, albeit without expanding or deepening it too much.

* The author is a political scientist and journalist.