By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY — Cardinal Michael Czerny said that when Cardinal Robert F. Prevost was elected pope and chose the name Leo XIV, “I rejoiced, I really rejoiced.”
The new pope said he chose his name in homage to Pope Leo XIII, often referred to as “the father of Catholic social teaching,” recognizing that the church’s social doctrine needs to be renewed to respond to the new industrial revolution, including the development of artificial intelligence, which poses “new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
Cardinal Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, spoke to Catholic News Service on May 13.
“The issue of work is of vital importance to the vast majority of people on the planet” and Pope Leo has made it clear that it is an issue important to him as well, he said.
People all over the globe, he said, are asking themselves how they can survive and thrive and support their families when decent, fulfilling jobs are becoming more difficult to find.
“Society doesn’t seem to be even remotely ready to face this problem — just keep discarding the workers and applauding AI for its innovations,” said Cardinal Czerny.
But AI is just one example, he said.
“Climate change, human rights violations, war, environmental degradation: they all contribute to the same result, which is the destruction of jobs, the elimination of jobs and the increasing difficulty of earning one’s living.”
“It is a huge and threatening problem,” the cardinal said, “and I’m very glad that Pope Leo has signaled how much the church cares about this, how engaged the church promises to be with this issue, which touches the very essence of what it means to be human, the essence of human dignity and not only the quality of life, but the very possibility of living together in harmony and also living a decent life, a dignified human life.”
The issue of migration also is tied to the issue of work, Cardinal Czerny said, because a lack of decent jobs can force people to leave their homelands and finding work is one of the first things migrants and refugees do when they reach their destinations.
But “now they are in the same boat with everyone else,” he said, trying to find a decent job. Initially, migrants and refugees tend to take the jobs no one else wants because they are badly paid, unstable and unfulfilling.
Closing a country’s borders to immigrants is not going to help the country’s citizens find decent jobs because fewer and fewer decent jobs exist, Cardinal Czerny said.
An anti-immigrant stance is not a “position based on reason,” he said. “It is based rather on feelings of fear and insecurity and confusion.”
Turning specifically to the United States, Cardinal Czerny said that “what jobs meant in the context of the American Dream, in simple words, was that ‘My kids are going to work and go do even better than I am,’ but that’s over. That is over.”
However, with “demagoguery and propaganda and fake news,” he said, many Americans are led to believe that “closing the borders and throwing out foreigners or undocumented people is going to make America prosperous and secure like they remember it was, and that we are going to live happily ever after and better without these people. It’s just not true.”
Cardinal Czerny said the distinction between the need for missionaries in places like Peru, where Pope Leo XIV spent decades ministering, and in Europe or North America also has disappeared.
“All parts of the church throughout the world have to be missionary,” he said, “and in some ways, it is easier if you are going to a place like Chiclayo (Peru), which is known to everyone as a missionary church, than it is in New York or San Francisco, but it’s just as important.”
And, the cardinal said, “there is no bishop of a diocese without poor, marginalized, invisible and probably also exploited people,” so clearly one cannot say it is easier to be a missionary bishop “in Chicago than in Chiclayo.”
CNS also asked Cardinal Czerny, a close collaborator of Pope Francis, how the cardinals managed to elect a new pope so quickly while still mourning Pope Francis.
“I think it is thanks to tradition,” he replied. “If we had arrived and there was no preset procedure and we had to start figuring out how we are going to go about this, it would take a month or two months or three months.”
But having a clear procedure, he said, “we were carried by the tradition,” and “the tradition freed us to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, so that we did not have to fuss about the details.”
