Pope Leo Backs Populist Pro-Family Policies to Promote ‘Stable Union Between a Man and a Woman’ Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images

In an address to members of the Vatican’s Diplomatic Corps, Pope Leo XIV stressed the fundamental importance of the union between men and women as the bedrock of civilisation. The Pontiff argued that governments should invest in family formation to foster more “harmonious and peaceful” civil societies, echoing the message of populist leaders like Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and Vice President JD Vance.

In his address Friday to foreign diplomats accredited to the Holy See, Pope Leo XIV harkened back to his predecessor and namesake Leo XIII’s famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (or “On New Things) regarding the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour.

Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical was written during a period of wide-ranging social upheaval, as Marxist and anarchist movements rose in response to the disorienting changes of the Industrial Revolution and the often abusive treatment of workers. Rerum Novarum sought to address this changing world and establish a moral foundation that respects the dignity of workers, affirms the rights of private property owners, and acknowledges the mutual responsibility of labourers and employers. In it, he denounced both the abuses of dogmatic laissez-faire capitalism as well as the violent ideology of socialism which strived “against nature” in a foolhardy attempt to undo the inherent inequalities of the world.

The encyclical called for industrialists and workers to fulfil their duties to each other for the betterment of the world. Leo XIII wrote that labourers should refrain from riots and senseless strikes; and in turn, capitalists should provide decent working conditions and fair wages for honest work. He argued that this bargain is necessary to enable the working man “to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income.”

In his address to the cardinals the day after his election as pope, Leo XIV explained that he chose his papal name in honour of Leo XIII and his encyclical Rerum Novarum, “Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

Pope Leo XIV returned to this theme in his address on Friday to the Vatican’s Diplomatic Corps: “In this time of epochal change, the Holy See cannot fail to make its voice heard in the face of the many imbalances and injustices that lead, not least, to unworthy working conditions and increasingly fragmented and conflict-ridden societies. Every effort should be made to overcome the global inequalities – between opulence and destitution – that are carving deep divides between continents, countries and even within individual societies.”

As his predecessor did in Rerum Novarum, Leo XIV also focused in on the need for policies that sustain workers and their families for the betterment of all.

“It is the responsibility of government leaders to work to build harmonious and peaceful civil societies. This can be achieved above all by investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman, ‘a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society’,” Pope Leo XIV declared, quoting directly from Rerum Novarum.

The comments, which also reaffirm the Church’s stance that marriage is between a man and a woman, seem to be in line with the policies advocated for by Western populist leaders such as JD Vance, the first Catholic convert to become vice president in the United States, and Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of the heavily Catholic nation of Hungary.

Amid the demographic crisis impacting much of the Western world, Orbán’s government has rejected the libertarian orthodoxy of non-state interference or reliance on mass migration in favour of enacting pro-family policies, such as income tax exemptions for mothers and “childbirth incentive loans” from the government, which can be wiped clean if a family has a certain amount of children.

While Hungary has yet to surpass the 2.1 children per woman needed to achieve the native replacement level, Orbán’s policies have seen success. The birth rate climbed from 1.23 in 2011 to 1.51 in 2023 after hitting a high of 1.61 before the coronavirus and the Ukraine war tanked the European economy.

Orbán, who is aiming to hit 2.1 by the end of the decade, said in February that Donald Trump’s re-election in the United States represented a “breakthrough in world politics” and that the “anti-migration, pro-family and patriotic forces are now in the majority in the Western world.”

The pro-natalist movement in the Trump administration has been championed by Vice President Vance, who has argued that a pro-life Republican Party must also be “more pro-baby and pro-family.”

“I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy-front just to give women more options,” Vance said during the VP debates last year.

Part of the pro-family agenda for populist figures like Vance and Orbán has been a firm rejection of the neo-liberal fixation with free trade and open borders, which has seen millions of jobs shipped overseas to countries like Communist China while flooding Western nations with cheap foreign labour, thereby artificially suppressing the wages of the working class on two fronts.

In his address on Friday, Pope Leo stressed that dignity must be afforded to “every person, especially the most frail and vulnerable, from the unborn to the elderly, from the sick to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants alike.”

However, prior to being elected to the Papacy, then-Cardinal Robert Prevost acknowledged that the issue of mass migration was a “huge problem” for the world, adding: “There’s got to be a way both to solve the problem, but also treat people with respect.”

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