Pope Leo XIV could fix RCC flaws and help save our world! But it’s highly unlikely!

By Donald A. Collins | 12 May 2025
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

As the news coverage analyzes the future for the new pope, we are well aware that his church is highly divided politically.

The same political issues that divide the church also divide America.

Two of the most important are sharply divergent views on sexuality and immigration.

But those and the most controversial issues are stoked by racism!

There are also issues that need urgent attention. One–the primary one–that the planet faces as humans and all living creature moves closer and closer toward a Sixth Extinction is population reduction having grown in my 94-year-old lifetime from a planet with 2 billion people to a planet with over 8 billion.

Read “The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert here.

We celebrate Mother’s Day yearly, but millions of those unplanned babies die yearly from lack of sustaining care or from the many traumas of war, violence and disease.

Given time, human numbers are declining as a result of women demanding and gaining rights to conceive when they wish or their ability to obtain vocations outside motherhood!

Whatever your religious beliefs may be, the physical occurrences that are now ravaging the Amazon basin are causing the extinction of living things. Conditions that now cannot be denied will not be deferred much longer, given our failure (which Trump ignores) to come to grips with environmental changes that are already heavily upon us.

Given time, human numbers could decline without trauma if we act now. The population is expected to grow to 11 billion by 2100, then decline, but global conditions now exacerbating crises say fix starting now or prepare for the arrival of a modernized list of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse–war, famine, disease and environmental destruction.

For a concise population variability history from Wikipedia read here.

This leads me to my main point of view about Pope Leo’s papacy.

Even as the new pope is linguistically remarkable, focused on the poor, cognizant of American political divisions this does not make him able or willing or even trying to focus on achieving to get some urgently needed changes in traditional RCC ideology highly problematical!

On the other hand, he has the authority within the church to foster some revolutionary and dramatic changes in its orthodoxy which could dramatically improve the planet’s chance for survival.

Racism or secularism divides us as does religion. What is the only difference between India and Pakistan as they initiate a war between two nuclear powers? One nation is Hindu one is Moslem!

Ethnicity? Anyone who has watched the program on PBS Finding Your Roots hosted by Henry Lewis Gates Junior knows that a huge majority of Americans have African American ancestors, apparently also the new pope.

Yet we know that Trump’s administration seems to have adopted the motto that if it ain’t white, it’s not right since he has just dismissed Carla Hayden the head of the Library of Congress (our largess in the US) an African American woman who had faithfully served almost the full time of her term.

In many ways we are at a crossroads of ideologies still anchored in the miasma of religious authoritarianism.

This new American Pope is obviously aware of RCC’s serious flaws that need attention. He will doubtless clash with Trump over immigration, but he must likewise face the urgent need for change Catholic or orthodoxy over a woman’s right to choose abortion or any other form of contraception, including sterilization, which the latter is perhaps more of a concern to some Catholics than abortion.

As the power of the Catholic Church is waning as more and more people of all religious faiths are demanding secular solutions to issues such as same-sex marriage, safe abortion and the avoidance of legal attacks against such views.

Unfortunately Leo’s predicted policies will not dramatically differ from his predecessor. Pope Francis had a unique opportunity to show the true religion means true ability to alter a range of views within the RCC faith that are not held by all its congregants! He did not.

Impossible? Such major change is highly unlikely by this pope and this religion, but the massive numbers of people voting with their feet to avoid its strictures will continue to make its impact less and less.

Just as it is unlikely that the church can completely eradicate its sexual history with priests and its boys, it likely can’t convince its illiberal members to live and let live on the other controversial issues involved in sexuality.

As we perceive the certainty of climatic crisis, enhanced by the unsustainable growth of population, we can only hope that secular forces will prevail over religious policies that are driving humanity to a very bad place.

Wouldn’t it be startling if the new pope could recognize the inevitable and instigate new directions for an old and sagging constituency? Like Trump against our Constitutional democracy and any religion seeking and gaining secular power, our chances of keeping our human conditions livable are demonized.

Leo could make historic progress for his God and secular believers if he dared!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?”, “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”, and “Common Sense: When will Trump be Impeached, Indicted, and Exited?”.

Pope Leo XIV Speaks to 6,000 Journalists in Vatican | Pope’s Address to Media | AK1G

Sir David Attenborough on overpopulation

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