@BigModernism Feser is nothing if not consistently wrong. Calling this address “marvelous”...On the death penalty, the speech calls for abolition
Feser is nothing if not consistently wrong. Calling this address “marvelous” is all the evidence you need to start reading Hiraeth to get the true story without the Trad Inc. spin. Here is an excerpt from my latest. Read the whole thing here:
open.substack.com/pub/bigmoderni
The Diplomatic Corps address as a manifesto for the borderless world
Leo XIV’s January 9 address deserves to be read as political theology, because that is what it is. It uses Augustine as staging, then pivots into contemporary governance. The speech praises multilateralism, laments nationalism, warns against “false representations of history,” speaks warmly of the UN’s role, urges reforms for efficiency, condemns violations of humanitarian law, critiques shrinking speech freedom, criticizes “Orwellian” language, defends conscientious objection in theory, then moves into the sacred cows: migration, climate, abolition of the death penalty.
On migration, the framework is predictable. Every migrant has inalienable rights. State action against trafficking must not become a “pretext” for undermining dignity. Climate change is included among the drivers of displacement. The moral pressure is one-directional: toward accommodation, toward international management, toward the perpetual exception that becomes the rule.
A Catholic reads that and recognizes the game immediately. A nation that cannot enforce its border is no nation. A people that cannot say “no” to entry, settlement, and demographic transformation is not practicing charity, it is being managed. Charity begins with order. Order begins with duties. Duties include the state’s obligation to protect its own citizens, its own culture, its own stability. The Church once spoke that language with clarity. The postconciliar apparatus speaks the language of NGOs, then sprinkles it with Scripture.
The speech also praises renewable energy projects and “caring for creation” as shared commitments with the Italian state. That phrase has become a passport for global regulatory regimes, wealth transfers, and bureaucratic control. Catholics are instructed to treat contested policy programs as moral inevitabilities. A Catholic can love God’s creation and reject climate managerialism at the same time. The speech does not make room for that distinction. It prefers the ambiance of consensus.
Then comes the line that tells you the entire political vision: a “short circuit” of human rights where new rights restrict old ones. That diagnosis can be true, and then the speech turns around and repeats the same human-rights vocabulary that created the short circuit. The postwar rights regime gave us abortion empires, censorship regimes, gender ideology, soft totalitarian speech codes, and borderless managerial states. The Vatican now asks the authors of the problem to fix the problem, with the UN as mediator.
On the death penalty, the speech calls for abolition, framing it as destroying hope of renewal. Pre-Vatican II Catholic teaching does not treat the death penalty as intrinsically evil. Legitimate authority has the right to inflict proportionate punishment, including capital punishment, for grave crimes, for the sake of justice and the common good. The modern line treats retribution as barbaric, then wonders why societies unravel into lawlessness. That is sentimentality with body counts.
The speech praises Francis repeatedly, calls him a father, folds the Jubilee into a pastoral narrative of comfort, then makes the predictable ecumenical moves, including references to Nostra Aetate and Jewish-Christian dialogue in the official anniversary tone. This is the same postconciliar package every time: soft canonization of the predecessor, hard entrenchment of the council’s vocabulary, a diplomatic posture that treats national sovereignty as the suspect force and international bureaucracy as the mature solution.
The Church used to convert nations. Now it congratulates the managers of nations.
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