A truly humble pope does his job with the attitude of a workman, not a showman.
A truly humble pope does his job with the attitude of a workman, not a showman.
I n less than two months, there is something almost normal about the Catholic Church again. Pope Leo XVI hasn’t conspicuously maintained emphasis on his predecessor’s themes and hobbyhorses. Unlike Francis, he hasn’t been preaching against novel “sins” which seem like nothing more than slurs against the pious: “backwardism” or “rigidity.” Nor has he continued Francis’s unlovely habit of making fun of young priests for their preference for traditional liturgical vestments.
At the same time, Leo has not announced a counter-revolution to quell the spirits his predecessor let loose in the Church. The man formerly known as Robert Prevost has somewhat disappeared into the role of pope — neither asserting his personality in a bumptious way, nor making off-the-cuff pronouncements that send his churchmen reeling. For the first time in the lives of many Catholics, a new papacy is not born into the storm of controversies left over from the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
A Return to the Palace Is a Return to Mystery
While it would be ideal for the Church if the pope remained an attractive figure to non-Catholics, Francis became something else entirely — his was a pontificate appealing to people who positively loathe Catholicism and most Catholics. Although Francis was often openly sour and harsh as a public figure — ripping his hand away from those callers piously trying to kiss his ring, and rhetorically extreme — he was admired precisely by people who recognized in him a certain laxity or even indifference to the papal office and its customs that they shared. His refusal to settle into his role and its traditions reflected a kind of willfulness.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in his decision to slowly take over more and more of the Vatican “guest house” as his personal residence and offices. Francis, rather than living in the relatively cramped papal apartment misleadingly named a “palace,” instead made his home in what amounts to a three-star hotel normally used to host foreign dignitaries and other visiting prelates.
In a way, this deprived Romans-in-the-know of one of their comforts. The visible light coming out of the papal apartments could indicate whether the pope was up and still working or praying late into the night. Or whether he had entrusted God with what had been left over and gone to sleep.
The Good News and Right Rites
Although Pope Leo XIV has hinted that he thinks the Church and he himself need to address particular challenges presented by digital technology in our age, he has refused to center anything like his personal mission statements in his public appearances. Instead, he has simply preached from the text of that day’s Gospel readings, often fluidly, and with a central focus on drawing people toward the saving work of Jesus Christ.
He has also slowly begun a minor restoration of papal liturgical practice. It began with his appearance in the traditional mozetta on the balcony after his election. But it has continued with his competent chanting and prayer in Latin, which suddenly feels again like the universal language of the Western church, and his full participation in Rome’s Corpus Christi procession.
Pope Leo’s secret, perhaps, is a knowledge that the papacy has authority insofar as it fulfills its assigned role, as a guardian of tradition. That doesn’t mean keeping the Church a locked-up museum piece. But it does mean standing firmly and gratefully on the foundational truths of the faith. Jesus simply asks Peter to follow him and to feed his sheep. When Peter gets overexcited and starts blabbing about his own ideas for liturgical revolution during the Transfiguration, God the Father silences him “even as he was yet speaking.” A truly humble pope does his job with the attitude of a workman, not a showman. The work speaks for itself.