Joe O’Leary: Pope Leo’s First 100 Days
A hundred days into his pontificate, Leo XIV has not put a foot wrong. Shunning controversy, he has silenced those itching for a fight, reducing them to the desperate stratagem of posting fake AI stories and speeches on Facebook and YouTube. His Teflon papacy may put Vaticanologists and church journalists out of business. Amid the quiet, his remarks on Gaza and Ukraine resound with authority.
He is hardly courting fashion when he calls himself ‘a son of St Augustine.’ The ebbing interest in this greatest of the Fathers is shown by the renaming of the Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes as Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes et Patristiques 25 years ago (so that now most of its articles are on other Fathers). But Augustine’s lucid and reflective style is a model for church leaders and for secular ones as well.
A feather in Pope Leo’s cap is the naming of John Henry Newman (the founder of UCD) as the 38th Doctor of the Church. Just as Leo XIII called Newman ‘my Cardinal,’ Leo XIV can call him ‘my Doctor.’ St Athanasius (295-373) was placed on that prestigious list in 1568, and Newman’s theological work began and ended with studies on him. So everything fits together smoothly.
However, Newman’s career has left painful memories in the church that shaped him and which he treated roughly after leaving it. He is also a flashpoint of hostility between conservatives and liberals in the Catholic Church today. Pope Leo can perhaps pour balm on these bruises and make Newman a truly unitive figure.
“Leo XIV has not put a foot wrong.”
So is that the only task of the moment – knowing where to put your feet so you don’t wake the dragon?
When the challenge issued by Pope Francis – to face the ‘angelic sins’ that hid iniquity behind the facade of celibacy and so disgraced the clerical institution – has not even yet been acknowledged by those who constitute that very same dragon?
Did Francis complete the journey then, leaving Leo with nothing to do but to place his feet carefully?
Does not the global explosion under the clerical celibate idealisation of sexual self-denial raise an acute question of meaning for the very same clerical institution – to discern – convincingly this time – what Jesus DID mean by ‘follow me’, and to do that?
Is there not an imperative to connect ‘follow me’ with integrity, authenticity, truthfulness – and to begin again by embodying as well as idealising those? Can the clerical church ever get there without admitting, examining and explaining its deep generational and self-imposed silence over clerical non-observance of the celibacy rule – even during Vatican II – broken in the end not by clerical compunction but by the revolt of the victims of that same silence?
Whenever a plane goes down everyone knows the imperative that follows: to know and to understand WHY.
Does ‘not putting a foot wrong’ mean NOT ASKING WHY the celibate RCC plane went down, for fear of waking the right-wing dragon that dodges that very same question?
As though ‘sin’ – ab initio – never had anything to do with fear of what others may think?
Sean, if Leo XIV has anything like the longevity of Leo XIII, we will have this safe, dull pope until 2049. He is the most popular world leader and by playing “the invisible man” (GKC — the postman) he has insured Teflon acceptability.
Mary McAleese has raised an alarm: Silence = Death — and when gay life has disappeared into cyberspace, homophobia is showing its teeth again.
Build serious, reflective lay organizations and don’t count on papal flimflam.
Leo XIV has never put a foot wrong. He has been happy to be a son of St Augustine, whereas many are restive under that yoke. People do not change at that age and we can expect him to continue in the papacy as he has done up to now. His temperament is quite the opposite of Pope Francis’s, who created a lot of commotion throughout his career. We can hope he will keep the engine of the church purring consistently and encourage its activities on every level. Let’s not forget that Augustine was perhaps the greatest of all church-builders, and certainly the western church bears his deep stamp in all its aspect.
In the words (almost) of the man in Fr Ted: “Are we all to become Augustinians now Father?”
Fr Ned, it could be worse — we could all be Thomists.
The fake Leo XIV websites are increasingly rampant. Some are linked to Elon Musk and Tesla. Others draw on genuine statements of Leo XIV before he became pope and present them misleadingly as present interventions, e.g. a statement of 2017 agreeing with US politician Chris Murphy on gun control is brought out as papal comment on the latest school massacre. The urge to create an omnipresent papal voice, which drowns Leo’s actual voice, is a kind of papolatry.
If a student spends a month writing an essay, with regular visits to the library, and then proposes the same topic to ChatGPT, the latter will produce a better essay in a few seconds. The papacy is obviously a juicy target for the arts of AI. Should Leo ask AI to write his first Encyclical?