The bad news about the new pope is that he’s Catholic

There is a new pope: Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost now holds the Keys of Heaven as Pope Leo XIV.

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, a native of Chicago who is now the first American-born pope, has spent most of his career outside of the U.S, ministering to the dispossessed and marginalized.The “Latin Yankee,” as he is known in Rome, worked 20 years in Peru.

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) 2025-05-08T17:37:14.808Z

Yes, there are some people who are relieved right now, and maybe some Catholics are even celebrating their new Deep Dish Pontiff. That’s their right, sure. But let’s not forget what a Pope is and what a Pope does.

“It could be worse!”

It could be worse, but what it is has been is bad enough. What it is is bad enough. What it is guaranteed to be is bad enough because we know there is no reparation coming for the centuries of atrocities emanating from this institution. The Church will not return stolen land or put its looted wealth to the purpose of helping people who need it most. That is not what any Bishop of Rome is putting on the table.

‪‬Now, there have been good priests who used their roles to push for justice in their communities; there have been nuns moved by their faith who were massacred by fascist gangs. This is possible, yes. Everywhere, people are people, and people who work for liberation in their own communities can ground their motivation for this in all sort of things.

But “Liberation Theology” will never move the hulking beast that is the Catholic Church toward anything resembling justice.

No amount of acknowledgement will ever return to life the Indigenous children brutalized in residential Canadian and U.S. schools, or return the church land those child graves sit on to its .

No amount of apology will cure those in sub-Saharan Africa infected with HIV/AIDS because the Catholic Church prioritized its holy raw-dogging over life-saving prophylactics.

No amount of prayer will return the gold and silver torn from the earth by those enslaved under Catholic empires, forced to take a Catholic mass to receive more substantial food and drink — no words in mumbled Latin will return the languages, texts, art, and histories burned around the world.

There is no Pontifex Maximus who will ever lead his Ecclesia Catholica — glutted still by millennia of horrors and abuses — to take a vow of poverty for itself and return to the people what it has took and hoarded.

There is better and worse, but there is no Pope who will ever side with the masses of people against the powerful. Popes can be better or worse, it’s true, but they will still always be Popes.

And All Popes Are Bastards.