The widely circulated but false report that was touted as one of the strongest non-electoral political moves in recent times, the new Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as the southside Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, was reported to have countered the hostility of Republicans in the U.S. Congress by extending a warm personal welcome to U.S. public health advocate Anthony Fauci to visit him in Rome.

Sadly, the report turned out to be false in any formal sense, although Fauci did deliver key remarks at a 2021 conference in Rome led by Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis on the role of public health. Still, however, I contend that the false rumor remained true in the spiritual sense that it reflected the sentiments of a pontiff who is clearly aligned with the social movement for scientific progress and against those in theTrump administration who continue to rely on dangerous mythologies to justify policies that are killing people.

Among the worst of these is Samuel Alioto, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who framed the argument used to undo the critical Roe Vs. Wade decision on the legal rights of women’s bodies. Justice Samuel Alito was forced to revert to the 13th-century English cleric, judge, and royal justice Henry de Bracton to argue that abortion restrictions have deep roots in English common law.

          The right to abortion has been the ardent target of key factions within the Republican Party for years. And the untimely death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg allowed former President Donald Trump to deploy judicial appointments to deliver Roe’s execution notice in late 2020. When Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed this out at oral argument in Dobbs, she was only stating what every single participant in the confirmation battles of the last several years well understood, and only the willfully blind could deny. 

He is famous for compiling De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (“On the Laws and Customs of England”), a massive and influential 13th-century legal text that blended English custom with Roman and canon law.

 Alito quoted Bracton’s treatise to establish historical precedent, noting the text’s assertion that if a person strikes a pregnant woman or gives her poison to cause an abortion—specifically if the fetus is “formed and animated” (quickened)—the perpetrator commits homicide.

But legal historians and Bracton scholars criticized Alito’s reading. They pointed out that Bracton’s text made a sharp distinction regarding “quickening” (when movement is felt), and that medieval canon law typically treated early-stage termination through a lens of religious penance rather than secular capital murder.

Critics argued that citing a medieval cleric’s ecclesiastical-influenced text misrepresents how the common law actually operated regarding reproductive autonomy before the modern era.

Active during the reign of King Henry III, Bracton served as a judge on the King’s Bench and as an itinerant justice. Like many educated professionals of the Middle Ages, he was also an ordained Catholic priest holding high ecclesiastical titles, eventually becoming the chancellor of Exeter Cathedral.

But it is patently absurd that an issue of vital importance to more than half the entire population has to be based on shady references to something written 800 years ago. The American revolution, after all, was fought to expel the remnants of a corrupt anti-democratic British system.

So the solution to what Alito did now awaits critical reforms here that I believe need to be implemented having nothing to do with political labels but solely with justice and fair play.

The reforms we need are three. Expand the Supreme Court to 14 justices, correlated to the 14 court districts of the nation, end the Electoral College and go instead to a popular vote policy, removing the fact that states like Wyoming and North Dakota have the same number of U.S. senators as California or New York, and enlarge the Congress to take population growth into account.

These changes do not signal any change in our basic Constitutional system, but expand the reign of equality while removing some egregious stumbling blocks to justice. In other words, the charge of socialism need not  apply at all.