‘Divine speech is woven with enigmas, that by its obscurity it may train the mind of the reader to seek more eagerly.’ – St Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job XX.1
TODAY Pope Leo XIV has held his office for half a year.
Most of us thought that by early autumn, certainly by six months in, we would have had some clear understanding of what kind of pope Leo XIV was going to turn out to be. We were mistaken. It is never easy managing expectations. Indeed, I remember being advised by an elderly friend, a dour Scots psychiatrist, that the key to remaining sane often lies in having realistic expectations, both of life in general and of certain situations in particular. He was talking at the time about a ‘career’ in the Church of England, but it remains excellent advice in all circumstances. He was suggesting there was a constant need to remain on the alert for misinformed and unrealistic expectations and the need to be willing to change them in the light of unwelcome reality.
This was never more true than for Catholics during this alarming period of post-Francis recovery.
The context for this recovery is the fact that much of the Catholic Church is suffering from Post Traumatic Pope Francis Stress Disorder, otherwise known as PTPFSD.
PTPFSD is something new, and none of us has had the opportunity to adjust to it in the past. The experience of Pope Francis’s pontificate is most like the experience of gaslit domestic violence.
Whether one uses simple, if hackneyed, phrases such as indicating left but turning right, or a sense of psychological arrested development that made his papacy more like a young university chaplain getting down with the kids, or the perpetual experience of semi-anarchic Mass which he promised and faithfully delivered – so effectively – none of us ever knew where we were with Pope Francis, and the experience has scarred us for a lifetime.
The consequence of the recent years is that none of us dares trust poor Leo. Worse, we are on the edge of our seats, poised to flee, white knuckles exposed, ready for absolutely anything.
Retrospectively, it now seems obvious that his calm, disciplined and restrained face after his election, which was first taken as a sign of shock, was or is in fact the mask of enigma, worn by a pope whose layered complexity we have so far failed to interpret.
Normally an assessment of a papacy would simply be a mixture of weighing what was said, worn, written and done, with an element of ‘how’ thrown in.
But it isn’t really working with Pope Leo. There is no agreed way of reading his papacy or assessing his approach. It’s not so much that there is contradiction, but there is complexity. And as yet, we have not found the key to interpreting the complexity.
We are essentially trying to discover if the Pope is a Catholic. There should be no need for that, but after Pope Francis there is. And one of the ways in which that should show itself, is in the signage of whether he is a progressive or a conservative. These ought to be alternatives, but Pope Leo appears to be using them as though they were complementary. And this is part of the confusion.
For example, he appears to be conservative on sex. That is usually a sound litmus test of where a position is taken in the culture wars. But on migration, another litmus test, he appears progressive. He is conservative on liturgical dress, but he blesses blocks of ice at ecological gatherings. He sings and prays cheerfully in Latin. But he won’t as yet rescind his predecessor’s ban on the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).
Unlike Pope Francis, these fall short of amounting to contradiction in his speech, behaviour, dress, appointments, and planned and off-the-cuff statements; it’s just that none of the elements that so far have comprised his public persona and action has sufficient weight to act as determinative interpretative keys to his overall approach.
If we go through the identikit approach to try to work out who the real person is behind the office, to our surprise and astonishment we still have no conclusion.
A brief resume of what the journey of discovery looks like so far.
It began with what he wore on the balcony. To our surprise, and somewhat to our relief, he looked like a normal pope, wearing clothes that were consistent with his office and, with the exception of Francis, the previous holders of that office. So suddenly, those who longed for consistency and continuity saw a sign that they might get it. Surely a new conservative, possibly a Benedict XVII in spirit!
Then there was his facility with Latin. Surely this suggested that he was at ease with the Latin Mass and Latin in the liturgy. Surely it was an indication that one of his first acts would be to reverse the bullying Traditionis Custodes, through which Francis suppressed access to the TLM. He used Latin, and sang the liturgy, and behaved for all the world as if he was comfortable with the full range of Catholic spirituality – and yet, did nothing.
In an early interview he proposed ‘synodality’ as a means to solve the TLM problem. But did he mean in the sense of free dialogue within the Church for the purposes of discernment, or in the Francis sense of orchestrated committees with hand-picked members tasked with articulating progressive policies? We have yet to find out.
He later gave an interview in which he upset conservative Catholics by drawing an ethical analogy between immigration and abortion.
Suddenly, all those who had set themselves up as detectives of his intention were working overtime. The only way in which this could be understood was if there were some level of multiple personality at work. Did he have a Catholic heart (sound on sex) and a liberal, left-leaning, pro-migration head (bad on politics)?
Was there a gap between his Catholic spirituality and his Democrat politics?
Then came the blessing of the block of ice.
At one level, this had clearly been arranged for the diary of Pope Francis on the assumption he would live to fulfil the engagement himself. At another level, everyone asked what is wrong with blessing water just because it is frozen. Catholics always bless water – does the temperature matter?
In a piece of politicised theatre set up for his predecessor, was poor Leo indicating a preference and papal support for ecological justice in the form of global-warming protest, (we know which side that would place him on) or was he simply being shepherded around a stage with choreography invented by activists?
Once again, none of these acts offered a determinative insight into his values or strategy. They weren’t deliberately confusing, but it was clear that the kaleidoscopic patterns that form his papacy were going to be more complex than anyone had expected.
The interpretative difficulties were made more intense by the fact that many other events reflected arrangements made when Francis was alive. A recent example of this was the paper released by the controversial Cardinal Victor Fernández, offering arbitration on which titles the Church should recognise Mary as having. The background to this was that for some time, conservative Catholics had been praying, agitating, longing, and arguing for a fifth Marian dogma. They had been waiting for Mary to be declared Co-Redemptrix, and only this week a 48,000-word document was released rubbishing the idea. It became clear very quickly, when references in the text were made to pressurising groups in social media, that this was effectively the ghost of Francis putting his favourite enemies – those he declared to be spiritually rigid – in their place, and defeating their hopes and longings with an act of papal fiat expressed through the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. But if Pope Leo didn’t commission this repudiation of conservative hope and longing, why did he sign off on it?
Both conservatives and liberals are watching Pope Leo to see whether he will either repudiate or re-energise policies of his predecessor. To the frustration of everybody he appears to be doing very little.
In ‘normal conditions’, whatever they are, the ideal way of conducting a papacy might be to do very little. But these are not normal conditions and both sides of the culture wars as they are represented in the Catholic Church are waiting for the moment when the Pope makes it evident which side he is on. What they are getting instead is a papal enigma which steers what might be considered a neutral cause between the two series of expectations.
One possible explanation is that Leo may consider his main duty as pope is to draw together all the disparate factions of the Church in his paternal and non-sectarian embrace, and is therefore avoiding taking any action capable of being interpreted as creating an allegiance to one side in preference to the other.
Much depends on what analogy one chooses to use to describe the situation in the Catholic Church in the wake of Pope Francis. One might be that of the role of pope as bomb disposal expert. In that scenario Leo’s predecessor has left behind some ticking ordnance that left unchecked may go off and cause explosions creating schism. One of Pope Francis’s more notorious remarks was ‘there always is the schismatic option in the Church . . . I am not afraid of schisms’.
It remains to be seen whether taking very little action will unite the Church around what is perceived as a non-partisan Father in God, or allow the Church to be further fractured.
The enigma is working just as St Gregory the Great suggested it would. Six months in, we find ourselves searching for a solution and meaning all the more eagerly.
