At the sound of the Pope’s impassioned voice, the more history-minded of his listeners might have sensed ghosts of papal assemblies past, especially one held nearly a millennium ago, not in a Renaissance palace but in a rough field in southern France. Back then, the brutal feuds of warring princes were laying Europe waste. The killing and pillaging had become savage enough to require a drastic intervention. At the Council of Clermont, in 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a crowd of prelates, knights, and nobles—the leaders of the Latin West. He wished to heal what he called “the great disorder” of a continent in deep conflict with itself, and the speech he gave is remembered for its success in doing that. Having just promulgated, at the Council, a historic Truce of God, which restricted combat between Christians to three days a week, Urban declared, “I exhort and demand that you, each, try hard to have the truce kept in your diocese. And if anyone shall be led by his cupidity or arrogance to break this truce, by the authority of God and with the sanction of this Council he shall be anathematized.”

Urban sought to pacify the warring Frankish knights by uniting them against a common external enemy. “Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians,” he said. The contemporary echo comes, of course, in Urban’s having defined the barbarians as “the base and bastard Turks and Arabs”—the Muslim infidels who were besieging the Eastern Church and desecrating the Holy Land. The Pope’s followers, marking their tunics with “the horizontal-vertical sign,” set out on their Crusade, and with a cry of “God wills it!” set in motion part one, yes, of the clash of civilizations. In the next two hundred years, as the Crusades went on, a coalescing Europe found its point of unity in the holy war against Islam. Now, in the secular age, that holy war has been reignited, and, with the rise of a border-obsessed Islamophobia, Europe’s unity is threatened by its blowback. Still, the difference between Pope Urban II and Pope Francis could not be clearer.

The resuscitation of Christendom is not on Francis’s bucket list. His concern is centered on human beings, not on members of any collective, whether religiously, ethnically, or nationally defined. From the start of his pontificate, Francis has been a stinging critic of the global “economy of exclusion and inequality,” so his denunciation of Euroskepticism cannot be taken as an unconscious alliance with global élites. On the contrary, in his remarks to Europe’s leaders, he called for a new solidarity, expansive and bold. Solidarity, he said, is “the most effective antidote to modern forms of populism.” And because it is rooted in the communal human condition—for him, the idea that we are all God’s children—it is a better organizing principle than, for example, class struggle, which assumes a dialectic of exclusion. “Solidarity entails the awareness of being part of a single body,” Francis said. “When one suffers, all suffer.” It is bounded not by nation or class, much less gender or race or religion, but, in Francis’s phrase, by “a new European humanism,” which looks beyond “the triumph of particularisms.” He contrasted this with tribalism, with the fear that erects “false forms of security.”

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