Leo XIV and the Best-Case Scenario

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the leading conservative thinker of his generation, regarded politics with distaste; he voted for the Tories, he said, “because they do the least harm.” The cardinals of the Catholic Church seem to have just acted on a similar basis.

Robert Prevost—as he was until yesterday—is unlikely to fulfill the liberal cardinals’ nightmare of a pope who would rip up Francis’s legacy. He seems to be well-liked by the more progressive cardinals—some of whom appeared beaming with delight on the balcony of St. Peter’s yesterday. But conservatives, too, expect a less harmful pontificate than a Pope Francis II would have delivered. Leo XIV’s first choices—the traditional name and traditional papal dress—are in themselves a retreat from his predecessor’s example. And he was, after all, spotted last week “entering Cardinal Burke’s house for a very secret summit.”

Trawling the Holy Father’s Twitter history, as one does, suggests a churchman who has made it to the age of sixty-nine without feeling any need to choose a side in the Catholic culture wars. Yes, he is outspoken on the rights of migrants; but he’s also seriously alarmed about the trans issue. Yes, he retweets the more progressive Catholic publications; but he also shares writings from the sturdily orthodox Cardinal George and Archbishop Chaput. Yes, he admires Pope Francis and likes the idea of “synodality”; but (unlike some people) he does not seem to regard either as a kind of inspired update on the gospel that calls into question what the Church has been doing for the last two thousand years.

To be clear, this is not a call for complacency. The Church is at an incredibly perilous moment, attempting to recover from a pontificate that actively fostered major doctrinal errors. If Leo XIV continues in this line, however cautiously and diplomatically, it means a deepening of one of the most severe crises in Church history. But you know all that already. So here is a case for optimism.

In interviews, the then Robert Prevost seems to gravitate naturally toward one theme: that it’s not about him. Interviewed as prior general of the Augustinians, he says members of the order are “called to live a simple life at the service of others.” As for his own spirituality, Prevost says it is inspired by St. Augustine’s Confessions—and once again he defines it in terms of self-abnegation. In a “highly individualistic” age, Prevost observes, people seek happiness in the wrong places. “Authentic happiness has to include others. And concern for others.”

As prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, Prevost sums up the bishop’s role as being “called to be humble and suffer with his people.” As cardinal, addressing parishioners at a Chicago church, he riffs for a little while before telling them: “I’m so convinced that if we open our lives and our hearts to serve others, we indeed—like the Gospel says—receive a hundredfold in this life. That certainly has been the case for myself.” Not wildly original content, I know, but the repeated theme is significant; and he doesn’t sound like he’s just saying it.

For twelve years, Catholics endured a pontificate in which a single person put himself at the center of events, so that even the law of Christ seemed less relevant than what feverish commentators referred to as “the agenda of Pope Francis.” It was an age when one leading episcopal ally of the pope said that “Whoever wishes to discover what the true will of Christ is for him, the true heart of Jesus . . . must ask the Pope. This Pope, not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that.”

A Vatican aide, meanwhile, claimed that Pope Francis “breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is ‘free from disordered attachments.’ Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by . . . its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.” Those were extreme examples, but it was a trend. And the way Francis acted certainly encouraged such statements, by going to the verge of denying Church teaching and then treating reasonable concerns as unforgivable insults.

As Amy Welborn has brilliantly observed, the word “humility” has been thrown around a great deal of late. But in the context of Church leadership, humility is mostly about what you don’t do. “Not to impose oneself, one’s own identity and personal causes as superior, but to allow oneself, one’s talents, gifts and yes, concerns, to be absorbed into this Body of Christ, and be used by God in whatever way He sees fit. To allow oneself to be shaped and re-shaped, not to enter the embrace of St. Peter’s determined to do the reshaping in one’s own image.”

Perhaps Prevost knows this too. In his homily this morning, the new pope said that “first of all,” the papal mission is “to move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified, to spend oneself to the utmost so that all may have the opportunity to know and love him.” If he actually does that—and as I say, I’m talking best-case scenario here—he will be a great pope.

Pope Francis was a man of formidable intellect, superhuman energy, and dazzling rhetorical gifts, who ruled with an iron will and altered everything he touched. He was the very image of a strong pope, and the result was a disaster. My prayer is for Pope Leo to teach us the meaning of humility; to make us understand the meaning of St. Paul’s words: “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”

Image via Getty/AFP