Popes and Palaces: Lifting the Veil from Sacred to Sovereign Power
The Myth of Gentle Cages and Benevolent Power
The glorification of pope Francis — head of a 2,000-year-old institution built on hierarchy, control, and empire — by influential progressives is nothing short of shocking, if not devastating. From dictatorships and global colonisation to sexual abuse, opulence, and centuries of repression, the Catholic church has been a long-standing monument to power structures. And yet, as with the public mourning that met queen Elizabeth's death, we are publicly presented with a reverence that romanticises a cage.
The pope, particularly in the context of the Catholic church, is often seen as a symbol of moral authority, spiritual guidance, and social justice, which can create a significant social dissonance when associating him with systemic oppression. The pope is largely seen by the majority in a religious manner rather than political. His own teachings tend to revolve around love, peace, and justice, making it hard for others to reconcile his image with oppressive politics, even when the church itself has long been involved with them. The pope's public rhetoric tends to centre on issues of poverty, human dignity, and care for the environment that are discordant with the rhetoric of abuse. When the pope does make public statements, they are more likely to be against discrimination, inequality, and war. That enables some to distance him from political regimes that espouse precisely those ideals. Others may selectively perceive the pope's actions or words based on their own religious or political agendas. For example, more right-wing individuals would refer to his advocacy for family values or the sanctity of life, ignoring his critique of economic inequalities or militarisation.
The Vatican's diplomacy in foreign relations keeps the pope within a space of action that moves away from the self-evident political identification. This neutrality also makes it harder for some not to see him as being directly connected with any one government's suppressive actions. The fact that the pope is the head of an international organisation also places him in the precarious position where both his actions and his words can be interpreted as either begging for peace or merely as a symbol of protest, without actually inducing physical political change. All these factors combine to create a type of separation in people's minds between the pope's teachings and the political realities of the world, and for some, direct connections to oppression are difficult. In times of global instability, people also look to leaders who bring hope from within crumbling systems. Francis is a 'good priest in a bad church' and that film also reassures those who, rather than destroy, may try to redeem institutions. However, the Catholic church, over centuries, has been complicit in supporting or aligning with authoritarian and repressive regimes. Through the Spanish Inquisition, the church was complicit in the persecution of non-Catholics, especially Jews and Muslims. More recently in Spain, it was involved in the fascist dictatorship of Franco, and during the Cold War in Latin America, a section of the church was complicit with the military dictatorships that perpetrated bloody repression, including torture and forced disappearances. In particular, in the 1970s and 1980s, some bishops in countries like Argentina and Chile were accused of taking the side of repressive regimes.
The Catholic church was previously a direct player in colonialism and imperialism. While pope Alexander VI, in the 15th century, issued the papal bull 'Inter Caetera', granting Spain and Portugal the right to colonise the 'New World', the church's involvement often justified the exploitation and oppression of Indigenous peoples under the guise of evangelism. The church played a role in the suppression of native cultures and the forced conversion of millions of people in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. More recently, the church's sexual abuse scandals have exhibited a systemic abuse of power. The church's failure to hold abusers accountable and its attempts to conceal the abuse inflicted the suffering of countless victims, especially in institutional settings like schools and orphanages, protecting offenders and silencing victims. The Catholic church's stance on sexuality rights is far from lenient and the pope, while at times more conciliatory than his predecessors, upholds traditional doctrine on these matters.
Despite pope Francis' loud condemnation of neoliberalism, the Catholic church itself has historically accrued wealth enough to generate inequality, based on global capitalism. The church's engagement with economic and political power arrangements in most countries, particularly its huge landholdings, supports current social and economic oppression. Lastly, the Catholic church's stance on the role of women excludes them from the priesthood with limited leadership roles within the church hierarchy. Despite pope Francis being vocal on issues like poverty, climate change, and economic inequality, he failed to mention these age-old injustices pushing for significant institutional reforms within the church. Therefore, while the pope is generally thought to be a voice of the oppressed, history and contemporary complicity of the church in global oppression is not something that can be ignored.
This echoes with the mourning we saw after the death of queen Elizabeth as well as with concepts of conscious capitalism. Both pope and queen head institutions responsible for colonisation, cultural genocide, repression of Indigenous spirituality and knowledge, immense wealth accrued through violence, generations of exploitation in the name of the divine or royal will, and centuries of intergenerational trauma everywhere, suffused in every family affected by colonialism, capitalism, and their aftermath. Elizabeth was seen as the stable, apolitical grandmother of the realm even as she ruled over a commonwealth haunted by empire. Francis was being celebrated as the humble, reforming pope even as the church continues its inequality and silence structures. Their benevolence myth softens and blurs the machinery beneath them. Both have inspired uncritical public mourning, even from influential progressive leaders and media. Tributes have been inclined to efface the colonial, patriarchal, and oppressive origins of their institutions for sanitised personal admiration. Both are icons of imperial power, cloaked in humility, and adored by many, while standing on institutions soaked in conquest, control, and silence.
Conscious capitalism, on the other hand, is a term used to describe a supposedly more ethical capitalism — one where businesses aim to create value not just for shareholders, but for all stakeholders: employees, communities, customers, and the environment. The essentials usually entail a purpose beyond profit, stakeholder orientation, conscious leadership and moral culture. It's a matter of putting a halo on a machine whose function is to consume. The system itself is still premised upon the exploitation of labour, extraction of resources, growth at any cost, and extreme power imbalances, replicating the oppressive status quo on the whole planet. You can't detox a structure built on dominance by installing some compost bins. It's largely seen as a rebrand, not a revolution — a way of appeasing public guilt while the engine of inequality just keeps on humming.
Public Reverence as a Violent Element of the Emotional Architecture of Power
The social cognitive dissonance that exists between the role that institutional longstanding history plays in power dynamics and in public opinion — particularly amongst influential progressives who would otherwise criticise those very institutions, is one of the main problems of our time. From the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity to the crowning of emperors by the pope, the church has long been entangled with political power and social control, either actively complicit or strategically quiet in the face of egregious violence and injustice. The Vatican's engagement with fascist regimes, colonial missions, and its mishandling of abuse are all well documented. Pope Francis may be a friendlier face, but the apparatus is the same. He's a gentle reformer, not a structural disruptor. To uncritically praise him is to risk mistaking symbolic gestures for systemic change.
Symbolic power matters. When people — and especially high-profile progressives — glorify the pope, they legitimise power in the hands of unelected, patriarchal elites, over centuries of damage, and invalidate their criticisms of empire, colonisation, and institutional abuse. It's akin to cheering a kinder king while ignoring the kingdom's chains. Like praising the nice jailer while pretending not to hear the sound of the lock clicking behind us. It is a diversion from bottom-up movements. Pitying one (male, elite, religious) leader distracts from the actual revolutionaries rising up from the margins with the scars of oppression and the courage to dream: Indigenous leaders, decolonial activists, and former believers. His role is the cage. The papacy is the embodiment of oppression. Even a left-wing-oriented pope operates within a rigid doctrinal and diplomatic machinery.
True leftist ethics demands horizontalism, the flattening of hierarchies, and the redistribution of power. The church — with its hierarchy, its immense wealth, and its divine infallibility complex — is the exact opposite of that. A pope might hold progressive values, but the seat he occupies is carved from the bones of imperialism. A leftist pope might say progressive things but, unless the institution itself is willing to divest from its power, wealth, and patriarchal foundations, those words risk becoming holy poetry with no praxis unless he dares to betray the very throne he sits upon. A sanctified speech with no spine. Words clothed in sanctity, yet feigned where justice treads. To be revolutionary means to upend the system, not just polish its surface. And both popes and kings are architects of continuity, not rupture. Their legitimacy depends on the past, lineage, tradition, and sacred order. So, when one of them dares to bite the hand that crowns him, he becomes something else entirely — a heretic, an exile, a ghost in the palace. Glorifying either without critique is a kind of amnesia dressed in reverence.
We've all been shaped by systems that teach us to revere power, especially when it wears a soft face. From early on, we're taught to respect the crown, the cassock, the institution — to trust that tradition equals virtue, that longevity means legitimacy. This is not just cultural storytelling, it's deep social conditioning. We've inherited narratives that celebrate the pope or queen Elizabeth as symbols of unity, stability, and moral leadership, quietly erasing the violence, domination, and structural violence conducted under their flags. We live with contradictions because we were taught to. We were taught to mourn the empire, humanise power, and celebrate symbolic reform as if it were radical change. And thereby we silence the voices of those crushed under the heel of the institutions we are meant to venerate. Even in desiring change, we are prone to falling under the illusion that it is already happening. Confessing this hurts because, more than a socialised failure, it is a survival mechanism. But that does not absolve us from accountability even to ourselves. It means accepting that the figures and institutions we've admired — possibly even revered — are not neutral. It means grappling with the fact that some of our emotional responses have been curated by centuries of myth-making, now upheld by this mourning.
Like with any trauma and healing work, it also requires something most people are not socially rewarded for: courage. Courage to question beloved symbols. Courage to leave comfort behind. Courage to speak the truth, even when it is unpopular. Stepping across this threshold does not require us to abandon spirituality, morality, or a sense of shared identity. It requires us to reclaim them from corrosive institutions that have corrupted them in the service of power. It requires us to select integrity over nostalgia. It involves seeing that reverence without reckoning is a form of complicity with what is harming us.
The End of Legitimised Illusions and the Forging of a New World
We must dismantle not just sacred and secular institutions, but how we feel and believe in them - challenging ritual, myth, and collective illusions. Not just between religion and monarchy, but toward their often shared complicity within the larger system of oppression. Mapping power as a continuum of symbolic authority, tracing the evolution and performance of legitimacy — from altar to throne, from sanctity to sovereignty —, is a cultural and political critique exposing how public reverence for religious and royal figures acts as a symbolic veil concealing the violent continuities of colonialism, neocoloniality, and capitalism. It interrogates how these institutions, central to imperial and neocolonial rule, have been rebranded as benevolent, moral forces under the guise of soft power, such as conscious capitalism. But what’s beneath the veil? Not just colonialism, neocoloniality, and capitalism: institutional complicity, the performance of virtue, the rebranding of domination as morality, the illusion of sanctity that emotionally binds people to systems of control.
If we're asking ourselves whether the time has come for society to deal with the ugly realities underlying our hallowed institutions, I'd say the veil is already lifting. But the veil is made up of convenient myths — the cosy glow of benevolent monarchs, holy popes, and other symbolic figures upholding oppressive systems. To lift it is to challenge the structures that have forever oppressed us, to rewrite the narratives that sanitise or justify centuries of violence, and to reclaim truth from the lips of the oppressed, not the oppressor.
But here's the thing: once the veil is lifted, there's no unseeing the truth. Once the illusion of benevolence is stripped away, it's on us to create something better. And that requires radical imagination to build alternatives.
Are we ready? Or is society still set to cling to the myth of the royal halo and papal wisdom? This is all an indication that this isn't just about figures like the pope or the queen, it was always about us and having to tackle our indoctrinated mass denial and accommodation of the paradoxes that persecute us all. It is our responsibility to pull the thread. Will we? Or will we keep praying to all types of thrones and calling it peace? In our quest for collective healing, we're left with the tremble of bare truth. Then comes the real question: Will we find the courage to create new myths?
Cristina Morales
Cristina Morales is a Barcelona-born, London-based cultural activist – a public anthropologist and cultural producer working internationally as a critical researcher, writer, educator, and curator-artist at the intersection of radical politics and community art organisation for self and social development. She is a singular, trauma-informed cultural strategist, bridging decolonial theory and the full spectrum of human sciences with socially engaged art. Cristina holds an MA in Cultural Management from the Open University of Catalonia and a BA in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Barcelona.