Leo Laid Bare: Progressive Head and Catholic Heart.

Discovering the complexities of compartmentalisation.

So, now, after ‘Dilexit Te’, we know.

Two steps to the left when it comes to firstly, immigration- and secondly, politics and economics;

and one to the right – sex and morals;

and a sort of probable semi-benign neutral hovering on the Latin Mass so far.

People are often compartmentalised of course. It’s sometimes described as ‘bi-lateral identity’, but in the case of a pope politics and faith may be a matter of the head and the heart.

Last week I found myself invited to a small dinner party with Bishop Schneider. Just he and I and two others. He is a deeply serious, holy and astute man. We sat opposite other talking generally. Some of the conversation was about his extraordinary upbringing in Kazakhstan.

People sometimes think it’s a little odd to have a German bishop from Kazakhstan. But the background to it was that Catherine the Great invited German settlers into Russia in the late 18^th century to farm the Volga steppe. They were promised land, local autonomy and freedom from military service. Over the next century, tens of thousands established prosperous colonies there. World War one caused a problem, but the real disaster came under Stalin. He accused the entire Volga German population of collaboration and forcibly relocated them to Kazakhstan and Siberia by train, where they lived in internal exile. So bishop Schneider grew up in the Soviet Union dictatorship in the German speaking ‘catacomb church.’

I grew up in Britain but reading Solzhenitsyn, which when I became a practicing Christian as a student, lead to me becoming a smuggler of Bibles into Moscow and Thomas Aquinas into Prague for the Catholic underground seminaries there in the 1980’s. There is a lot that Bishop Schneider and I agree upon when it comes to Marxist totalitarianism and economics.

As we talked, a couple of time he lifted his head and said slightly sorrowfully “Ach Gavin, you are wrong.” Until we got to talking about Pope Leo, and I got an “Ach Gavin you are right.”

Well, perhaps.

After the appalling car-crash with reporters where he defended Cupich’s award to Durkin the Democrat senator, and made that highly offensive equivalence between immigration and abortion, it was becoming clear that Pope Leo had leftish political instincts.