Hungary’s landslide vote last Sunday. The Pope under attack all week.
And a question I can’t quite shake:
What are leaders actually rooted in?
Because the contrast right now is hard to ignore.
There are leaders who are rooted in themselves - their power, their image, their gain. And once that becomes the center, something shifts fast. It stops being about responsibility and becomes about control, about securing advantage, about self-enrichment. And from there, the slide is subtle but real: lines get blurred, rules get bent, and over time a kind of moral corruption sets in that no longer even feels like corruption.
You can see that quite openly in the attacks coming from Donald Trump and J. D. Vance. It doesn’t read as strength to me. It reads like power that has lost its anchor and now compensates through force, aggression, and the willingness to damage others to stay on top.
And then, in the same week, something else.
In Hungary, a large number of people - many of them young - simply stopped going along. They showed up, they voted, and a long-entrenched, increasingly self-serving system was challenged by someone willing to step forward without any guarantee of outcome. We don’t know where this will go, but that moment matters. It shows that even under pressure, something in a system can still resist.
And then there is Pope Leo XIV.
Under direct, personal attack, he doesn’t enter that same dynamic. No escalation, no counter-aggression. Instead, he keeps returning to something that clearly does not come from the same place: humility, conscience, the Gospel, a lived faith, a grounding beyond the immediate logic of power.
And if I try to name it more precisely, it feels like this:
He is rooted in love.
Not as sentiment, but as orientation. A form of leadership that is in service of others - and that recognizes something of dignity and the divine in every human being. From that place, aggression stops being a viable strategy. Not because it is forbidden, but because it no longer makes sense.
You don’t have to share that belief to sense the difference.
Some leaders are rooted in themselves.
Others are rooted in something that relativizes themselves.
And that difference becomes very real when it counts.
Because once the root is the self, leadership starts to turn - more control, more narrative, more self-enrichment, often framed as necessity. I see enough of that, not only in politics.
But when the root is deeper, something else becomes possible. Not softness. Not naivety. But a steadiness that doesn’t need to escalate to hold its ground - and a form of leadership that begins to serve rather than dominate, that is shaped by care rather than fear, and that draws its strength from something closer to love than to power.
I keep coming back to this more than to any headline:
What are you rooted in when you lead?
And what are you actually serving when you do?