Our fragile world needs leaders like Carney and Pope Leo

In our fragile and at times fragmenting world we were never more in need of moral giants to focus our minds and hearts on all that is right and good. There are times, like now, when it is as if an incremental moral corruption is slowly enveloping us and when, in William Butler Yeats’ famous words, ‘the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity’. In times like now, we need prototypes or exemplars to dispel the bleakness by benchmarking a clear way forward for us.

There’s a case to be made that God has, as God often does, sent us not just one but two quite extraordinary people to deflect what often seems like a gathering moral vacuum. And as often happens, they can come to us obliquely, often from unlikely circumstances - from ordinary families and with little advance warning of the promise they bring with them. Unlikely prophets that suddenly seem to emerge as if from nowhere but whose presence quickly alerts us to the rich harvest they represent.

Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, who visited Ireland last weekend and Robert Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, no stranger to Ireland in his past life, both come from ‘ordinary’ families and interestingly both have migrant family histories. Two of Mark Carney’s four grandparents, as was related last weekend, were from Aughagower in Co Mayo and Leo’s paternal grandfather was born in Sicily. (No one should be surprised that Leo spoke about migrants in the Spanish parliament some days ago.)

The similarities between Carney and Prevost don’t end there. Both happen to be from Catholic homes but more tellingly they share very similar personality traits not least the measured tones that often disguise a policy of direct communication but, even more tellingly, they radiate an attendant calmness, clarity and courage that have become hallmarks of their style.

It was their courage that first brought them to the attention of the world. Carney entered the toxic den of the Oval Office in Washington to be confronted by President Donald Trump, his alter ego, a bumptious figure diametrically opposed to Carney who unashamedly tried to bully him into agreeing that Canada become the 51st state of the USA. 

The location and the occasion served to create maximum pressure on visiting dignitaries but Carney’s response, conveyed with a beady eye, and with just two words - ‘not ever’ - struck a different note from, for instance, Sir Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, who had an invitation to the King in his back pocket to ensure he could persuade the salivating Trump over the line.

And so it was too with Pope Leo, on his first trip of his pontificate overseas, as he explained quietly and calmly to the media, that NO he was not afraid of Trump and that YES he would say what he had to say whenever he wanted to say it.

Now, of course, a medley of characters is lining up to take on a weakened Trump, whose public ratings are now so low that mathematics has lost its ability to measure them and the world and his wife know that he will lose the mid-term elections and his authority as, effectively, he becomes a lame-duck president. The outgoing tide of popularity has left Trump stranded on a road to nowhere and the vultures, priming their newfound courage, are gathering. But what vultures invariably represent is opportunity, not courage. Carney and Prevost are made of sterner stuff.

What also highlights the contemporary value of the Carney/Leo leadership and their moral value system that gives substance to that leadership is the extraordinary dearth in the quality of world political leadership now. It might indeed be argued that the Carney/Prevost axis has very little competition in the current leadership stakes.

Take Putin. His army of one million soldiers is diminishing by the month as their leader, progressively more worried by the turn for the worst in the war with Ukraine, is desperately throwing thousands of soldiers to their deaths in battle.

Take Netanyahu. Since his grip on the leash around Trump’s neck has lost its tension, he has achieved what few had predicted and what once seemed impossible - the obliteration of the credibility of Israel on the world’s stage and the reputation for what amounts to genocide and a casual disrespect for the rules of international law.

And there’s Trump. Now little more than a figure of fun on the international stage, a figure of shame to Americans wondering how his devastation was allowed to cause such destruction to their reputation and a figure of pity at a human level as old age and a variety of conditions seem to hasten his imminent disintegration - while the world holds its breath that, with his exclusive authority as President of the United States to order the use of nuclear weapons, he won’t tip our planet over the edge.

The leadership that Carney and Leo represent is cut from a very different cloth and for that people of goodwill are surely grateful. Leaders like Carney and Leo are to be unambiguously cherished especially while ‘leaders’ like Putin, Netanyahu and Trump and others strut their stuff on the world stage.

There was a tangible and merited sense of pride in Mayo and especially in Aghagower as Mark Carney was welcomed home to the land of his grandparents’ birth, where in May 1925 they - Robert Carney (23) and Nora Moran (22) - had set off for Canada. Like thousands of migrants before them, they arrived in Grosse Isle in Montreal with all of £5 in their pockets, before eventually settling in Alberta. A century later, their grandson, now in everything but name the putative leader of the western world, was honoured by his own - and Aghagower, Mayo and Ireland were honoured by his presence.