A Note on Freedom: Independent, But Still Becoming

A Note on Freedom: Independent, But Still Becoming 

 Issued on the 126th Anniversary of Philippine Independence 

June 12, 2025 

 This is a note—not a declaration. Not a decree. Simply a note, offered quietly from the folds of a nation’s heart. 

 The Philippines is an independent country. That much is fact. The flag was raised, the anthem sung, the colonizer’s rule ended. On paper, sovereignty was secured. But even now—over a century later—there remains a quiet truth that cannot be silenced: this country is still fighting to become a nation that truly determines its own path. 

 What is independence without dignity? Without agency? Without the power to shape policy, economy, and identity on its own terms? 

 There is freedom, yes—but it is partial, conditional, and often borrowed. For all the beauty of its islands and the strength of its people, the Philippines still struggles under the weight of foreign dependence and domestic inequality. Its seas are encroached upon. Its workers are shipped abroad. Its resources, extracted. Its decisions, too often shaped by interests beyond its shores. 

 And so this note speaks—not to celebrate with fanfare, but to remind with quiet resolve: sovereignty is not a single moment, but a continuous motion. 

 It is in the rice farmer asking for fair compensation. In the student demanding education that liberates. In the worker who stays not because they must, but because they choose to. In the leader who serves the flag, not their own pocket. 

 It is easier to say that the Philippines is independent. Easier still to celebrate it in parades and fireworks, with the illusion that the matter is settled. But a harder truth shadows the page: for all its legal sovereignty, the nation often behaves not like a republic charting its own course, but like a cultural community waiting for permission—beholden to the very powers it once defied. 

 Unlike Taiwan, which despite isolation chooses self-definition and stands firm in the face of pressure, the Philippines too often trades resolve for reassurance, policy for patronage. It invokes democracy while deferring to interests that neither vote here nor suffer the consequences of their influence. It speaks of people power, yet waits for others to validate its direction. At times, the question echoes uncomfortably in the national conscience: is the Philippines truly a sovereign state—or has it accepted a softer identity, closer to that of a postcolonial Puerto Rico, where the forms of freedom are present, but not its full weight, nor its responsibility?

 This is not to condemn, but to call. Independence must be more than an inheritance; it must be a decision remade every generation. A republic that forgets how to act as one may find itself adrift—not colonized, but not fully free either. So let this June 12 not mark a finish line, but a call to continue. Let it remind every Filipino—at home and abroad—that independence is not merely about being free from something, but about being free for something: for justice, for truth, for dignity, for nationhood that is lived, not just proclaimed. 

 And if that journey is uphill, then let it be climbed with the same courage that once lit the fires of revolution. This is the note. It is not loud. But it is clear. 

Loose Sand or Rising Soil? - The Filipino’s Search for a National Soul

Loose Sand or Rising Soil?

- The Filipino’s Search for a National Soul

On the 126th anniversary of Philippine independence, the nation pauses to celebrate its freedom. Flags wave proudly, speeches echo in city halls, and parades march with rehearsed precision. Yet beneath the surface of festivity lies a question that time and symbolism have never truly resolved: has the Filipino people grown into their freedom—or merely worn it like an inherited costume? 

A century ago, in 1924, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen observed with brutal honesty that his people, despite their ancient civilization, lacked a national spirit. “They are just a heap of loose sand,” he said. A people divided, vulnerable, and carved up by outside forces. “Other men,” he lamented, “are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat.” It was a chilling metaphor of a country consumed by others because it could not yet stand for itself. 

Today, observers look at the Philippines and see troubling parallels. For all its modern trappings—the skyscrapers, digital infrastructure, and globalized lifestyle—the country remains haunted by old patterns. Power continues to serve entrenched elites; poverty lingers despite decades of development plans; and the national will, if not absent, remains easily fragmented by regionalism, patronage, and personal ambition. 

Like China once was, the Philippines too often appears as an appendage to the interests of others—both local and foreign. Pretentious agreements are signed in glittering rooms, while unjust deals rob the nation quietly in the background. The majority of the population benefits little from the promises of trickle-down economics. Instead, they survive on the margins, in the shadow of a system where opportunity is too often inherited rather than earned. 

To some, this is not a new observation. The early 20th-century writer Miguel Lucio Bustamante described the Filipino character in extremes: the simple farmer content with his carabao and land, and the educated man who, after schooling in Manila, returns to the province full of arrogance, only to bring misfortune upon his household. In both cases, what is absent is ambition for the nation—a larger purpose beyond self, family, or class. 

Despite access to modern education, global networks, and democratic space, the Filipino often remains hesitant to build a cohesive national vision. There is pride in culture, but little unity in direction. Protests are loud but fleeting; elections are passionate but cyclical. The country exports its best labor to care for others abroad, while struggling to uplift its own. 

To compare the Philippines to early 20th-century China may seem harsh—perhaps even accusatory. Yet such comparison is not meant to shame, but to awaken. Sun Yat Sen’s words were not a resignation but a call to transformation. China, after all, did not remain loose sand. Through immense hardship, ideological struggle, and a vision of collective destiny, it forged a new path, however contested or imperfect. 

The Filipino question is therefore not one of capability, but of will. What binds the fisherman in Leyte to the student in Makati, the teacher in Bukidnon to the caregiver in Milan? Where is the national spirit—not as performance, but as daily commitment? What is the dream that unites, not just entertains? 

Too often, it seems, the Filipino identity is reactive—proud in moments of crisis, loud in moments of scandal, but quiet in the long, hard work of nation-building. As a result, the country remains vulnerable to external manipulation, internal exploitation, and generational fatigue. 

And so the central question endures—this Independence Day more than ever: Will the Filipino remain this way? 

Will the people continue as a heap of loose sand—dispersed by every gust of scandal, every wave of imported influence, every political tide? Or will they, at last, become rising soil—solid, fertile, capable of holding a nation’s weight? 

True independence is not merely declared. It is cultivated. 

And the time to cultivate it is now. 

THEY STABBED JUSTICE IN THE BACK!

THEY STABBED JUSTICE IN THE BACK!

In the stillness of night, behind curtains of privilege and velvet impunity, eighteen senators have laid their daggers not only into the Constitution—but into the throat of the Republic itself. 

 They were summoned by duty. They responded with betrayal. They were called to trial. They chose surrender. 

 They have abdicated their role as judges, and embraced the robes of accomplices. They did not follow the Constitution—they abandoned it. They did not seek truth—they extinguished it. What was demanded was judgment. What they offered was complicity. 

 The Constitution said: FORTHWITH. Not RETURN. Not DEFLECT. Not DELAY. And yet they’ve said: “Let the House reconsider.” “Let the next Congress decide.” “Let the courts handle it.” They pass the burden like cowards pass blame. In doing so, they have not only betrayed the people—they have dishonored the very meaning of law. 

 They hide behind procedure like tyrants hide behind banners. 

 And let this note speak clearly: this is no procedural motion. This is a political consolidation. It is the Senate surrendering itself to the Duterte faction. It is the Senate preferring silence over scandal, subservience over struggle, treachery over truth. 

 “Audacity, more audacity, always audacity!” cried Georges Danton before the National Convention in 1792, when the French Republic itself was in peril.[¹] That is what justice demands in times of crisis—not this Senate’s pale cowardice. Danton was calling the people to rise against kings. We call now the people to rise against traitors in suits. 

 And when Robespierre declared, “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant,”[²] he foresaw what is now being done to us: the suffocation of political memory, the erosion of constitutional obligation, the silencing of the Republic’s conscience. 

 What the Senate has done is not a failure of deliberation. It is a betrayal of people's trust. And through this process is what the Constitution was meant to preserve: a peaceful, principled mechanism for removing those who abuse power. The vice president is accused of high crimes. Instead of proceeding to trial, the Senate slammed shut the doors of judgment and told the people to wait—to forget—to move on. 

 The people will not forget. 

 Tonight’s vote proves that the powerful do not fear guilt—they fear exposure. They do not fear the law—they fear the people watching them uphold it. 

 Let it ring from every rooftop and every street: this is not procedure. This is a putsch in slow motion. This is a crisis in legislative disguise. 

 They did not vote. They stabbed. 

 And the wound will not close—not until the people rise, not until the voice of justice drowns the whispers of cowardice, not until those who worship power are exiled from the temple of democracy. Let justice roar—not whisper. Let the people rise—not wait. Let the traitors tremble—for the Republic remembers. 

 REFERENCES: 

 [¹] Georges Danton, speech to the National Convention, September 2, 1792: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace, et la Patrie est sauvée.” (“Audacity, more audacity, always audacity, and the Fatherland is saved.”)

 [²] Maximilien Robespierre, speech to the Convention, 1793. The quote is often paraphrased as: “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” (See: Robespierre: Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 2007.) 

LOUIE JALANDONI, 90

 LOUIE JALANDONI, 90 

February 26, 1935 – June 7, 2025 

By Kat Ulrike

 It is with profound revolutionary mourning that the passing of Luis "Louie" Jalandoni is announced. A stalwart of the Filipino people’s struggle, a diplomat of the downtrodden, and a beacon of internationalist solidarity, Ka Louie passed away peacefully at 9:05 a.m. on June 7, 2025, in Utrecht, the Netherlands (3:05 p.m. Philippine time). He was 90 years old. 

 In his final moments, he was surrounded by his lifelong comrade and beloved wife Ka Coni, family members, and comrades forged across decades of struggle. His departure marks the end of a historic era—but not the end of the movement to which he devoted his entire life. 

 Born on February 26, 1935, on Negros Island, into a family of landlords and sugar barons, Ka Louie broke from the privileges of his birth. His political awakening came not through theory alone but through contact with sugar workers and peasants in the Visayas. He chose the difficult road of struggle over the comfort of inherited wealth. 

 As a Catholic priest, he served under the Church in the Barrios program, ministering to the poor in the countryside. This path would bring him to a deeper understanding of structural injustice—and into the heart of the people’s movement. He was a founding figure in the Christians for National Liberation (CNL), a courageous group of clergy and religious workers that stood in firm resistance to the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship.

 In 1972, Ka Louie joined the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The following year, the CNL became a founding allied organization of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). As Marcos declared Martial Law, Ka Louie went underground, aligning his life permanently with the revolutionary cause. 

 In 1973, he and Ka Coni were arrested and imprisoned at Fort Bonifacio. For nearly a year, Ka Louie was held in a dark, airless cell, crammed with six or seven others. But repression could not silence the movement. Campaigns by religious and international human rights groups led to their release in July 1974. 

 Exile followed, but not retreat. In 1976, facing renewed threats, Ka Louie and Ka Coni were granted political asylum in the Netherlands, becoming the first Filipinos to receive such recognition. From there, a new phase of struggle began. In 1977, Ka Louie was named international representative of the NDFP, tasked with building solidarity networks, exposing the crimes of the dictatorship, and articulating the vision of national liberation to the world. 

 In 1989, he became the chief negotiator for the NDFP in peace talks with the reactionary Philippine government. In every round of negotiations—from Cory Aquino to Duterte—Ka Louie held fast to the movement’s line: peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice. His work at the negotiating table was never a retreat from struggle, but an extension of it—firm, principled, and unwavering. 

 He endured the collapse of talks, political betrayals, arrests of consultants, and state perfidy with calm resolve and dialectical clarity. Never once did he compromise the integrity of the people’s demands. His commitment to a just peace remained unshaken until the end. 

 Ka Louie’s contributions—diplomatic, strategic, moral—cannot be overstated. He stood as one of the most enduring figures of the Filipino people’s revolutionary history: a priest who became a militant, a detainee who became an exile, and an exile who remained forever bound to the people he served. 

 His life reminds all that to commit to revolution is to surrender not hope but illusion. His death is a loss—but also a legacy. What he helped build cannot be buried. What he stood for continues to rise.

 Ka Louie Jalandoni lives on—in every clenched fist, in every barrio meeting, in every principled stand taken against tyranny. His memory strengthens the movement that shaped him and that he, in turn, helped shape. 

In Memory of José “Pepe” Mujica: A Comrade Among Comrades

In Memory of José “Pepe” Mujica: A Comrade Among Comrades 

When the world learned of José “Pepe” Mujica’s passing, it did not just lose a former president of Uruguay. It lost a living example of what public service truly means. Mujica was not a perfect man. But in a world riddled with self-serving leaders and political theatre, his life was a quiet revolution—a reminder that humility, simplicity, and solidarity with the masses are not just virtues of the past, but imperatives for the present. 

For those unfamiliar, Mujica was once a guerrilla fighter, a political prisoner who spent more than a decade in jail—much of it in solitary confinement. Yet he emerged from that darkness not with bitterness, but with a deeper conviction to serve. As president from 2010 to 2015, he refused the grandeur that came with office. He donated 90% of his salary to social causes, drove a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, and lived on a modest flower farm with his wife. He wasn’t acting. He was like that. 

Ramon Magsaysay, the late Filipino president, once said: “Those who have less in life should have more in law.” Magsaysay became a symbol of integrity in public service in post-war Asia. But if we are to speak plainly and bravely, Mujica might be the fuller realization of that ideal. Where Magsaysay was a statesman, Mujica was a comrade—among comrades. He did not just talk about the poor; he lived among them, listened to them, and acted on their behalf. He did not ride convoys. He walked through muddy streets. He did not speak of austerity; he practiced it with devotion. 

Critics often tried to label him—socialist, leftist, even communist. But Mujica never governed for ideology’s sake. If so, then he is, by all means. People have grown used to leaders who separate the economy from society—who offer shiny promises and deliver empty reforms just to secure another term. Mujica’s leadership wasn’t that. Call him leftward—but only if that leftward meant forward. If it meant social justice, dignity for the many, and solidarity as policy, then that speaks louder than any slander hurled against him. Labels fall flat in the face of lived principle. 

His policies on healthcare, education, civil rights, and redistribution were not radical—they were humane. His goal was not to shift Uruguay leftward, but to move it toward fairness and dignity. In that direction, he reminded the world that servant leadership is not a relic of the past, but a moral necessity. 

In mourning Mujica, we must not merely praise the man—we must carry forward the challenge he leaves behind. Will our leaders choose humility over hubris? Will they measure success not by GDP or prestige, but by dignity and compassion? Will they, like Mujica, recognize that public office is not an entitlement but a burden—a burden meant to be carried in the service of others? 

Mujica often said, “I’m not poor. Poor are those who need too much.” It is a line that exposes the moral poverty of those who hoard power and privilege. And it calls us—citizens, leaders, institutions—to a deeper reckoning with what governance is really for. 

Pepe Mujica is gone. But his legacy is not. It lives in every young person who dreams of a gentler politics. In every worker who believes in justice. In every act of kindness done not for applause but out of principle. He showed us it’s possible to lead without ruling, to serve without taking, and to love the people not just in theory, but in truth. 

The world will remember Mujica as a president. But history should remember him as something rarer: a comrade who never forgot his place among the people. 

Rest in power, Pepe. Abrazo Fuerte, Venceremos! 

Of 'Perks' over 'Principles' in the age of De-Democratisation

Of 'Perks' over 'Principles' in the age of De-Democratisation 

Introduction: Voting in the Age of Simulation 

Democracy is often treated as the crowning achievement of modern civilisation, a system in which the people choose their leaders and direct their collective destiny. But for a growing number of citizens in the post-industrial West, democracy no longer feels like a choice—it feels like a chore. Voting, once an expression of political agency, now resembles a loyalty program: you participate for the perks. Where no incentives are evident, many opt out. 

This is not simply apathy. It is symptomatic of deeper structural decay—a collapse of meaning within democratic rituals, and the growing suspicion that power resides elsewhere. From a hyperrealist point of view, politics has become a simulation of choice, democracy a stage play in which the outcome is pre-written. 

The Spectacle of Hyperreality: A Postmodern Lens 

French theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that in a world saturated by media and symbols, reality itself is displaced by simulations. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he wrote: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” This insight is painfully apt in contemporary politics, where political action is mediated through spectacle, spin, and screen. 

Campaigns focus on aesthetic performance. Politicians are not policy-makers but branded personas. Voting becomes a symbolic gesture rather than a substantive act. Political discourse is reduced to viral moments, image management, and emotional manipulation. Participation is encouraged not through principled appeals, but through targeted perks: stimulus cheques, tax credits, identity affirmation. 

The result is a de-politicised populace, exhausted by contradiction, alienated from real choice, and drawn into a theatre of the absurd. Change becomes a branding slogan, not a political process. 

Lenin on Bourgeois Democracy and the Illusion of Choice 

Vladimir Lenin, writing more than a century ago, anticipated much of this spectacle. In The State and Revolution (1917), Lenin made a withering critique of bourgeois democracy, calling it “the best possible shell for capitalism.” Parliamentary systems, he argued, give the illusion of popular control while real power remains with the ruling class. 

Lenin wrote:

“To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people in parliament—such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.” 

He called it a system designed to “stupefy the masses,” perpetuating the idea that change can come through voting, while insulating real levers of economic and coercive power from popular interference. 

Today, this critique resonates with the disillusioned voter who sees the same economic interests fund every party, the same policies dressed in different language, and the same elites recycled through revolving doors between government and industry. In this light, abstention is not irresponsibility—it is clarity. 

Lenin would not have been surprised by this turn. He argued that real political consciousness does not arise spontaneously from participation in bourgeois democracy, but through struggle outside and against it. This view sharply contrasts liberal optimism about democratic reform. For Lenin, meaningful political action begins where the illusion ends. 

Neoliberalism and the Marketisation of Citizenship 

The political spectacle coexists with another, more insidious transformation: the neoliberal recasting of individuals as market actors, not citizens. Wendy Brown, in Undoing the Demos (2015), describes how neoliberal rationality colonises every sphere of life. Governance becomes management; politics becomes economics by other means. 

Citizens are now consumers of policy packages, not co-authors of the social contract. Voting is reframed as customer feedback. “What’s in it for me?” replaces “What’s right for society?” This logic encourages instrumental participation: people vote for immediate benefits—unemployment checks, student loan forgiveness, tax breaks—rather than visions of justice or solidarity. 

This marketisation of politics reinforces Lenin’s argument that bourgeois democracy serves to protect property, not to empower people. The state becomes a manager of capital’s interests, ensuring social peace through minimal redistribution and maximum control. 

De-Democratisation and Post-Politics 

This convergence of spectacle and neoliberal governance produces what theorists like Colin Crouch and Chantal Mouffe call post-democracy or post-politics—systems that retain democratic formalities but lack substantive contestation. 

Crouch, in Post-Democracy (2004), writes:

“A small, self-reproducing elite increasingly decides the issues of public policy, and the role of the mass of citizens is to accept the choices made for them.” 

Mouffe adds in The Democratic Paradox (2000) that consensus-based politics strips away ideological difference, creating a sterile public sphere dominated by technocracy. Political participation is reduced to a performance within tight boundaries; real alternatives are excluded. 

Under such conditions, elections are like reality television—drama, voting, but no real consequence. As Zygmunt Bauman argued in In Search of Politics (1999), “Power has become extraterritorial… while politics remains local.” The nation-state becomes a stage with actors, but no real scriptwriters. 

Hyperrealist Defiance: To Vote or Not to Vote? 

What, then, should the hyperrealist voter do? Is abstention surrender or resistance? 

From a Leninist angle, abstention from bourgeois democracy can be the beginning of radical consciousness, not its end. It is the recognition that politics must move beyond electoralism. Lenin believed that revolutionary energy was born not in parliament, but in workplaces, streets, and autonomous organisation. 

In hyperrealist terms, refusing to participate in a simulated democracy is not apathy—it is a rational act of refusal. It is the rejection of participation in a system that rewards submission with illusion. This view contrasts sharply with liberal commentators who equate non-voting with civic decay. In truth, it may signal the early stages of political reawakening. 

But defiance must not stop at withdrawal. Without organisation and direction, disengagement devolves into nihilism. Here again, Lenin’s emphasis on political education and vanguard organisation becomes relevant. If political consciousness does not arise spontaneously, then the task is to build spaces where people can connect their lived experiences to structural critique. 

Conclusion: Reclaiming Politics from the Real 

To reclaim democracy, we must go beyond the spectacle. That means rejecting the shallow incentives of electoral loyalty and demanding a system where power is genuinely accountable to the people—not to shareholders or lobbyists. 

It means restoring politics as a collective project grounded in solidarity, not individualised consumerism. It means recognising, with Lenin, that the forms of democracy can obscure its absence, and with Baudrillard, that symbols can seduce us into complicity. 

The hyperrealist voter is not the end of politics. They are its ghost—haunting the ruins of representative democracy, waiting for something real enough to believe in. 

 *** 

 Works Cited:
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Semiotext(e), 1981.
• Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015.
• Crouch, Colin. Post-Democracy. Polity, 2004.
• Lenin, Vladimir. The State and Revolution. 1917.
• Lenin, Vladimir. Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. 1920.
• Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. Verso, 2000.
• Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. Verso, 2016.
• Bauman, Zygmunt. In Search of Politics. Stanford University Press, 1999.
• Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010.  

A White Cassock Against A Wounded Ego: The Trial of an American Pope

A White Cassock Against A Wounded Ego:

The Trial of an American Pope

No one says it outright in the vaulted hush of the Sistine Chapel during and after the conclave, but the tension hangs there like incense after vespers: the anxious murmur of a Church now shepherded by a North American pope. 

It isn’t a question of intellect, piety, or polish. Americans have those in abundance. No, the concern lies deeper—less a matter of theology than of temperament. The ghost of Leo XIII lingers still, whispering caution about the spirit of Americanism—not merely its democratic ideals, but its deeper sensibility: that blend of optimism, rugged individualism, and market-friendly morality that turns faith into personal branding and doctrine into a sales pitch. The founding promise—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—has, in many circles, become a slogan emptied of soul and pressed into the service of property, profit, and privatized virtue. Once a vision of human flourishing, it is now, too often, a license for exploitation. And so it is not the people’s freedom that concerns the Church—but what has been done in its name. 

Yet now, with no small sense of irony, the Holy See has elected Leo XIV—American by birth, Peruvian by citizenship, Augustinian by formation, but most notably, one who matured not in Washington, but in the highlands and barrios of Latin America. 

That final detail matters. For the empire that bore him also sent him far from its imperial heart. Before the curia, before the cameras, Pope Leo was in the margins—preaching with the latinos in Peru: from the Jesuit colleges of Bolivia to the Campesinos of Peru, understanding the language of the have-nots, the tounge of those mostly who end disenfranchised and deported from their adopted lands. Such experiences would say are not taught in Boston or Chicago: the quiet speech of suffering, the catechism of dispossession, the dialect of dependency and dashed hopes- and these are not lessons one forgets, even when the white smoke billows and the world cheers. 

Still, the burden of his passport remains. His vowels, though softened by years abroad, still mark him as a son of the United States. That fact trails him into every chamber, colors every pronouncement. He is not simply the Bishop of Rome; he is, to some, the Pope from the Pentagon. For a Church that has long struggled to define itself apart from worldly powers, this is no small predicament. The fear is not that he will speak as a pope—but that he will be heard as a president. 

Meanwhile, the specter of Trumpism still lingers—its rallying cry, “Make America Great Again,” echoing through airwaves and pulpits alike. But the greatness it conjures is thin and brittle, offering little to the average Joe or Jane. It is a hollow ideal, wrapped in a patchwork of distorted nationalism, fortified borders, and the vilification of migrants—fueled by a marriage of white grievance and borrowed Christian vocabulary. These voices claim to uphold conservative values, yet remain conspicuously silent on the “matters of the stomach”—the cry for living wages, affordable housing, and dignity for the working American. Pope Francis challenged this vision directly—speaking not of walls, but of bridges; not of markets, but of people; not of Wall Street, but of the Amazon and the favela. But Pope Leo cannot merely echo that legacy. He must translate it. He must speak not from the outside looking in, but from within the very system that formed him. And that is far more difficult. 

And in these turbulent years—years of not forgetting the Capitol Riots, threats of ICE versus documented and undocumented migrants, and Elon Musk preaching "efficiency" at the expense of the programs America needs—the notion of an American pontiff carries freight. One cannot ignore the image of America abroad: proud, ascendant, but also bruising. From Tarriffs and statements versus the global south people know what American policy has meant. And it is not surprising that there are people who can recall missionaries who came bearing both Bibles and intelligence. That remember dictators and juntas quietly blessed by clergy or that of clergymen and laypeople who took arms and siding with the oppressed and the needy. And they will not easily forget. 

It is not surprising, then, that Pope Leo meets opposition not just from skeptics in Rome but from critics within his own homeland. For some, he is too much the outsider—too concerned with migration, poverty, and foreign wars. They would rather he keep to spiritual matters, like any respectable evangelist, and leave the questions of war, borders, and human dignity to diplomats and generals. They demand a pope who stays in his lane. Abortion, yes; Gaza, no. Conscience, yes; capitalism, off-limits. But Pope Leo seems not to have read their memo. And so the charge is made: that he is meddling, politicizing, even betraying his station. That he is, in a word, inconvenient. 

Not surprising, either, are the voices of those who clutch tradition in one hand and silence in the other. These are the Christians who cry out for pomp but go mute on poverty. Who would prefer a pope crowned and carried aloft in the sedia gestatoria than one speaking plainly about war and wages. They extol reverence while shunning reform, dreaming of another Pius whose obstinacy preserved antiquated orders, forgetting the living truth: ecclesia semper reformanda est—the Church must always be reformed. They babble with pride, “Roma locuta; causa finita est,” as if Rome’s speaking were always final, even when the world bleeds anew. 

Some even mimic that curious sermon once offered by a British prime minister—Thatcher’s “Sermon on the Mound”—that tried to confine Christianity to private virtue while leaving “matters of the stomach” to the invisible hand of the market. They forget—or perhaps never learned—that Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum did not emerge from marble halls but from the cries of workers, coal-streaked and overworked, asking whether the Church had ears. 

As an observer, it is hard not to notice the irony. These “Christians” moralize just enough to make the exploited seem dignified, yet never enough to challenge the system exploiting them. They blur the line between private and personal property when it suits them, yet fail to distinguish between the mom-and-pop shop and the monopolies that hollow out towns. The community is subordinated to the market. Humanity becomes not a neighbor, but a demographic—or worse, a statistic. 

Under this pressure, Pope Leo wears two garments. One is visible: a white cassock, stitched with centuries of ritual, hope, and humility. The other is invisible, yet ever present: the American identity, with its privileges, contradictions, and shadows. He cannot shed either. But he can choose which one he serves. 

If he allows his memories to shape him—the voices of the poor, the faces of the forgotten—then perhaps his Americanness becomes not an inheritance but a wound. Not a badge, but a reckoning. And perhaps only such a wounded pope can speak honestly to a wounded Church. 

He could then speak of peace not as abstraction, but as confession. Of justice not as theory, but as repentance. He could reject the fantasy that the Gospel can share a bed with domination. He could remind the faithful that the Church was not born to accompany empire, but to exorcise it. 

There will be calls for balance, for restraint. He will be tempted to preserve unity at the expense of truth. To temper his witness for the sake of comfort. But the Church is not suffering from too much courage. It is starving from too little. 

The crucified do not speak in the language of empire. They speak in wounds. And if Pope Leo dares to do the same—if he risks being misunderstood, reviled, even betrayed—then perhaps he will not merely be remembered as the first American pope. He will be remembered as a true one.