How Many Divisions Has The Pope?
As Winston Churchill tells the story in volume 1 of his history of World War II, The Gathering Storm, in 1935 Stalin was asked by French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval whether he, Stalin, might support Catholicism in Russia. "It would help me so much with the Pope," Laval says. "Oho!" Stalin replies. "The Pope! How many divisions has he got?" (Emphasis in original).
Whether or not true, the tale is more about Stalin's character than it is meant to be instructive in the ways of realpolitik. At the time of Stalin's quip, Pius XI was Pope, and he more forcefully and loudly condemned the rise of Nazism than did his successor Pius XII, whose papacy began in 1939. Had Pius XI lived longer, the Church might have played a more active role in combating Nazism despite having no army--although historical counterfactuals are necessarily purely speculative.
Donald Trump is a funhouse mirror version of a Rennaissance man: he is impressively ignorant about just about everything. Thus, it is doubtful he knows about Stalin's quip, but if he did, he would likely mistake its brutality for wisdom. After Trump's recent social media and in-person accusations against Pope Leo XIV, the Pope said he did not fear Trump. Apparently, neither does Trump fear the Pope. About that, we need not speculate, given Trump's behavior.
Perhaps after being told that sharing an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure healing the sick by the laying on of hands wasn't playing well with his base, Trump deleted that post, although, as always, he did not take responsibility. He claimed (repeatedly) that he thought the image depicted him "as a doctor." The picture, which shows Trump's hands radiating holy energy so obviously is not of a doctor that one almost wants to applaud the audacity of the lie, except it's also possible that Trump is so unfamiliar with religious imagery and so incurious about the practice of medicine that he sincerely believed the image depicted him as a doctor. I leave it to readers to make up their minds about whether it's worse for Trump (and the rest of us) if he was lying or telling the truth.
Meanwhile, despite deleting the image of himself as Doctor Jesus, Trump pointedly refused to apologize for his social media posts targeting Pope Leo XIV, who, he repeated, is "very weak on crime and other things."
I've been puzzling over the weak-on-crime accusation. Does Trump think the Pope's job is to fight crime? Such are the times in which we live that I actually looked into whether there was some movie Trump might have seen (he certainly wouldn't have read a book) in which a fictional character is Pope by day and crime-fighting superhero by night. I came up empty. I eventually concluded that "weak on crime" must be a reference to the fact that Leo has criticized brutal crackdowns on immigrants. That has nothing to do with crime, of course, but Trump sells his immigration policy as targeting violent criminals. Here too, it's not clear whether it would be worse if Trump were simply lying about that or actually believed it.
It is tempting to think that Trump's blasphemies will prove to be the breaking point for his MAGA base, but past experience breeds caution. One could build an army of scarecrows from the enormous pile of straw amassed out of each ostensible last straw of Trump's outrageous words and deeds. Yet even if Trump's self-inflicted stigmata end up causing few defections from his base of supporters, they are not costless for the United States or, ultimately for Trump's political fortunes. Trump's Stalin-esque dismissal of the Pope is, in microcosm, his approach to everything, eschewing soft power--indeed, denying the very existence of soft power--in favor of bullying.
There is a scene in chapter 8 of George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings that is also depicted in episode 3 of Season 2 of the HBO adaptation A Game of Thrones in which Varys poses a riddle for Tyrian:
In a room sit three great men: a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your rightful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?
The riddle has no definitive answer, as Tyrian observes. It depends on what the sellsword values. The initial lesson of the riddle is thus that power does not derive from politics, religion, or wealth but from strength. It is then suggested that the king has the upper hand because even if, in the moment, he does not command the sellsword, he commands an army. But then Varys observes that this merely moves the locus of inquiry from the sellsword to the army. Why is the army loyal to the king rather than to a priest or a rich man? Ultimately, Varys concludes: "Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less."
Trump holds power despite having committed numerous high crimes and misdemeanors because Republicans in Congress fear that if they cross him, he will throw his weight behind a primary challenger. He wields power with no opposition from across Capitol Hill for the same reason. It is long past time that everyone gave up their belief in Trump's power.
-- Michael C. Dorf