Pope Leo XIV mistakes San Marino’s power-sharing for human freedom.
San Marino has a 60-member parliament. It elects two captains regent every six months. The captains serve jointly as heads of state. The arrangement limits the concentration of authority. That is a useful institutional design.
It is not yet a moral answer. Rotating officeholders can restrain one institution from dominating another, but they cannot, by that fact alone, secure the freedom of the human person. A government may distribute authority perfectly and still permit power to decide whose life, dignity, and suffering count.
A country can divide power among offices and still ask whether every person can live with dignity. A government can rotate its leaders and still leave the vulnerable without a voice before the state, an exit from its abuses, or a remedy when those abuses occur. Those are not features supplied by changing officeholders. They are protections owed to the people who must live under the state’s power.
I know the temptation because I carry it too. I can admire a well-built chair and forget to ask who has nowhere to sit. I can praise a door’s hinges while ignoring the person locked outside. Catholics do this with institutions. We praise the parish, the constitution, the family, the nation. Then we ask whether the stranger, the prisoner, the migrant, the child, or the poor person has been welcomed only after the structure has received its blessing.
The pope praised Saints Marino and Leone for translating the Christian message into “a new community and political model, strongly characterized by the Christian principles of freedom, mutual respect and communion.” Those principles deserve more than ceremonial approval. They require a test.
Who has freedom when the state treats a person as expendable? Who receives mutual respect when citizenship becomes a measure of human worth? Where is communion when economic power decides whose hunger counts and whose suffering remains outside the room?
Jesus gave us the test without a constitutional diagram. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” He did not say, I was a stranger and your offices rotated every six months. He did not say, I was hungry and your parliament was properly constituted. He placed the stranger, the hungry, the imprisoned, and the naked at the center of judgment.
That is why San Marino can be a lesson in limited authority without becoming a model of freedom in full. Its dual regency may restrain one form of domination. It does not, by itself, establish the freedom of the human person. The person needs food, shelter, medical care, legal standing, family unity, and a real chance to speak against the power governing him. Freedom without those conditions becomes a word polished smooth by use.
Pope Leo has spoken elsewhere about the obligations owed to migrants, and his July 4 appeal to uphold America’s immigrant-welcoming legacy belongs beside his San Marino praise. Both appeals judge political order by how it treats people who can be excluded. Neither should be reduced to constitutional form alone. A nation is not free because authority changes hands. It is free when authority cannot make some people disappear from moral concern.
We who claim the gospel and live in republics must apply the same measure to our own political arrangements. We cannot condemn concentrated power in one capital while excusing it in a church, a corporation, a border agency, or a wealthy household. We cannot praise freedom when it protects our own choices and call it disorder when the poor ask for choices of their own. The Catholic Church has built institutions that served human dignity, and it has built institutions that protected rank while the vulnerable waited outside. I belong to that accounting. The governing question is whether those institutions made vulnerable people visible, protected them, and made power answerable to justice. No saint’s name permits me to skip it.
Holy Father, the door remains open. Keep praising institutions that restrain power. Then ask the harder question: who is still being crushed beneath them? A humane political order would make every person visible, protect the stranger, give the poor a voice, and place power under the judgment of the human beings it governs.
A carpenter can build a beautiful frame around an empty room. The work is not finished until someone can come in.