A Leonine Revival

We are still in the early days of the pontificate of Leo XIV. No one who prognosticates now about the future of his papacy can know for certain what lies ahead. That will be for him and his collaborators to determine. Nevertheless, each papacy brings with it a new cultural imagination, one that builds upon the example of its predecessors, but that also innovates. More importantly, each pontificate is associated with a collaboration on the part of the faithful who participate in its mission and are unified by shared ideals. So, while it is still early days, it is also a timely moment in which to take stock of some initial manifest aspirations of this pontificate, and of some possibilities implied by its reference to Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum in particular. 

In recent years, the Catholic Church has lived through three epochal pontificates, that of popes St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. Each had its own brilliant style, immense spiritual effect on human culture, and inevitable human limitations, these latter being a lasting sign, in God’s mercy, that the mere fisherman chosen by Christ is not Christ himself. The stability in the papacy through time does not depend upon the strength of men but is a gift of God that comes from above. It invites us to perceive in Peter a principle of doctrinal unity and a touchstone of universal communion built up in genuine love. The papacy is also about the missionary character of the Church. Peter and Paul both are apostles to the nations, sent out mercifully to all—including the suffering, the disempowered, the alienated, and the confused. The role of Peter is to proclaim the gospel fearlessly, and to throw open the doors of mercy, so that all encounter Christ.

Mystical Body

One initially striking thing about the pontificate of Leo XIV is that he clearly perceives the challenge and opportunity that lies within this succession of recent popes. He is an unambiguous successor to Pope Francis, but he is also conscious of the contributions of the precedent popes, understanding them each, and thus also himself, within the framework of the mystery of the Church. To find our unity as one in Christ—as the pope’s Augustinian motto In Illo uno unum suggests—is to find our unity as the mystical body of Christ. Augustine famously observed that we are all members of Christ by the grace of our baptism, and so it is by deepening our mutual life in Christ that we come to perceive our genuine unity as his mystical body. By appealing to the teaching of the popes who precede him in the light of this Augustinian motto, our new pope is clearly suggesting that we walk together through time under the aegis of Christ. In other words, the Church is a Christocentric mystery. The tensions with the Catholic Church and between partisans of the various pontificates can be resolved by a deeper reflection on the objective contours of our common life in Christ, and by our subjective appropriation of and conversion to his presence and mystery. In sum, all need to convert.  

Perhaps there is something to learn, then, from each of the pontificates, in search of a more comprehensive unity: from St. John Paul II, his evangelical witness to the teaching and practice of the Catholic faith, in ways that were radical and sometimes counter-cultural in the face of a secularized world; from Benedict, the search for a deeper liturgical life in the Church and his commitment to scholarship and theological reflection; from Francis, his message of universal mercy, his concrete and policy-oriented solidarity with the poor, his consultation of the faithful, and his outreach to those previously alienated from the Church’s hierarchy. No doubt there is something new now coming into being, but we have something to learn from all of these previous great witnesses to the Catholic faith. What I am suggesting then is that a deeper Catholic unity is truly possible, a unity we are asked to seek now in a new way, transcending human ideological conflicts and ecclesiastical politics. Christ’s mystical body may have a left side and a right side, but it also has a center, vitally located in a head and a heart—which give life to the integrated whole. If we locate that center, we can be one in Christ, in his teaching and in the universal practice of charity and mercy. I suspect Pope Leo XIV is going to try to pursue this line. 

It is one that members of the Catholic Church in the United States could do well to support and cultivate. The Church in the U.S. is well and alive, despite grave challenges in recent decades. By fostering a more integral reception of the whole teaching on the magisterium on all matters, Catholics (in the U.S. and elsewhere) can serve better the mission of this pontificate. Here I’m referring to matters pertaining to the interior spiritual and sacramental life, and to the cultivation of intellectual virtues (true Catholic learning and education), and thus not just to political principles and policies. However, I am also referring to political matters: to the fundamental truth about the nature of the human person; the respect for the dignity of life from conception to natural death; the virtue of temperance for all persons and the need for mercy for all persons in regard to their failings in this domain; the role of social justice and policies that privilege the most vulnerable, which mandates the just and charitable treatment of immigrants and those in all countries who suffer from poverty, lack of education, or persecution for their religious beliefs. Do not conform yourself to the thinking of the world, but have in yourself the mind of Christ. What if the mind of Christ were to take hold more deeply of the Church in this age to come? This would implicate each one of us, and unite us more deeply in a common mission of mercy, evangelization, and fidelity to the truth. 

Rerum Novarum—New Things

Pope Leo XIII published his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, only twenty-five years before the outbreak of the 1917 Communist Revolution that would mark the modern world irrevocably. In that document, he sought to indicate a middle way between two extremes. On the one side, Leo was responding to the new and revolutionary changes emerging from the creation of industrialist capitalism. Against the exploitative practices of elite industrialists, Leo sought to underscore the rights of workers to reasonable working hours, a just wage, self-organization, and access to a range of human goods that should be protected and advanced in some way by the state. Here we can think of goods such as the just rule of law, education, health care, political freedom of expression, and freedom of religion, all goods that the magisterium has underscored in the hundred and fifty years since the time of Rerum Novarum. On the other side, Leo was responding to the emergence of secular “socialism,” as he called it, which would seek to deny the rights of private property, abolish the role of religion in public life, and claim authority to redefine the natural human family (especially by new divorce laws, which de facto suggested that the Church cannot publicly identify or define what either natural or sacramental marriage is). Here he was essentially seeking to confront the theoretical absolutization of the state as an ultimate authority in all human matters. 

Needless to say, these are timely considerations. Today the Church is confronting anew an age of political turmoil and technological change. We rightly fear the creation of a secular world order that is religiously tone-deaf, where those with the most influence disdain religious beliefs and even mock the Christian faith. Real-life examples abound. We also rightly fear the advent of distorted forms of neo-nationalism, either as surrogate forms of religion, or even more dangerously as something allied with religion in its political aspirations. Conflicts today in Ukraine, Israel, Pakistan, and India should make us wary of the ways that Christians, Muslims, and Jews might either ignore the precepts of their religious convictions or weaponize them publicly in the pursuit of political aims. Modern technology is giving rise to new possibilities of ideological polarization, state surveillance, and deadly weaponry that should lead to concern. 

In this context, it is noteworthy that Leo XIII refers us to three societies (the family, the state, and the Church) that must mutually benefit one another, each of which makes reference to the human person in his or her natural dignity. First, Leo notes in Rerum Novarum that the state presupposes the reality of the family, since every citizen begins life as a child born and educated by his or her parents. Thus without the family there is no state, and the role of the parents in educating their children is invaluable to the common good, which the parents contribute to by their very way of life. Likewise, parents have the natural right to educate their children, and this includes the right to religious education, by which human beings refer themselves beyond the state, toward the search for truth and the transcendent mystery of God. This educational stance, when rightly undertaken, is the greatest protection against demagogy and political ideology. It renders political life relative to a higher calling to seek the truth in all things and to adhere to it when we find it, whether this is politically expedient or not. 

Likewise, Leo speaks of the common good of the Church, which has the joy and the burden of articulating to the world—including to all members of the political community—the truth about God and the mystery of Christ. This mission of the Church includes the teaching of the natural law: to articulate that human beings are ultimately made for God, and that their dignity cannot be reduced to or defined by the state or their allegiance to a given political party or nationality, however important national identity may seem. If the state presupposes the family as its foundation, it aspires toward religiosity by preserving the freedom of the Church and the natural freedom of religion for its citizens. It’s not meant to become a religion unto itself or a final arbiter of human meaning. 

However, Leo also underscores the irreplaceable role that the state has as well, and the irreducible importance of civil government, which cannot be supplanted by the Church. Leo XIII was not a theocrat. Those who participate in civil government have the responsibility to determine how the collective people of a given nation should organize themselves for the collective flourishing of each person. As such, civil leaders and those in elite spheres of influence (including the ultra-wealthy) have an obligation to serve the good of those who are less accomplished or less powerful. They also have an obligation to refer themselves to the principles of human nature and human dignity that are universal, so that all persons are treated by a just and reasonable standard, all have pathways toward progress, and all are acknowledged as persons made in the image of God. Without such a standard, there is no renewal of civil government and there is no measure of just legal action. 

Today the Church frequently has to navigate between extremes. On the one side we find a merely constructivist notion of legal theory, where societies are thought to create their laws as mere products of subjective desire, the collective will of the people. On the other side we find a new absolutism of the state, where countries with powerful leaders (both non-religious and religious) take up prerogatives to shape the exercise of law and freedom for their peoples in highly centralized ways that are often arbitrary or problematic. The timeliness of a Leonine revival is evident in this context: to recall the three societies and their grounding in a deeply classical and perennial vision of human nature. Human beings, by virtue of their rational nature, made in the image of God, have a dignity that is not reducible to the mere contours of the state and the immanent sphere of political life and temporal history. They have an eternal destiny. This is not a truth accidental to or optional for human politicians. It is in fact the one thing necessary to understand if we are to govern human individuals and families justly: They are made for the truth, and therefore they have a responsibility to seek the truth about God, man, and the state, and to act in light of this truth, a truth that cannot be dictated to them by the whims of leaders, social media and the algorithm, or by ideological fashions of the secular elite. In fact, it is a mercy to invite all people to the reconsideration of what we are ultimately made for: knowledge of the truth and the pursuit of genuine love. Love for God liberates us, and also expands our hearts to open us outwardly to the needs of all peoples. 

The Church of Faith and Reason is also the Church of the Least 

Most especially, however, the Church must reach out to all those who are most disempowered and who cannot raise their own voice before the powers of the world. Leo XIII sought to speak for the families of workers who were not able to mount resistance to forms of exploitation that were aberrant, stemming from the Industrial Revolution. In a global age of economic inter-dependency, the Church is an irreplaceable voice for those peoples and nations that can readily fall victim to the inequalities that emerge between nations. One important consideration here that is immediately related to economic advancement is that of education. Pope Leo XIII did a great deal to advance the education of peoples, not only in the domains of theology and of philosophy, but also in all forms of secondary and university education that would advance and empower a civilization of human flourishing. 

Famously in this regard, Leo sought to restore the study of classical theological sources, especially the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas but also other scholastics, and of course, the study of St. Augustine of Hippo. It is a serious historical error to think that this aspect of his thought is separable from his social and political thought. The opposite is the case. For Leo, the revival of scholasticism in the modern world was about the deep harmony of divine revelation and natural reason (both philosophical and scientific), but it was also about political empowerment. By giving people true knowledge of the principles of human dignity and by showing how these principles relate to other disciplines like the natural sciences, one fosters a greater personal autonomy for everyone, and a greater access to economic viability. Leo XIII was responsible for the foundation of a wave of Catholic universities in the Americas as well as in Europe, and he was prophetic in seeing education as something deeply related to integral human development. The work of Pope Leo XIV in Peru provides an example of a person who made use of his education at Villanova University and from the Augustinian Order, as well as his education at the Angelicum, to promote the good of others, in keeping with this evangelical tradition of service.  

Augustinian Postscript

Alongside Leo XIII we should also mention Pope Leo I, aptly named Leo the Great. That historic figure was himself a disciple of St. Augustine of Hippo, who brought Augustine’s theology into wider influence through his pontificate, characterized by profound theological preaching and social teaching. As is well known, Augustine, on the first page of his Confessions, describes the restless heart of the human being that cannot rest in anything other than God. In City of God, he also explains how the Church is collectively animated by the inward stirrings of divine charity that fills the hearts of the faithful. For this reason, they cannot rest on this earth or find their home merely in time, but are bound to ever move forward to God’s city of heaven, toward the vision of God. By this same measure, Augustine notes, the Church in this world cannot be restricted to a life defined merely by political powers and the gods of the Roman state. It is only once one sees this that one can find true rest and peace in God, and so also true political perspective. Leo the Great understood this and brought this perspective into the papacy. He stood before Atilla the Hun in 452 to ward off the destruction of the Roman people by civil diplomacy. By the love of God, he conquered. 

May Leo XIV, Augustinian at heart, be empowered by God’s Spirit to speak to the restless hearts of our modern era, and may he find inspiration from both these precedent Leos to meet the great powers of our age with those words of the risen Christ that are of unsurpassed political relevance, even in our own day: “Peace be with you.” And however he should fulfill the responsibilities of his Petrine office on behalf of the Church, may we who are members of Christ’s faithful find ways to collaborate with him and seek together, in that mystical body that is the Church, a genuine Leonine revival, for the good of all and as an emblem of that peace that only God can give.