The Pope bets against the bullies

The Bottom Line

Columnist Troy Nahumko looks at how the Catholic Church, long a shrewd player of the odds, may finally be learning to back a more compassionate horse

Troy Nahumko

The track wasn’t much to look at. Dust that clung to your shoes, stale beer in the sun, cigarette smoke hanging low like it had nowhere better to be. My great-grandfather loved it anyway. He dressed for the occasion, as if elegance might improve the odds, and took me along, a six-year-old watching men hunch over their racing programs like they were consulting holy writ. They studied numbers the way others read tea leaves, certain that the future could be coaxed out of past performances if you just stared hard enough.

But my great-grandfather didn’t bother so much with the paper. He went down to the paddock, where the air smelled like horses and fate. He asked about the jockey who’d been drinking, the one chasing trouble, the horse that had taken a bad step off the trailer, the race that wasn’t meant to be won. It wasn’t science, more a kind of street-corner anthropology, but he read the room better than the men with their pencils. And if the day tilted his way, he walked off with a few dollars and the quiet satisfaction of having trusted his premonitions.

The fever didn’t cross generations. I’ve never been much of a betting man. Faith, even less so. But institutions, like old gamblers, develop a nose for the table, and the Catholic Church has been circling it for two thousand years- sometimes backing emperors, sometimes martyrs, occasionally hedging with a flexibility that would make a contortionist blush. In the last century alone, it managed to find common cause with regimes in Italy and here in Spain that were not, shall we say, big on turning the other cheek.

Lately, though, it seems to be eyeing a different horse: less Caesar, more Sermon on the Mount; less iron fist inquisition, more open hand. In a world where strongmen from Trump to Orbán and Putin are running hard on fear, otherness and control, the Church appears - somewhat to its own surprise - to be back in the paddock, sniffing out the human condition instead of the apparent winning odds. It’s an unfamiliar look, like seeing your bookie take up ballet. Whether it pays out is another matter. But for the first time in, perhaps ever, you get the sense they might be betting on the better story.

A less charitable reading is that this is just another long game. After the public-relations equivalent of a very bad hangover post Ratzinger, the Church did what institutions do: changed the tone, softened the lighting, brought out a more approachable face. If you squint, it’s the ecclesiastical version of what the Americans did going from Bush to Barack Obama - same house, different curtains.

Still, when bishops start picking public fights with the likes of the Global Bully and his ideological minions here in Spain, when the rhetoric leans less toward fortress and more toward fellowship, you start to wonder. Maybe this isn’t just optics. Maybe, somewhere in the paddock, they’re hearing something the rest of us aren’t. I’d like to think that this time, they’re not betting on the loudest horse, or even the strongest - but on the one that helps humanity win the race.