Newman, Augustine, and Leo XIV

The day the conclave opened, as the cardinals were swearing their solemn oath, I came upon a sermon preached by St. John Henry Newman while still an Anglican. Whether my coming upon it was chance or providence I shan’t speculate. Still, it seemed an apt exhortation directed to them, and to him among them who would soon be proclaimed pope.

Newman told his congregation: “It is very common to hear it said that the received system of religion is too narrow and strict, that we ought to be more liberal (as it is called) and conceding than we have been hitherto.” And in a telling rejoinder, he opined: “I find many warnings in Scripture against departing from what we have received—I find none against overstrictness in keeping to them.”

Then, further on in the sermon, he appealed directly to his audience: 

God forbid that any one of us in his own station and according to his own opportunity should have in any degree helped on the diminution and wasting away of those things which Christ and his Apostles have bequeathed to us! God forbid that at the day of account we should have to answer even for having been silent when we ought to have witnessed for them, or uncertain or doubleminded when we should have defended them!

I confess these words were in my mind as I waited anxiously for the announcement and the appearance of the new pope. When his name was announced, I was surprised. When his chosen name, Leo XIV, was proclaimed, I was delighted. When he appeared in traditional papal vesture, I was impressed. And the favorable impression was magnified by the dignified manner of delivery of his opening greetings and by their Christocentric content.

Friends of mine, of more “liberal” tendencies, have focused upon his advocacy of “una chiesa sinodale, vicina a coloro che soffrono”—“a synodal church close to those who suffer.” But, of course, this need not entail a commitment to all the tortuous meanderings and permutations that the “synodal process” has undergone these past three years.

What struck me, instead, was how Christologically imbued his remarks were. Of course, one might counter: What else would one expect of a new pope in his first appearance on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica? Yet consider. 

His opening greeting of “Peace!” was not “peace” as the world gives it, but “la pace di Cristo risorto”—the peace of the risen Christ. And, he insisted, we are to go forth as missionaries without fear because “we are disciples of Christ who precedes us”—“Cristo ci precede.” And we venture with confidence because “the world has need of Christ’s light”—“il mondo ha bisogno della sua luce.” For “he is the bridge [il ponte] by which the love of God reaches us.” In Christ, we too labor to build bridges, to proclaim the gospel, to be missionaries, for we are “men and women faithful to Jesus Christ [fedeli a Gesù Cristo.]”

Intriguingly, this clear Christocentric message is for the most part muffled if not entirely ignored in the reporting. And this not only, as one would expect, by the New York Times, but even by Catholic commentators of a “liberal” slant, who, unlike Leo, manifest a neuralgic hesitancy to explicitly name “Christ.” The serious risk is that, bereft of their distinctive Christian content, concepts like “peace” and “dialogue” become mere bromides, what Newman—made cardinal by Leo XIII—calls “unreal words.” Indeed, the even greater danger is that “any one of us,” whatever our station or estate, succumb to Newman’s strictures about being “silent” or “uncertain” or “doubleminded.” 

My appreciation of the robustly Christocentric nature of the new pope’s address receives further confirmation by considering his episcopal motto: “In illo uno unum.” As a self-described “son of St. Augustine,” Pope Leo appropriately borrows the words from Augustine’s sermon on Psalm 127. Drawing out Augustine’s typically terse syntax it reads: “In the one Christ we are one.” Here authentic unity (far from being the supposed buzzword of “conservatives”) is founded in the One who alone is the source of the Church’s unity: Jesus Christ. 

My hope for the new pope is that he may draw upon this rich Augustinian heritage, as did his predecessor, Leo the Great, to rekindle in the Church of our day a renewed Christic imagination. For we have sadly become Christologically impoverished. As Raniero Cardinal Cantalamessa has lamented: Too often in the Church today it is as if “Christus non daretur”—as though Christ were not a reality, but a merely notional verbal presence. 

It has been surmised that the delay in announcing the results of the vote on the first day of the conclave may have been due to a prolonged meditation by Cardinal Cantalamessa. If so, he may well have exhorted the cardinals that the Church’s center is Jesus Christ himself and to have warned against the pressing danger posed by Christological amnesia and aphasia.

May the pontificate of Leo XIV bear bold witness to the one pontifex who is our peace, because only in him can the many truly become one. May this new Leo engage, respectfully but with parrhesia, the Atillas both within and without the Church. And, like his great predecessor, do so confiding in the name of the one Lord Jesus Christ: In Illo Uno.