As the Christian church year began on the first Sunday in Advent, Pope Leo XIV was in the predominantly Muslim countries of Turkey and Lebanon. He visited a Mosque, joined a two-hour Divine Liturgy with an Orthodox patriarch, and talked Mideast peace with Turkey’s President Erdogan.
As head of the universal church, the first American-born Pope has become, in less than a year, the world’s preeminent multi-tasker. He has a Gospel to preach, facing the challenge of fewer priests and faithful in the pews. He has made full communion of Christians “one of the priorities of the Catholic Church.” He has decried the cruelty of this century’s authoritarian rulers.
The life journey as well as spiritual journey has figured in Leo’s ministry, bespeaking his outspoken advocacy for refugees, immigrants, and the poor. He has also striven to be an ecumenical and political bridge builder, advocating a two-state solution to curb suffering and bloodletting in contested lands of Israel and Palestine.
In Lebanon, facing risks and ministering to the flock, while deploying his moral authority in the role of peacemaker, Leo walked gingerly in the shoes of the fisherman. He was greeted by an crowd of 150,000 in war-ravaged Beirut.
The papacy has taken very different turns in the past century, reflecting personality and responding to perils. The aloof, remote Pius XII — Vatican gardeners were forbidden to look at the strolling pontiff — stirs controversy to this day for not bearing public witness against Nazism and the Holocaust. John XXIII and Francis were loving pastors who also opened the Church to the world. In drafting his seminal Pacem en Terris (Peace on Earth), John XXIII reportedly told theologians, I am a son of simple peasants, write this that they might read it.
“War no more, war never again,” was the message passionately delivered by Pope VI to the United Nations, But Paul overruled his own theologians with Humanae Vitae, the encyclical condemning contraception. Millions of Catholics chose conscience over obedience, doing lasting damage to authority of the hierarchy. The priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley attributed falling mass attendance to the birth-control ban.
John Paul II was a long lasting, larger-than-life pontiff, instrumental in relegating Soviet and Polish communism to the dustbin of history. But he was sternly orthodox. Equally so was his successor Benedict XVI, who earned the nickname of “God’s roteweiler” for cracking down on dissent. The Church was grievously damaged by the clergy sex-abuse scandal that originally broke in the U.S. on John Paul’s watch.
Leo is showing signs of embracing Francis’ commitment to social and economic justice, but the Augustinian is putting a different face to papacy from his Jesuit predecessor. Preaching and celebrating mass, he is omnipresent on Facebook, and is fluently multilingual. In recent weeks, Leo has spoken and preached in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and even (briefly) Arabic.
He has prayed with King Charles III, the first encounter in centuries between a Catholic pontiff and the monarch who heads the Church of England. He has been seen receiving actor Robert DeNiro and accepting a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. The Sox are his team and much in need of his prayers.
The pope’s chief difficulty, and object for makeover, is the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in his native America. (Leo has dual U.S. and Peruvian citizenship, the result of having served as a diocesan bishop in Peru.) Leadership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has belonged to the clerical equivalent of company men. Defining abortion as the preeminent church issue, the USCCB. He has aligned itself with the Republican right in the nation’s culture wars.
While a defender of traditional marriage and family, Leo responds to St. Matthew rather than MAGA. He has tapped Cardinal Robert McElroy, a champion of immigrant rights as Bishop of San Diego, for the high-profile post of Archbishop of Washington, D.C. The appointment carries a message to our xenophobic president. Leo has bluntly delivered that message, decrying “the indiscriminate deportation of people” and calling for “an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence.”
The pope has also delivered an unmistakable message on broadening the bishops’ message: “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life, and someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants,’ I don’t think that’s pro-life.”
While speaking up for God’s children — including those Trump calls “garbage” — Leo has spoken to the the perils threatening God’s creation. He has forcefully linked climate change and its human consequences.
The recent United Nations climate conference in Brazil heard from the Holy Father. Leo called for “concrete actions” in response to climate change and, in a video, said that God’s creation “is crying out in floods, droughts, storms, and relentless heat.” One in three people on Earth “live in great vulnerability “ due to human-caused impacts, Leo argued.
The American bishops have heard from the boss, and presumably the Holy Spirit. Without mentioning Trump, they at last spoke out forcefully earlier this fall, taking to task the administration for its crackdowns, pursuits, warehousing, and expulsion of “illegals.”
“We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” the bishops declared. They criticized ICE agents’ deployment to church property, hospitals and schools.
He may lack Francis’ spontaneity, but Leo is showing himself to be a quiet lion for social, climate and economic justice. The successor to Peter is pushing back against 21st Century Caesars. In short, Pope Leo XVI is doing the Lord’s work.
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