by Dan Hitchens, First Things
Reading—for obvious reasons—Henri Daniel-Rops’s The Church in the Dark Ages, I have been repeatedly struck by the truism that moments of institutional crisis demand genuinely great leaders. Movements, forces, trends are all very well, but in the end you need these towering figures like an Augustine who can encapsulate the essence of Christian theology and philosophy in a single body of work, a Benedict who can found an entire way of life, a Charlemagne who can reboot civilization, a Pope Leo who can face down a brutal warmonger . . .
Ah yes. That. Watching the confrontation between the Holy Father and the White House, it is tempting to see in it a kind of epochal struggle for the soul of Western culture. On the one hand, a man of peace, standing for the oldest, grandest, strangest institution on the planet, bringing the same message of love that Jesus Christ preached when he walked the earth; on the other, the incarnation of pride and vengefulness, now driven to the point of actually blaspheming and presenting himself as Christ as his destructive rage threatens an ancient civilization and the stability of the world.
There’s something to that, perhaps. But taking a longer view, the conflict represents something else. We are not in an age of great leaders; instead we are being granted some tantalizing images of what great leadership might be.
In Trump, you can witness the force of a single character to overturn apparently immovable facts. First he walked straight through the Republican Party’s internal defenses and claimed it as his own; then he won victory after victory against the cultural left, who had seemed all-powerful in the middle of the last decade; then he has repeatedly seen off scandals and lawsuits that would have sunk any other politician. Anyone not impressed by this, with whatever reservations, is kidding himself.
However, Trump looks less and less like a great figure, not just because of his failings but because those failings seem increasingly to be destroying even his solid achievements. This month we are getting a spectacular lesson in why pride is considered the gravest of sins. It is chilling to reflect that last year Trump appeared to be going through some kind of spiritual crisis—“I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well”—but is now raging against the Vicar of Christ and presenting himself as Jesus. As ChatGPT might put it, that’s not greatness—that’s vainglory.
In Pope Leo, meanwhile, the sheer wonder of the papacy is once again visible. Detached from the ugliness of politics, and yet able to speak with a matchless power in moments of danger; a living proof that Christianity is not irrelevant, but “ever ancient, ever new”; a truly fatherly presence for the billions of us who look to him. And of course no pontiff since John Paul II has come across quite so, well, papally. Leo’s face, his voice, exude prayerfulness and a quiet courage so much in evidence in recent days.