I’m not Catholic or acquainted with Catholic theology, but I am fairly well acquainted with the Left, and as I noted a few weeks ago, Pope Leo seemed to have taken to smuggling leftist ideas in under the guise of religious ones. (As leftist clergy tend to do.)
So this raises a few red flags.
Pope Leo XIV said at a Mass on Sunday that no one in the Church “should impose his or her own ideas” and asked that tensions between tradition and novelty not become “ideological contrapositions and harmful polarizations.”
The pontiff called on Christians to live “with confidence and a new spirit amid the tensions that run through the life of the Church: between unity and diversity, tradition and novelty, authority and participation. We must allow the Spirit to transform them, so that they do not become ideological contrapositions and harmful polarizations.”
It is not a question of resolving these tensions “by reducing one to the other, but of allowing them to be purified by the Spirit, so that they may be harmonized and oriented toward a common discernment,” he said.
Which ‘Spirit’ is Pope Leo referencing? Because it sounds suspiciously like a Hegelian dialectic crowned by Hegel’s Weltgeist or World Spirit in which one can resolve contradictions by attaining higher levels of consciousness.
Hegel’s *Phenomenology of Spirit* offers a compelling account of the development of consciousness, moving from the most basic awareness of sensory certainty to the profound realization of Absolute Knowledge. Through the dialectical process, contradictions are not simply overcome but are synthesized into higher forms of understanding, leading to the ultimate reconciliation of subject and object.
Pope Leo then urged that the Catholic Church must be a church that does not judge, he said, “but becomes a welcoming place for all; a church that does not close in on itself, but remains attentive to God so that it can similarly listen to everyone.”
