Still from Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

“We must learn to be loyal, not to ‘East’ or ‘West’ but to each other, and we must disregard the prohibitions and limitations imposed by any national state.”

– EP Thompson

America finally got its Pope, but not the reactionary the Opus Dei sect was furiously lobbying for. And not an anti-abortion zealot like Cardinal Dolan, either. (Though his views on homosexuality and gender appear to be more orthodox than his predecessor’s.) Instead, the Vatican’s smokestack spewed white in honor of Robert Prevost, a Chicagoan, whose attitude, at least, seems that of a Southsider (even if he turns out to be a Cubs fan). For years, Prevost served as the head of the Augustinian Order, whose members, like the Franciscans, are instructed to lead simple lives and devote themselves to the ministration of the poor.

Like his mentor, the Hippie Pope, Prevost was in the thick of the South American wars. Francis was in Argentina during the Dirty Wars, and Prevost spent two decades in Peru at the height of the Sendero Luminoso insurgency. Where exactly Prevost stood politically during those bloody years remains unclear, as was the nature of Francis’s relationship to the Argentine Junta. But the new Pope’s attitude towards the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism is much less opaque. He has directly criticized the Catholic convert JD Vance and decried the Trump administration’s treatment of refugees and mass deportation scheme. Whether he shares Francis’s views on Gaza and his affection for the Palestinian people remains to be seen.

Greg Grandin on Southside Leo, the America, América Pope [Prevost was born in Chicago and became a citizen of Peru]:

He spoke Spanish and Italian, no English, from the balcony. I know he said he chose Leo because Leo XIII was the first Augustinian pope, but Leo XIII was also known as the “social pope,” or the “labor pope,” and his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) called for a just wage. The text is a rearguard action against socialism, but it also sought to socialize capital. And reads a hell of a lot better than what we have today — “Abundance,” for example: “All masters of labor should be mindful of this – that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine.” And so the wheel turns: Leo XIII influenced Perón, who influenced Francis, who, it seems, handpicked Leo XIV.

Three weeks ago, the new Pope retweeted this…

The new Pope on the man whose toxic papal visit may have been too much for the ailing Hippie Pope to endure…

A few other recent social media posts from the man who would become Pope Leo the Southsider…

Even the Vatican is living in Baudrillard’s Hyper-Reality. Cardinals watched the recent film “Conclave” for an introduction to how the actual Vatican conclave works.

George DePuis: “Conclave: Real Housewives of the Vatican.”

The reactionaries are handling the selection of Southside Leo in their characteristic mode of cordiality and comity …

Trump: “Nobody’s done more for religion than me.”

Reporter: “Some Catholics are not so happy about the image of you looking like the Pope.”

Trump: “Oh, I see. You mean they can’t take a joke. You don’t mean the Catholics, you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it. I had nothing to do with it. Somebody made up a picture of me dressed up as the Pope. I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it was AI. But I know nothing about it. I just saw it last evening. Actually, my wife thought it was cute.”

The image was shared on both Trump’s personal social media account and the White House’s official account.

As for “the Catholics”,

Strangely, Jim Bakker was not elected America’s first Pope.

Jesus was a street person, Jim. Maybe you’ll finally understand his work when you spend a few weeks sleeping on the pavement…(Tammy Faye could have explained this, but you done her wrong.)

AJ English journalist Hebh Jamal, a US citizen, on her interrogation by four DHS agents before her flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to the US: “I wrote about my experience entering the United States last month for AJ English. My phone was taken and looked through. We were threatened not to participate in political activity, and they demanded to know what my latest article was about. So, it was not good.”

DHS: Did you have any family members experience violence [in Gaza]?

Jamal: Yes. Fifty members of my family were killed?

DHS: Were any of them Hamas supporters?

While Pete Hegseth leaks war plans to his wife, the editor of The Atlantic and his drinking buddies, Trump just invoked the “state secrets” privilege over the “thinking” that went into the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Augusto Antonio Ulloa Garay, exposed the Trump administration’s assertions in federal court to be lies, aka perjuries: “We’re providing........

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