I don’t like churches. The smell of incense gets into my brain on its own, even when I’m still standing outside and there’s no smoke anywhere. When I was ten, as an altar boy in full vestments, I was allowed to keep watch over the dead in the mortuary chapel at the back of the church. Sometimes I stood there alone for fifteen minutes. But I did have to keep the incense going. Now I’ve rented a little apartment within spitting distance of Notre-Dame in Paris. Since the fire, the church has suddenly become wildly popular again. Long lines of people wait to be let in and look at the polished-up pride of Paris. I keep well away from that.

I wonder if Macron is actually Catholic. Looked it up. Yes, he is. Well, sort of. He had himself baptized at twelve, at his own request. Like me, he went to a school run by priests (Jesuits for him, Augustinians for me), so his own request? Hmmm. But now, like me, he’s agnostic. That means you don’t know whether God exists, which of course you can’t know.

France itself has been trying pretty hard since 1905 to keep church and state apart. But Macron, with a big smile, welcomed Pope Leo XIV, who began his visit to France in Paris. Winning souls and votes, that was the mission. Souls for Leo, votes for Macron. According to the media, some 300,000 people lined his route through Paris and around Notre-Dame alone.

All it did for me was keep me from getting to my apartment. On Monday I wrote about world government (see below), and oddly enough I now realize that this is actually a kind of world government too.

There are about 1.4 billion Catholics. They live everywhere. They speak different languages, carry different passports and have completely different cultures. But there is one boss.

A government in Rome. Embassies. Their own laws. Local administrators called bishops. They have schools, universities, hospitals and still a good number of missionaries spreading the faith in areas where the word godforsaken fits better than anywhere else.

Leo has his own little state, the Vatican, but no army or police to keep his 1.4 billion subjects in line.

So what holds something like that together? Faith in love. Love thy neighbor.

That sounds awfully simple when you’ve just written a piece about world government.

Maybe we don’t need a complicated political system at all. Maybe we should just put love in charge.

Wish it were that easy. That same Catholic Church has a lousy track record on tolerance. It went after heretics. It shut Jews out. Gay people were condemned, and women still can’t be priests.

And I haven’t even mentioned the sexual abuse.

Exactly here in France, in 2021 they did an independent inquiry. The number of minors abused over seventy years by priests and other people working for the Church was around 330,000. So no, not a world government I’d copy one-to-one.

But still. There is something in this that I can’t get out of my head.

Why do people actually stick together?

Almost every country in the world is a member of the UN. We make agreements about almost everything. Human rights, climate, poverty, health, war. Until it costs too much or we don’t like it anymore. Then suddenly we are Dutch, American, French or whatever again.

Religion somehow managed to cross those borders.They try to tie people to one set of values, across all borders. But that’s top-down as well, and for centuries it kept people down and kept them dumb. And still. Love (church) might beat politics (UN).

bell hooks, the American writer, wrote about this. Love wasn’t some sentimental stuff for her. She saw it almost as a political choice. You care for someone, you take responsibility, you respect them and you really try to understand who they are. And she also looked at it the other way around. If you want to dominate or humiliate someone, don’t call it love.

For world domination I can’t think of anything more interesting. Believe what you like, follow whoever or whatever you like. Build a society on love and mutual respect and I think you’ll get pretty far.