Pope Leo excommunicates

0:02It's been a little over a year since the first ever American became Pope. And it's been about a year and a half since the second ever Catholic Vice President of the United States was sworn into office. Pope Leo and J.D. Vance aren't officially beefing, but there's definitely tension. The Pope spoke out against the Iran War. God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. And J.D. Vance clapped back saying, When the Pope says God is never on the side of those who wield the sword, there is more than a thousand year tradition of just war theory, okay?

0:41What followed was a not insignificant contingent of Catholics and non-Catholics alike saying Pope Leo should excommunicate J.D. Vance. It's probably not going to happen, but the Chicago Pope just kicked a bunch of conservatives out of the Catholic Church. This is a thing he does now on Today's Explain from Vox. Support for Today's Explain comes from BetterHelp. While we talk about mental health more openly now, that doesn't make asking for help easy. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report surveyed 2 ,000 Americans and revealed that 85 % of those polled believe getting support is wise, Yet 74 % of those polled say society discourages people from doing so.

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2:27David Gibson, common spelling, G-I-B-S-O-N, like the guitar.

2:35Director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. the Jesuit University of New York. Pope Leo, Bob to his friends, did something dramatic last week. It's a bit of a throwback. For people who maybe missed it with the Fourth of July weekend, tell us what happened.

2:58Well, basically, the Pope excommunicated a bunch of traditionalists, super right-wing, Latin mass high church types who actually, he would say, they excommunicated themselves. It's this group, it's called the Society of St. Pius X. They ordained four bishops. And today, we take exceptional means that are proportionate to the needs of the church today. The Catholic Church is an apostolic church. It's all about chain of custody. You've got to have, you can't break the chain. You need bishops to ordain priests. You need to keep bishops going. And the thing you cannot do, the red line in the Catholic Church is the pope is the one who ordains bishops.

3:51He says you can ordain a bishop. You can't go ordain a bishop on your own. That's like starting your own church. That's a total red line. They said, no, we need this. July 1st in Econ, Switzerland, beautiful in the mountains, they gathered this SSPX and they ordained these four bishops. That was a schism. On nous accuse de ne pas le respecter. They accuse us of not respecting him. Mais c 'est parce que nous aimons le pape. It's precisely because we love the Pope. Comme vicar du Christ. As the vicar of Christ. Comme chef de l 'église. As the head of the church. Que nous ne voulons plus voir le pape.

4:28We don't want to see the Pope humiliated anymore.

4:39Look, this group, it's really a tiny, tiny group. They're located in the West. It's all about this restoring Christendom, restoring the glories of old European white Catholicism. Basically, this group wants a special carve-out. They want to be able to celebrate the Mass the way it was before 1962 or 1955, depending on when you make the cutoff. We have to be ready to pay whatever the price to serve the Church.

5:18And whatever the sacrifices God asks of us. even if it means we are treated as rebels. They want a special carve-out, a special bubble, where the Pope says, it's okay, and I'll give you your own bishops. The Pope is saying, no, you can't do that. You can't go off and have your own special little church. So essentially they're saying, okay, we're more Catholic than the Pope.

5:49You mentioned that this group, the Society of St. Pius X, that has now at least partly been excommunicated by Pope Leo, wanted to keep the church to some degree European. This is in the wake of what people thought could have been, you know, the first Asian pope, the first African pope. Is this group a little kind of like, I don't know, like white racist? They're certainly culturally chauvinistic, to put it mildly. Look, I like smells and bells. I like, you know, a lot of the European Catholicism. I've traveled around the world with popes. I've seen popes celebrate mass in a dusty refugee camp in Africa.

6:33I've seen mass celebrated in St. Peter's Basilica with the incense and the whole deal. It's beautiful. It's the mass wherever you are. It's diversity. These folks don't like that. It's very much this kind of cultural, ethnic, and some would say racial chauvinism, that our culture, our people, that kind of blood and soil nationalism is the same dynamic in the church. It's kind of blood and soil and cultural Catholicism. It makes no sense from a Catholic perspective. You're baptized Catholic, you're raised Catholic, you are Catholic, anybody is Catholic, whether you're in Indonesia or Indiana. But these folks don't see it that way.

7:22That's what they're about. They're very small, but they're located and concentrated in North America and in Western Europe, and they have influence, and they have money, and they have visibility. So that's really why it's a big story. They also have an amen corner. An amen corner. So to speak. The Vatican for decades has bent over backwards to try to accommodate these folks because it's kind of a no enemies to the right dynamic within the Catholic Church. And here are these folks who've been given everything and they still went and split. The import of this is that these are accommodations they would never have given to people on the left wing, on the progressive wing.

8:11but they're giving them to people on the right wing, on the far right wing, and that they still thumb their nose at the Pope is what makes this so important.

8:25So this small but powerful sect of the Catholic Church thumbs its nose at Pope Leo. Why? It picks a fight with the Pope. Well, there are two reasons. One is to go down the liturgical rabbit hole of all of this arcana about the mass and the Latin mass and can you change it and can you not. This is, they want to revisit the Vatican II Council where the church modernized like 60 years ago? Yes, exactly, in the 1960s. And they did things like lifting the anathemas on Protestantism, engaging in, you know, endorsing religious freedom, accepting the division between church and state, lifting the teachings of contempt against Jews.

9:13The right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person, as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God. It is very important, especially where a pluralistic society prevails, that there be a correct notion of the relationship between the political community and the church. Although the church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. But it also gets to what is really going on. It's not about the Latin mass. They love to argue about that stuff. The bigger dynamics that I wanted to get to in a New York Times op-ed I wrote about this are that these really channel the same dynamics we're seeing in the secular world, in the political world of this kind of Christian nationalism, this nationalist populism, where it's this sort of civilizational fight to retain the privilege and position, mainly of white European folks, who see America, the United States of old, being taken away from them, the France or the England, the glories of empire of the past, being taken away what is rightfully ours.

10:31That kind of resentment is what they are using as a wedge issue. That's really their platform of grievance against what they perceive as a loss of status.

10:47If you're looking at the global church, these folks are already outliers. They've already lost. When Pope Leo was elected, they lost in a global sense. In the American sense, in the smaller kind of Western sense, the jury is still out because they are much larger. This kind of conservative oppositional mentality is much wider in the United States. And will that triumph? Will they try to make peace with Leo, the first American pope? Will they recognize that he could be around for 20 years and we better take a step back, take a beat, otherwise we'll be irrelevant? Or, you know, will they just persist here in the United States, this kind of right-wing Catholicism, which is ascendant, J.D.

11:37Vance, who wouldn't know a Latin mass from anything, wouldn't care about it necessarily, but he does share. He's the guy who tells the Pope to stay in his lane on theology. I mean, it's that kind of mentality that we're really talking about, which is why the stakes really are high in this whole kind of battle about the Sism. The issue is whether this conservative Catholicism remains ascendant and essentially isolates the American church even further in the global church. That would be a tragedy.

12:26Alright, that's all we have to say about the conservative sect that picked a fight with the Pope, but when Today Explained is back, we're going to tell you about a big fight the Pope picked.

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16:27When you call my name, it's like today you explain. I'm down on my knees. I want to take you there. Chicago Pope dropped his first ever encyclical about a month ago, and it went after big tech and AI. We asked Claire Gengrave from Religion News Service on the show to tell you about it, starting with, uh, what is an encyclical? An encyclical is essentially the highest form of magisterial document that a pope can issue. It has complete papal authority and it's used by popes when they really want to send a strong message across. It used to be addressed only to Catholics, but now they tend to be addressed to all people of goodwill.

17:14So it's really a podium for the pope to speak to the world.

17:20So the main takeaway is definitely the idea of trying to offer what the church in its thousand-year-old history has figured out to be what it means to be human. At key moments in history, the church is called to decipher the new things in the light of the gospel and the dignity of the human being. It's presenting all of these things that the church believes make human beings human and why we should treasure that, especially in a time where things are becoming more abstract and technological and certain philosophies in Silicon Valley want to sell us a world that is without pain, without death, without disability, or without any sort of limitation.

18:11Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity. And the Pope is trying to send a message to say, hey, actually, it's our limitation. It's our humanity that make us human. and you shouldn't buy anything that wants to make a future that is not human. No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil. Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history.

19:01And he uses that in a lot of different sections, from war and peace to how should tech relate to moral issues. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable. AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict. In this way, it will accustom us to the idea that violence is inevitable and needs only to be optimized. And it offers this knowledge that the Catholic Church, just like many religions have, not just for tech execs, but anyone who wants to have a say in the future of this technology.

19:48He could have written about anything in this first encyclical. He could have written about humanitarian aid to the poor. He certainly could have written about immigration, which is something he's clearly passionate about. He could have written about his vision for the Catholic Church. But instead, he wrote about technology. That is a big swing for a brand new pope. Why take it so early in his papacy? Yeah, it's interesting, right? But he sort of had been hinting at this straight off the bat when he was elected. He chose the name Leo XIV to honor his predecessor. Leo XIII, who lived at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

20:30And that pope had written an encyclical as well. It was called Rerum Novarum, a Latin word which essentially means on new things, right? And it wanted to address the tensions and the problems that had to do with the Industrial Revolution at that time. He understood that the church could not remain distant. Within an epical turning point, menacing human dignity, the encyclical Rerum Novarum spoke its evangelical and social word about new things underway. And it offered the idea that the Catholic Church supports rights of workers and paid time off and the minimum wage and the responsibility of capitalist systems toward workers and regular people.

21:15And by choosing that name, Leo was saying that he thinks that the church and maybe the world needs those kinds of reflections once more as we face a new industrial revolution. Today, we find ourselves facing a transformation of similar magnitude with perhaps even greater consequences. Who is he writing this for? I mean, I'm guessing your average Catholic doesn't even read a papal encyclical, let alone a non-Catholic. But do Silicon Valley tech leaders read a papal encyclical? The Pope surely hopes that Catholics will read this encyclical. And there's a reason to believe some of them will. But you're right.

21:58The majority probably won't. Maybe they'll get a few tidbits here and there for what the media says about the document itself. But you could tell that the Pope really wanted that message to come across. And why is that? One of the ways we see that is that he invited Chris Ouell, the co-founder of Anthropic, to sit next to him as he presented this encyclical. In a special way, I'd like to thank Mr. Ola for accepting our invitation. In turn, in the name of the church, I accept your invitation to walk together, to listen and to speak, and together to find the way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence.

22:39In conversations we at Anthropic have had with faith leaders and cultural leaders, we have found one shared and deeply held conviction. If this technology is coming, it must go well for our common home and for the children to come. So I think that was a clear way for this pontiff to say, hey, Silicon Valley, I've got one of yours over here who you take really seriously. It definitely started a conversation. Tell us about the conversation. I mean, it's been, I think, a bit over a month since this encyclical dropped. Was it controversial? Did it affect any change? Are people responding? Some people don't think that the Vatican should associate itself so closely with Silicon Valley.

23:29But one thing to keep in mind is that this conversation has actually been happening since Pope Francis. I have been reporting on the, you know, closed-door meetings called the Minerva Dialogues between major Silicon Valley execs and Vatican representatives about what AI could do, about AGI, about the possibility, they said, to be creating a conscious that is not unlike that of angels. As this technology treads into unclear and more unknown paths, I found that a lot of these experts and programmers are turning to religion to ask some fundamental questions about soul and consciousness and what makes something alive.

24:15And the church and many other religions have a lot to offer. And since the encyclical, some people in Silicon Valley are interested. Now, I don't know if you read the New York Times story that says that others are definitely not. And that's for sure some of the people like Peter Thiel, who came to Rome shortly before the document was actually released, to posit that anyone who tried to impose limitations on artificial intelligence or applying any sort of guidelines that are moral or not to its development are actually the Antichrist. So it's a split world over there. And if it comes to that, if AI is indeed used in a way that the pope disapproves of, does he have real power?

25:05Can he flex in a way that, you know, makes a meaningful difference? It feels like the encyclical isn't that. It's him laying out his ideology on tech. But when push comes to shove, what can Pope Leo really do? I think the answer to that question is a little nuanced. The Vatican is a small city-state. It has an army. It's laughable. It doesn't impose tariffs. It doesn't have economic power. It's the tiniest state on the planet. But the Pope speaks to 1.4 billion people in the world. Church representatives, from catechists to missionaries to priests to nuns, are all over the world. That's without mentioning Catholic universities and elementary schools.