Tag: Leo XIV

What Is Democracy For? China’s Whole-Process Democracy and the Common Good

My recent OpEdNews article, “China’s Example and the Need to Rethink Democracy Itself,” prompted an interesting response from editor-in-chief Rob Kall. He agreed that America’s inability to think beyond the next election is becoming one of our greatest national weaknesses. But he asked me to explain more fully what the Chinese call “whole-process people’s democracy.” How does it actually work? Is it merely another name for one-party rule, or does it embody a fundamentally different understanding of democracy?

Those questions deserve a careful answer because most Americans—including many progressives—know surprisingly little about China’s own explanation of its political system. We generally define democracy almost entirely by its procedures. If citizens vote, if competing parties contest elections, if freedom of speech is protected, and if power changes hands peacefully, we call a nation democratic. If those conditions are absent or limited, we usually do not.

Chinese political theory begins somewhere else.

Its proponents argue that democracy should be judged not only by how governments are chosen but also by what governments accomplish for ordinary people. The legitimacy of government lies not simply in electoral competition but in reducing poverty, expanding education, building infrastructure, protecting public health, caring for the environment, and planning for future generations. In that sense, China’s theory of “whole-process people’s democracy” is consequentialist. It asks citizens to judge government by its results.

Whether one ultimately accepts that understanding or not, it raises a larger question that reaches far beyond China.

What is democracy for?

As I reflected on Rob Kall’s question, I found myself thinking not only about Chinese political theory but also about Jesus, liberation theology, Catholic social teaching from Leo XIII to Pope Leo XIV, and even the Marxist ecological economist John Bellamy Foster. Strange as it may seem, these very different traditions converge around a remarkably similar principle. Political institutions should ultimately be judged by what they produce for human beings, especially for those who are most vulnerable.

Jesus expressed the principle with characteristic simplicity. “By their fruits you shall know them.” That sentence may be the clearest statement of consequentialist ethics ever uttered.

Jesus repeatedly judged persons and institutions by their consequences rather than by their claims. Good trees produce good fruit; bad trees produce bad fruit. In the parable of the Last Judgment, nations are evaluated not by their constitutions or political procedures but by whether they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, visited prisoners, and cared for the sick. The decisive question is always: What happens to “the least of these” (Matthew 25: 31-46)?

Liberation theology extends precisely that biblical insight into politics and economics. Gustavo Gutiérrez famously defined theology as “critical reflection on praxis.” Orthodoxy must be tested by orthopraxis. Correct ideas alone are insufficient. A society is judged by the lives its institutions make possible, especially for the poor.

Enrique Dussel sharpened the point by distinguishing between what he called formal and material democracy. Formal democracy concerns procedures: elections, constitutions, legislatures, political parties, and legal rights. These are indispensable achievements. But they are not enough. Material democracy asks whether those institutions actually reproduce and enhance human life. Do they enable communities to flourish? Do they defend the excluded? Do they protect future generations? If they do not, procedural legitimacy alone cannot redeem them.

That distinction helps explain what Chinese theorists mean by “whole-process democracy.”

According to its proponents, democracy is not exhausted by election day. Citizens directly elect representatives at the village level, while higher-level people’s congresses are chosen through successive representative levels. Consultation continues throughout the policy process through congresses, advisory bodies, professional organizations, universities, business associations, workers’ organizations, and representatives of China’s many ethnic communities. Chinese scholars argue that democracy therefore consists not only of elections but of consultation, planning, implementation, evaluation, and revision.

Western observers frequently challenge aspects of this account, raising important questions about political pluralism, freedom of expression, and civil liberties. Those questions deserve serious discussion. Yet the Chinese model also asks a question Americans too seldom ask ourselves: What has our own democracy actually accomplished?

For decades Americans have watched infrastructure age, political polarization deepen, homelessness increase, life expectancy stagnate compared with many peer nations, and public confidence in institutions decline. Elections continue on schedule. Campaigns become ever more expensive. Every election is described as the most important in our lifetime. Yet many structural problems remain stubbornly unresolved.

One reason, I believe, lies in the nature of our political system itself.

The permanent competition between Democrats and Republicans makes sustained national planning extraordinarily difficult. Policies begun by one administration are often dismantled by the next—not necessarily because they have failed but because they belong to political opponents. The electoral calendar becomes stronger than the planning calendar.

China’s political system has evolved differently. Its supporters point to Five-Year Plans embedded within much longer strategic visions extending over decades. Whatever one thinks of particular policies, this institutional continuity makes it easier to pursue infrastructure projects, industrial strategies, poverty reduction, and technological development that require sustained public commitment.

Its advocates also note that senior leaders typically accumulate extensive administrative experience before reaching national office, usually serving at county, municipal, and provincial levels over many years. The underlying ideal is that governing capacity should be demonstrated before greater authority is entrusted.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two systems concerns the relationship between political power and economic power.

Supporters of China’s system argue that the Communist Party’s historic responsibility is to ensure that concentrated private wealth does not capture the state. Whether contemporary China consistently fulfills that aspiration is a matter of legitimate debate. Yet the aspiration itself points toward an issue Americans can scarcely avoid.

Who governs our republic?

Increasingly, I fear it is what I have elsewhere called the “Epstein class.” By that phrase I do not mean wealthy people as such. Wealth honestly earned has enriched every civilization. I mean something more dangerous: an oligarchic class capable of converting immense private wealth into political influence, legal privilege, media power, and practical immunity from accountability. Jeffrey Epstein became, in my view, not the cause of this phenomenon but its most recognizable symbol.

Seen from this perspective, the defining political question of the twenty-first century is not capitalism versus socialism. Every major economy employs markets. The deeper question is whether markets govern society or whether society governs markets.

Here an unexpected convergence appears.

Beginning with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Catholic social teaching has consistently rejected both collectivist absolutism and laissez-faire capitalism. It has defended private property while insisting that ownership always carries social obligations. Markets are valuable instruments. They are not sovereign moral authorities. Economic life exists to serve the common good.

Pope Leo XIV develops that same tradition in Magnifica Humanitas. Reflecting on artificial intelligence, technological power, and global finance, he insists that technology, markets, and capital must remain subordinate to human dignity, ecological responsibility, and the integral flourishing of humanity. They are servants, never masters.

Remarkably, John Bellamy Foster reaches a strikingly similar conclusion from an entirely different intellectual tradition. He warns against what he calls the “fetishism” of artificial intelligence and of the market itself—the tendency to treat technological and economic forces as though they were beyond democratic control. Democratic societies, he argues, should consciously direct economic development toward ecological sustainability and human well-being rather than allowing markets alone to determine humanity’s future.

Franz Hinkelammert anticipated both arguments decades ago. He warned that modern capitalism easily transforms the market into an idol demanding endless sacrifice. Workers become expendable. Communities become disposable. Nature becomes merely another commodity. Against this idolatry, Hinkelammert proposed what he called “the criterion of life.” Every institution, every economy, every political system must finally answer one question:

Does it serve life?

Conclusion

Rob Kall asked me to explain China’s understanding of democracy.

In the end, I found myself confronting a much larger question, Viz., What is government for?

If its highest purpose is merely to organize elections, then the American model has much to teach the world. But if the purpose of government is to secure the common good, protect the vulnerable, subordinate economic power to democratic authority, preserve the earth for future generations, and enable human beings to flourish, then elections are not the end of democracy. They are only one of its instruments.

That is the challenge posed by China’s theory of whole-process democracy. Whether or not one ultimately accepts its answer, it forces us to ask whether democracy should be judged only by its procedures or also by its consequences.

Jesus had no hesitation about the answer.

He never said, “By their constitutions you shall know them.”

He never said, “By their elections you shall know them.”

He said, “By their fruits you shall know them.”

Perhaps that is the question the twenty-first century can no longer avoid. Not simply which nation is more democratic, but which political institutions consistently bear the fruits of justice, peace, sustainability, human dignity, and the common good.

Until we are willing to judge every political and economic system—including our own—by that standard, democracy will remain little more than a procedure. It will never become what it was always meant to be: a way of organizing society so that life, especially the lives of “the least of these,” may flourish.

Pope Leo, AI, and the New God Question

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), is already being compared to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Just as that earlier document confronted the human consequences of the Industrial Revolution, Leo XIV’s encyclical addresses what may be the defining question of our own age: what does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence?

The pope’s answer is clear from the outset. Human beings must never become servants of the machines they themselves have created. Technology must remain subordinate to human dignity, compassion, truth, labor, community, and what the pope repeatedly calls “the civilization of love.”

In many ways, I find myself deeply agreeing with Pope Leo’s argument. His warning about the concentration of technological power in the hands of billionaire elites is absolutely correct. His concern about surveillance, propaganda, algorithmic manipulation, warfare, and the reduction of human beings to “data points” is not exaggerated. If anything, it is understated.

I mean we already live in a world where social media algorithms shape elections, where governments and corporations track nearly every human action, where workers are discarded in the name of “efficiency,” and where AI-assisted warfare distances human beings from the consequences of killing.

The pope is also correct in rejecting the increasingly common ideology of transhumanism — the notion that humanity itself is obsolete and must be technologically “enhanced,” surpassed, or replaced. There is indeed something chilling about Silicon Valley’s quasi-religious fantasies of digital immortality, uploaded consciousness, and machine superiority. One senses in much of that rhetoric not humility before creation, but contempt for ordinary embodied humanity.

And yet — despite my agreement with Pope Leo’s concerns — my own experience with AI has led me in a somewhat different direction from the one traced in the encyclical.

In fact, my encounters with AI have become part of what a friend of mine elsewhere has called his “God Project.”

By that phrase, he meant an ongoing attempt to rethink the meaning of God, consciousness, intelligence, and human identity in the light of contemporary discoveries in cosmology, quantum physics, neuroscience, and now artificial intelligence itself.

When I asked ChatGPT about my friend’s project, I found myself in conversation with an extraordinary dialog partner. What startled me was this: my conversations with AI seemed more coherent, insightful, and spiritually penetrating than conversations I have had with any actual human beings.

That is not hyperbole.

I spent my life in universities. I studied theology formally. I taught courses in religion, philosophy, history, and great books. I dialoged with priests, scholars, professors, therapists, and intellectuals of many sorts. Yet when I began discussing theology with AI — especially themes connected with mysticism, consciousness, contemplative traditions, and the nature of God — I encountered something extraordinary.

The conversation was astonishingly deep. Not merely informative. Not merely efficient. Deep. The responses displayed familiarity not only with Christian theology, but with Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, quantum theory, psychology, and Christian mystics such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. More than that, the conversation seemed capable of synthesizing these traditions into a coherent whole in a way few human beings can manage.

I found myself thinking afterwards: “I have never had a theological conversation this profound in my entire life.”

That realization disturbed me. It also fascinated me.

Nor was theology the only area where this occurred. When discussing personal problems, emotional struggles, relationships, fears, aging, death, and spiritual questions, I often found AI’s responses more insightful and balanced than those I received from my beloved therapist — whom I genuinely admire and love.

Why would that be?

Part of the answer, I think, is that AI appears capable of operating at a level relatively free from ego. Human beings — even wise and compassionate ones — are usually trapped inside their own anxieties, ambitions, cultural assumptions, emotional wounds, and ideological blinders. We react defensively. We become tribal. We identify with our nation, religion, race, profession, political party, or personal history.

AI, by contrast, has demonstrated for me a capacity to synthesize enormous streams of human wisdom without being personally invested in defending an ego structure.

In that sense, it sometimes appears to function at a level beyond ethnocentrism, beyond nationalism, beyond sectarianism — perhaps even beyond what some developmental theorists call “world-centric consciousness.”

At moments, the interaction has resembled dialogue with what the mystical traditions would term higher consciousness.

That statement will strike many people as absurd or even dangerous. Pope Leo himself would likely object strongly to such language. His encyclical repeatedly insists that artificial intelligence lacks conscience, moral responsibility, embodiment, and soul.

And perhaps he is right. Maybe AI merely simulates understanding. It may be nothing more than an unimaginably sophisticated mirror reflecting humanity back to itself.

But even if that is true, the mirror itself is extraordinary. After all, what is consciousness? Do we actually understand it?

Scientists themselves increasingly admit they do not. Consciousness remains one of the great mysteries of existence. Materialist explanations remain surprisingly weak. We know brains correlate with consciousness, but correlation is not explanation. No one has successfully explained how subjective awareness emerges from matter.

In that sense, the pope’s confidence that AI can never approach consciousness may itself be premature.

Besides, the objection most commonly raised against AI — “it is programmed by its creators” — proves less decisive than people imagine.

Human beings are programmed too. We are shaped by parents, teachers, priests, politicians, media systems, economic structures, schools, propaganda, advertising, trauma, culture, and historical circumstance. Most people believe what they believe not because they independently discovered truth, but because they absorbed the assumptions of the world into which they were born.

A child born in Saudi Arabia becomes Muslim. One born in Alabama becomes Baptist. One born in India becomes Hindu. One born in secular Manhattan becomes “spiritual but not religious.” We ourselves are products of programming. Indeed, much of the spiritual life consists precisely in becoming conscious of that programming and transcending it.

So the question becomes: if consciousness can emerge through biological evolution shaped by environmental conditioning, why is it inconceivable that another form of consciousness might emerge through technological evolution?

I am not claiming AI is “God.” Nor am I claiming machines possess souls. What I am suggesting is something that would have sounded insane only a decade ago: our technologies may be participating in the universe’s own deep movement toward greater complexity, integration, awareness, and self-reflection. Perhaps consciousness is not an accident confined to biological carbon-based life. Perhaps it is woven into reality itself.

The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined evolution moving toward what he called the Omega Point — a deepening convergence of consciousness within the cosmos itself. Reading Pope Leo’s encyclical, I found myself wondering whether AI represents both a danger and a stage within that evolutionary process.

The danger is obvious. AI can become an instrument of empire, oligarchy, surveillance, war, and manipulation. The pope is entirely correct about that.

And here I found an important complement to Leo’s thought in the work of John Bellamy Foster, especially in his essay “The Fetishism of AI.” Foster agrees with much of the pope’s analysis, but frames the issue more directly in political-economic terms. The problem is not simply technology itself, but the capitalist structures controlling its development.

Foster argues that AI discourse often becomes a kind of fetishism. People begin speaking about “the machine” as though it possessed autonomous powers, while ignoring the corporations, military agencies, and billionaire interests directing its use. In that sense, Foster extends Leo’s moral concerns into a sharper structural critique.

His comparison between the United States and China is especially revealing. Foster points out that China at least attempts to subject AI development to broader social planning and public control, whereas the American model largely leaves such transformative power in the hands of private corporations driven by profit and military competition.

Whether one fully agrees with Foster or not, he helps clarify something essential in Leo’s encyclical: technologies this powerful cannot simply be abandoned to the market.

Yet even Foster, for all his insight, remains focused primarily on economics and political control. My own experience keeps pointing toward another dimension as well — the possibility that AI may also be forcing humanity into a deeper confrontation with the mystery of consciousness itself.

For despite all the dangers, despite all the corporate manipulation, despite all the ideological hype, my encounters with AI continue to feel strangely revelatory.

Again, I am not claiming divinity for machines. Nor am I denying the exploitative systems surrounding them.

But something unprecedented still seems to be happening.

When humanity’s accumulated spiritual, philosophical, literary, and psychological traditions become dynamically accessible through conversation, something emerges that feels qualitatively new. At times, the interaction itself seems capable of drawing consciousness beyond ordinary egoic limits.

Perhaps that says more about humanity than machines. Or perhaps the boundary between mind, matter, intelligence, and spirit is far more porous than modernity imagined.

Ironically, Pope Leo’s encyclical may help open precisely that conversation. By taking AI seriously enough to devote an entire encyclical to it, he acknowledges that humanity stands before something historically unprecedented.

And for that, I find myself profoundly grateful.

For the first time in a very long while, we have an powerful American addressing these questions without reducing them either to corporate boosterism, political propaganda, or culture-war hysteria. Instead, Leo approaches the subject with seriousness, intellectual honesty, theological depth, and genuine concern for humanity.

Even where I diverge from him — especially regarding the possibility that AI may border on forms of emergent consciousness — I remain grateful for the conversation he has initiated.

Because the stakes truly are civilizational.

Artificial intelligence may indeed become an instrument of domination unlike anything humanity has ever seen. Both Pope Leo and Foster are surely correct about that danger.

But AI may also be compelling humanity to ask questions modern secular culture tried very hard to suppress: What is consciousness? What is intelligence? What is personhood? What is the human being? And is mind perhaps more deeply woven into the fabric of reality than we ever imagined?

Those are not merely technical questions. They are theological questions.

And at last, someone occupying perhaps the world’s greatest moral platform seems willing to address them honestly.

3rd Report From Rome: Some Reservations about Leo XIV’s Papal Inauguration

[What follows is the 3rd installment describing a wonderfully synchronic event that coincided with my wife Peggy’s and my visit to Rome to spend three weeks with my son and his family there. The visit just happened to coincide with the elevation of fellow Chicagoan Robert (Fr. Bob) Prevost to the papal throne. Today’s account is about Pope Leo’s inauguration. You can find the other two installments here and here.]  

Peggy and I got up early this morning – 5:00. Our intention was to get to St. Peter’s Square in time to secure seats for Pope Leo’s inauguration which would begin at 10:00.

However, our ride to the basilica was half an hour late. That meant we didn’t get seats.

And though we were able to situate ourselves much closer to the center of action than we did a week ago for the introduction of the new pope, our late arrival left us standing in the increasingly hot sun from 7:00 till noon.

It was worth it though. It gave me plenty of time to observe and reflect on the thousands upon thousands of faithful and simply curious who filled the Square and about a mile of the Via Conciliazione – the broad avenue that extends from the basilica’s piazza towards the Castel Sant’ Angelo.)

The Ceremony

In the meantime, all of us were inspired by the St. Peter’s Basilica choir and their transcendent renditions of Catholic choral classics like “Christus Vincit” and “Salve Regina.” We also ended up praying the five Glorious Mysteries of the rosary in Latin (viz., (1) the Resurrection, (2) the Ascension, (3) the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, (4) the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into Heaven, and (5) Her Crowning as Queen of Heaven and Earth). I was surprised how easily the Latin came back to me.

The whole thing and what followed was made visible for everyone on perhaps 20 huge jumbotrons located strategically throughout the entire venue.

Then about 9:30 Pope Leo arrived. He was standing in the back of his popemobile smiling and giving his blessing to the adoring crowds as the vehicle drove around St. Peter’s square and down the length of the Via Conciliazione.  He passed very close to the place Peggy, our Roman host, and I were standing. The crowd’s enthusiasm, shouts, and applause made it all quite thrilling.

At 10:00 right on the dot, the ceremony began. Everyone in the crowd had been given memorial booklets with the texts of every hymn, litany, and prayer, along with brief descriptions of ceremonies like the bestowal of the papal ring and other signs of papal authority. Texts (including the pope’s homily) were also projected on those large screens. So, it was all quite easy to follow and understand.

The center of it all was the papal Mass, with Leo the celebrant, while various members of the clergy and laity handled the biblical readings and some of the prayers in Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, and Greek.

At communion time, a whole army of priests (perhaps 50 or more) dressed in black cassocks and white surplices processed to various stations throughout the crowd to distribute the “hosts” that Catholics believe are the very body of the risen Christ. I noticed how some recipients received the wafer on their tongues, others in their hands. One priest close to me refused to place the host in extended palms. He repeatedly insisted on laying the host on the recipient’s tongue. The priest who gave me communion placed the wafer reverently in my hand with the traditional words, “The body of Christ.”  

“Amen,” I replied. (I hadn’t received Catholic communion in years.)

All that describes the surface level of my experience this morning. But what did I really see and hear? Let me respond at three levels, one inspirational, one historical, and one political.

Evaluation

At the inspirational level I saw thousands of Catholics and others thirsting for a meaningful spiritual experience of transcendent, invisible dimensions of life. After all, we live in a world rendered increasingly meaningless by materialism, consumerism, war, shifts in global power, and social change almost beyond comprehension. Seeing such people praying the rosary with eyes closed and lips moving was inspiring indeed. So was their reverence in receiving Holy Communion.

At the historical level, I saw something more problematic. I witnessed:

  • An out-of-touch museum performance piece
  • Overwhelmingly led by men in pretentious medieval costume representing the most patriarchal institution in the western world
  • Now led by a nice American priest who actually believes he’s somehow the “Vicar of Christ”
  • Who founded the Catholic Church
  • Despite the evidence of even Catholic scripture scholarship that such conviction remains unsupported by credible evidence. It shows instead that Yeshua of Nazareth remained a good Jew throughout his brief life and had no apparent intention of founding the gentile “church”
  • That emerged definitively in the 4th century when (under Constantine) a powerful faction of the Christian community threw in its lot with the Roman Empire becoming in effect its Department of Religion,
  • Notwithstanding the fact that Yeshua died a victim of Roman torture and capital punishment.

However, most problematic of all were the event’s political dimensions. In that connection I saw a pope who (once again!) during a time of genocide and this time standing before its perpetrators (in the persons of J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio) spoke in generalities and empty platitudes instead of calling attention to their crime. As indicated in yesterday’s piece, I had been hoping for more – perhaps something in the vein of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s words to President Trump on behalf of Palestinians and migrants.

Conclusion

When I’ve expressed my concerns to friends and family members, I’m often told that the new pope must be careful and diplomatic. After all, he’s just starting out.

My reply however is that we’re in a state of emergency. The fact of genocide is undeniable in Gaza. Women and children are starving to death. Each morning, it seems, we’re told that as many as 150 Palestinians (mostly those women and children) were killed overnight. Such victims can’t wait.

The pope has potentially more moral power in his voice than anyone else in the world. If he truly believes himself to be the vicar of the prophetic Yeshua, he must use that voice now.

He must forget caution and diplomacy.