About my ma and about Pope Leo XIV

Because it's Mother's Day, and because some inklings about what the new pope will be like are becoming known.

“We knew we had an important job, we were sworn to secrecy.”

My mother the spy, as I used to call her. She passed through to Tir Na Nog on January 29, 2023. Marsha Lederman wrote a lovely tribute to her in the Globe and Mail here: Bletchley girl Eileen Glavin scanned the airwaves for German messages. My own tribute on the day of her passing, right here in The Real Story: This is not the Sunday newsletter I'd planned.

Ma lived well, and bravely, a devout Catholic to her dying breath, like my father. She loved and was loved, and she died well, sung to sleep by the people she called her “Jewish children,” the sons and daughters of Shayndel and Rabbi Mordechai Feuerstein.

On the last night of ma’s life, Aviva Feuerstein had crawled into bed beside ma, and she was joined online by her sisters and brothers Leah, Dovid, Shifra, Penina, Yosef, Elisheva and Nechama. Shayndel had passed away years before. Rabbi Feuerstein, a towering figure in the Orthodox community and a man my ma came to call “my rebbe,” passed away only a few weeks ago.

Here she is as a young RAF volunteer, during the war years.

Ma was 101 years of age when she left us, “the last of the old ones” as my cousin Douglas back in Ireland put it, leaving me and my brothers David and Anthony along with seven grandkids, four great-grandkids and a great-great granddaughter, along with her “Jewish children” and innumerable comrades and admirers. My brother Michael and my father Mícheál had gone on ahead, before her.

Ma had lived through the hardships known to the women and men of her generation and she accounted for her long flourishing by this maxim: “Never give up. Keep on fighting. No matter how bad and dark things look. See the best side of everything. If you look on the dark side, you’ll go right downhill. There’s a bright side to everything.” That’s how Aviva remembered it and it’s true to my memory as well.

I’m sometimes surprised by how much her standpoints, and my dad’s, became an influence on me and on my outlook on the world, on politics, on war, on life and on death. As for what my father bequeathed to me, that’s a long and complicated story, recounted here: The Faith Of Our Fathers.

It was in that auld faith in all its contradictions that I was raised, so consciously or otherwise I unavoidably inherited a worldview that persists in the way I form opinions, preferences, and judgments.

Whether or not we’d want this to be so, we all have our biases. The trick is be conscious of them, to be careful about them and honest about them. In my own vaguely atheistic case, the body of moral literature known as “Catholic social teaching” has clearly left a mark.

In the Irish Catholic variant there is a proper tendency to cleave to the old religious devotions, to be slighty suspicious of all men who wear their collars backwards, but to respect and honour priests who keep to their duty to administer the sacraments, visit the sick, bury the dead and otherwise keep their views to themselves.

It’s what we would want of the clergy right through the magisterium even unto the Holy Father himself, who will of course reserve to himself special responsibilities and prerogatives, being the heir and successor of Saint Peter, the first Bishop of Rome. We’ve had 265 of these fellas so far. As for Pope Francis, I said my piece here under the subhead And then the pope goes and dies.

Which brings us to His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV.

But first: I intended a lot more for today’s Real Story but it’s getting late in the day, my hand’s still busted but slowly mending - still hard to type properly though. I was away from my perch at the National Post this past week and I won’t be back until next month.

I’ll be on the road starting next weekend and posting around here will likely be a bit sparse, but for the love of God, to borrow an expression, do please take up a paying subscription to keep the Real Story project going. Easy as pie and a bargain it would be at twice the price. Just click here.

‘A great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven.’

The routine mendacity of depriving, defrauding or chiseling workers of their rightful wages is described this way in the foundational encyclical of the Vatican’s view of social justice (the real thing, not the vanity expression that has become so popular lately) known as Rerum Novarum. Those words are a departure from the body of the work only in tone.

His Holiness Pope Leo XIV deliberately chose Leo as his papal name to recall Pope Leo XIII, whose Rerum Novarum was his great contribution to Roman Catholic social and political thinking.

Pro-union, anti-socialist (socialism of the heavy state variety anyway) and of the view that political power is best kept as close as possible to the individual, the family and the local community, the encyclical was composed to the purpose of addressing “that the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world.”

That was in 1891, so let’s leave off with the notion that Catholic notions of social justice were absent from Catholicism before the days of hippie priests and Vatican II and liberation theology. Pope Leo XIII was the “pope of the workers.”

Pope Leo XIV intends to revisit Rerum Novarum, if I can put it that way, in the context of the current revolutionary threat of artificial intelligence and the light-speed advances of digital technologies to the way human societies function, and to the very idea of what it means to be human.

Woke Pope My Arse

The Americans are amusing themselves at the moment with MAGA megaphone carriers declaring the arrival of a “woke” and Marxist pope, which is of course causing certain hoarse-throated “liberals” to cause a fuss about how the Chicago boy born in 1955 as Robert Francis Prevost must be one of their own.

I’d ignore most of all that if I were you, except for amusement. The former Cardinal Prevost is a serious guy. He has broken with Pope Francis only in declaring an overdue unequivocal solidarity with Ukrainians and in properly describing Vladimir Putin as an imperialist warmonger, in pretty much those terms. He has also pleaded for a ceasefire in Gaza and repeated calls for Hamas to release its Israeli hostages, right the hell now.

You’ll have a better understanding of Prevost by not paying too much attention to his American childhood and support for the White Sox (funny story - a saucy term for the pope in my family, any pope, was “auld red socks.”) Pay more attention to the fact that he’s spent well more than half his life in service to the poor in Peru and to the church in Rome. First and foremost, he’s an Augustinian.

For a really close look, see Freya Zank’s The new pope, Leo XIV, a political overview.

If there’s going to be anything schismatic about Pope Bob it won’t be so simple as a quarrel between liberal and conservative Catholics. More likely, a disturbance in the force involving “Cradle Catholics” and converts, which is a real thing. Quite a few recent converts are of the strident Cradle Protestant J.D. Vance variety, if you take my meaning. But I don’t want to be mean about that crowd. Best wishes to them.

For a sensible and deeply thoughtful intellectual voice among the “conservative” converts I’d strongly recommend an old friend, Sohrab Ahmari. Among other things, Sohrab wrote a very kind review of my book Come From The Shadows. Whatever our differences, he’s a good egg, and quite brave. He’s been around the block, let me tell you.

If you’re a Catholic of any type you might want to offer up a prayer for Cardinal Zen, who I fear may soon by martyred by the Chinese Communist Party, and for Jimmy Lai, who remains imprisoned in Hong Kong for committing acts of journalism, and has been denied Holy Communion along with anything resembling basic justice for nearly five years now. And put in a word for Hong Kong’s 1,800 political prisoners while you’re at it.

For now, just let me say that if you’re going to keep faith in anything, do please keep faith in me. Subscribe.

All for now.