Pope Leo, Catholic Boomer?

Like Kremlinologists during the Cold War, American Catholics are searching for clues to the character of their new pope. Conservatives take heart that he wore the red mozzetta that Pope Francis had spurned and sings the Regina Caeli in Latin. Progressives hang their hats on his repeated assurances that he will continue efforts toward greater synodality and the fact that he took the name of a pope best known for his social teaching. All this is in service of a single question: How much will Leo be like Francis, the pope who made him a bishop and a cardinal? The exercise is as old as the papacy itself, but also a bit silly. No pope is just like his predecessor and the extent of the overlap will only be revealed as the years unfold. What we can say with certainty of Pope Leo XIV, besides the quite shocking fact of his being an American, is that his formation as a Catholic priest and canon lawyer was after the Second Vatican Council. Ten years old in 1965, when the Council closed, everything about his Catholic life has been post-conciliar. Another way to put this is that Pope Leo is a Catholic Boomer. Is this good news?

I recently watched an interview on EWTN, in which a Dominican theologian expressed the hope that our first post-conciliar pope would get the Church off the “merry-go-round” of wearisome debates over the proper interpretation of the Council. In his view, the choice of a “pre-conciliar” name signals a desire to move beyond these disputes and to solidify, as Leo XIII did in his own time, the Church’s mission to a world in urgent need of the perennial truths of reason and faith. A similar view, albeit from across the ideological divide, can be found in Daniel Rober’s recent essay “Living Vatican II: Pope Leo heralds the dawn of the ‘post-post-conciliar’ era.” Rober, a theologian at Sacred Heart University, also sees in Leo’s age a chance to move beyond debates about the Council, although he has a very different idea of what this will mean. 

To make his point, Rober divides the post-conciliar era into three stages. The first began in 1965. The Council had closed with great fanfare and optimism, but the shocks to the system soon stymied St. Paul VI’s papacy in a morass of unsettled disputes over sexuality, women in the Church, and governance. St. John Paul II learned the lesson and initiated a second stage in the Council’s reception. While he sought to implement his own reading of Vatican II, sometimes quite boldly, John Paul II downplayed and even suppressed discussion of the controversial elements that had so dogged his predecessor. Benedict XVI followed suit with his own hermeneutic of “reform in continuity.” This all, however, came to a crashing end with the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 2013. According to Rober, “The signature achievement of Pope Francis was to reignite the spirit of the Council precisely to prepare the Church for a new era.” He did so by bringing to the fore issues stirred up by the Council, but long sidelined. For this, Rober claims, Francis suffered at the hands of critics who had convinced themselves that the Council’s innovations could be buried by reference to the “great tradition.” The villain here is Bishop Robert Barron, who Rober criticizes for his caricature of the decade after Vatican II as “beige Catholicism” filled with bad liturgy and silly preaching. Such a dismissal, in Rober’s judgment, ignores the fact that many of the questions that roiled Catholicism in those years came directly out of the Council and remain pertinent. 

According to Rober, the election of Robert Prevost is a serious blow to those who would domesticate Vatican II. Prevost won because he was the candidate most likely to continue Francis’s project of building a synodal Church guided by continuous and broad consultation with the People of God. Accordingly, Leo’s papacy will be marked by dialogue not over the proper interpretation of the Council but about how best to conduct the important work of realizing its spirit by giving more prominence in ecclesial affairs to non-bishops and, in particular, women. Rober finds evidence in Pope Leo’s use of Evangelii Gaudium in his address to the College of Cardinals highlighting what it will mean “to renew together today our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.” Of the seven “fundamental points” Leo takes from Francis’s Apostolic Exhortation, Rober mentions three: “missionary discipleship, care for the least and rejected, and dialogue with the modern world.” His conclusion is that by making the Francis papacy “an authoritative interpretation of Vatican II,” Pope Leo has brought the post-conciliar era to an end. The Church is now “post-post-conciliar.”

I am not partial to doubling the “posts,” but I agree that Leo’s age constitutes the crossing of a threshold. Unlike his recent predecessors, Robert Prevost did not become a priest in one Church only to find himself in another. Accordingly, it is likely that his papacy will be more about implementing the Second Vatican Council than talking about it. Yet, if synodality is part of this implementation, there will be a great deal of talking. After all, the Baby Boom generation is surely the most garrulous in human history. In that sense, synodality is quintessentially Boomerish. That does not mean, however, that the Leonine papacy will be a simple return to the obsessions of Baby Boom Catholicism. Some of the old tunes will be heard again, but in a new key and with tighter arrangements. Keep in mind that our first Boomer pope is also a canonist, and, most likely, will make sure that this wider consultation be conducted in a manner that affirms episcopal and papal authority. More importantly, if Leo’s early statements are indicative, he will insist that all internal discussion be in service of the Church’s mission to spread and affect the Good News of Jesus Christ in our present-day world. It is no small thing that Leo’s list of Evangelii Gaudium’s “fundamental points” begins with “the primacy of Christ in proclamation.” Rober, strangely, leaves this off his list and thus, I fear, misses the heart of the matter. Leo’s reception of Vatican II will be Christocentric. And, if Bishop Barron’s recent analysis of Pope Francis is right, this is a point of continuity.  

One of the issues that Pope Leo must decide is what to do with the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. Having little personal memory of it, the old Mass is unlikely to provoke him one way or the other. Rather, he is faced with a simple fact: The liturgy that the Council thought fit to reform has an unexpected attraction to young Catholics. This indicates that the reception of the Council on matters liturgical is incomplete and in need of serious theological reflection prior to any further destabilizing action from the papal magisterium. In other words, this is the kind of issue that could benefit from wider consultation of the People of God informed by a Christocentric view of the Second Vatican Council. Is this Boomerish? Sure, but it is also good governance.