Leo XIV: Our Anti-Americanist Pope

One of the more noteworthy episodes during the late nineteenth-century tenure of Pope Leo XIII was the pope’s response to the so-called “Americanist” controversy in the United States.

Leo XIII wrote two encyclicals addressing issues that implicated the Catholic Church in America. The first, Libertas Praestantissimum (1888), was written to refute a theory of freedom that was contrary to the Christian understanding of liberty. While this encyclical was not written expressly about Americanism, the political theory of freedom criticized in Libertas was minted in the U.S.

The second, Testem Benevolentiae (1899), was written directly to Cardinal James Gibbons, then Archbishop of Baltimore, addressing a controversy that bloomed in France but that had been planted in the U.S.

In his very brief tenure as Supreme Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV has demonstrated that he—the first American pope—is not an Americanist pope. Yes, he is America’s pope, but not any more or less than he is the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church. As such, he is no less suspicious of American tendencies to compromise the Faith than his illustrious predecessor. The manifestation of Americanist impulses in 2025 is somewhat different from that of the late 19th century. The importance of affirming a robust Catholic understanding of the human person, social life, and economic considerations, however, is no less urgent for Leo XIV than it was for his immediate patronymic predecessor.

In Libertas, Leo XIII complained about the modern assertion that freedom is merely the ability to make a contrary choice, without regard to the object chosen or the proper end of the human person. He criticized a theory of freedom, especially prominent in the U.S., that celebrates “natural” liberty but rejects “moral” liberty.

Natural liberty, Leo XIII explained, is the capacity to reflect and choose among contradictory objects. Moral liberty is the freedom from using natural liberty to choose wrong objects. Natural liberty is the necessary basis of moral liberty, not its completion. Moral liberty is achieved through the exercise of natural liberty as schooled by virtue in the Church. Natural liberty is the necessary condition for any moral action (good or evil), but not the sufficient condition for a good moral action.

The modern liberal notion of freedom, as epitomized in the U.S., effectively denies this distinction, holding that the highest moral good is the mere ability of choosing among contraries, without making a judgment about the choices made. This is a manifestation of the theory of individualist personal autonomy at the heart of the modern liberal project, as perfected in U.S. politics and law.

Testem Benevolentiae was written to Cardinal Gibbons after a translation of the autobiography of Fr. Isaac Hecker, the founder of the American religious order, the Paulist Fathers, appeared in France. Hecker represented an attempt in the U.S. to assimilate the Catholic Faith with the liberal moral theory at the heart of American politics. In a similar criticism voiced in Libertas, Leo XIII expressed concern that the freedom embraced by Hecker and his kind was really license rather than liberty.

Rooted not in the Catholic doctrine of solidarity, but rather in the individualist theory of freedom from the 16th century, the notion of freedom advocated by Hecker seemed to downplay, if not eliminate, the necessity of the institutional church and teaching magisterium from the development of Christian virtue. Hecker’s flirtation with this liberal moral theory even drew a cautionary note from his somewhat sympathetic colleague, Orestes Brownson. Brownson warned Hecker that his advocacy of individualism is more akin to liberal Protestantism than historical Catholicism.

While the problems addressed in these two encyclicals were not limited to the U.S., the American Catholic experience was especially prone to these errors, founded as it is on a theory of the human person at odds with Catholic moral anthropology. In the apostolic exhortation Dilexi te, the first major publication of his tenure as pope, Leo XIV demonstrated that he is just as wary of these tendencies as Leo XIII was some 130 years ago.

This is especially clear in Leo XIV’s harsh criticism of laissez-faire economics, a staple of right liberalism in the U.S., and embraced in some of the influential American Catholic institutions that perpetuate the Americanist problem more generally.

Among American Catholics, influential voices advocate what might be called “Catholic economic libertarianism.” This is characterized by a strong presumption in favor of laissez-faire economics and nearly absolute criticism of any government involvement either in economic regulation or wealth redistribution. Certain think tanks, prominent professors, and other Catholic intellectuals advocate a presumption both that markets should be left alone to decide how wealth is created and that the solutions the market finds should be undisturbed.

This results in an equally strong impulse to oppose economic regulation or redistribution of any kind as inconsistent with free markets and, so the theory goes, free persons. While the specific economic expression of this tendency is a new variation, the theory that informs it is a consistent descendent from the 19th-century Americanist impulses condemned by Leo XIII.

Pope Leo XIV has just such an approach to economics in mind in Dilexi te. “We must … denounce the ‘dictatorship of an economy that kills,’ and to recognize that ‘while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few,’” admonishes the pope, quoting Pope Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.

This necessarily entails embracing the whole of Catholic Social Doctrine, and rejecting false notions of individualist, libertarian morality and economics. Pope Leo XIV has no patience for “economic thinking [that] requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything.” This does not respect the “dignity of every human person,” especially those who are not capable of participating in economic life, whether through personal incapacity or structural impediments.

Work, the pope explains, is “a participation in God’s work of creation,” and thus should be considered the first step out of poverty. “On the other hand,” however, “where [work] is not possible, we cannot risk abandoning others to the fate of lacking the necessities for a dignified life.” This invokes the duties of both private almsgiving and “governmental institutions to care for the poor,” he explains. Thus, Leo XIV rejects “pseudo-scientific data [that] are invoked to support the claim that a free-market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.”

In his landmark 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope St. John Paul II offered a highly qualified and tentative endorsement of what he preferred to call the “market economy,” “business economy,” or “free economy,” which are terms he preferred to “capitalism.” While recognizing that the human person must be free to take economic risks and to reap the rewards when those risks pay off, he also understood that the economy must not be unfettered from moral principles expressed through reasonable regulation. Regulatory structures are needed both to assure as many people as possible may participate in economic life and to assist those who cannot participate through no fault of their own. Unregulated markets cannot address either of these concerns.

In Dilexi te, Leo XIV takes up John Paul II’s admonition, cautioning us to be wary of a theory of markets that shuns regulation and redistribution, in favor of one that recognizes the need for oversight and correction. The Church’s robust history of social doctrine, Leo contends, is a much more hopeful path toward care for the poor and dispossessed than liberal theories of morality, politics, and markets. Catholic social doctrine, especially its doctrines of dignity and solidarity, cannot be compromised by the moral and political philosophy of any regime that rejects the inherent social nature of the human person and the proactive duty to preserve the dignity of all.

Leo XIV—the American pope—understands that Americanism is no more legitimate in 2025 than it was in 1899.