One hundred fifty-five years ago, when the freshly minted Kingdom of Italy conquered the rump of the Papal States and Pope Pius IX withdrew behind the Leonine Wall as the “prisoner of the Vatican,” elite European opinion pronounced the papacy finished as a factor in history—and, it was often assumed, the Catholic Church as well.
Well.
Last month, the election of Pius IX’s twelfth successor riveted world attention as no other change of institutional or governmental leadership possibly could. Much credit for that goes to Pope Leo XIII, who, between 1878 and 1903, invented the modern papacy as an office of global moral teaching and an instrument of global moral witness. Concurrently, Leo set in motion the dynamics that led to the growth of the Catholic Church into a global communion of 1.4 billion people—a worldwide community of diversity and inclusion like none other.
Pope Leo XIV is too intelligent, too given to good manners, and too shrewd to have said it, but when he stepped out onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on the night of May 8, this son of the American Midwest might well have said, playing variations on a theme by Mark Twain, “Rumors of the Church’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”
Those of us in Rome in those electric days could not fail to have been impressed by the enthusiasm that greeted the 267th Bishop of Rome. Yet it struck me then, as it strikes me now, that there are potential downsides to the Petrocentrism—the tight focus on the papacy and the pope as the index of All Things Catholic—that has been on display throughout the Catholic world for some time now.
There is good news here, to be sure. The world needs an adult speaking in adult terms into a global communications ecosystem too often dominated, and thus marred, by the soundbite and the tweet—and Leo XIV has already demonstrated just how to do that. The world needs someone who can shine the bright light of truth into the darkness of conflict and war, and Leo XIV has already done that, too. 1.4 billion Catholics need a reference point for the unity that is one of the four marks of the Church—and by reminding us that this year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, Leo XIV has shown us exactly where the template of that unity-in-truth is to be found.
Petrocentrism has its downsides, however.
What happens in Rome does not even begin to exhaust what is happening in, to, and with the Catholic Church throughout the world. In the 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, John Paul II taught that the Church does not have a mission, as if mission were one of a dozen things the Church does. No, the Church is a mission, an evangelical mission defined by Christ himself in Matthew 28:19: “Go and make disciples of all nations.”
Thus what happens in Father Bill Ryan’s Togo Mission, or on the campuses served by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or in the vibrant pastoral life of the Archdiocese of Bamendain Cameroon, or amongst the heroic priests and people of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, or in Church-supported crisis pregnancy centers and hospice facilities, or in Jimmy Lai’s solitary witness in a Hong King prison cell—what happens in your local parish—is at least as important, and often more important, than what happens in Rome.
At the American founding, there were some 25,000 Catholics in the United States, and it’s a safe bet that fewer than one hundred of them knew the name of the pope (Pius VI, as it happens) or what he did. The pendulum has now swung hard in the opposite direction, such that too many Catholics are preoccupied—intensely, even frantically—with what’s afoot in Rome: an unhappy conjunction, I suggest, of the politicization of everything with 21st-century entertainment culture.
An interest in life at the Church’s administrative center is fine; an obsession with it, fueled by ill-informed blogs and social media, is not. It distorts the global Catholic reality even as it raises both unwarranted anxieties and misguided hopes.
Pope Leo XIV has an immense task ahead of him. Let us keep him, daily, in our prayers. Let us also do him the service of not dissecting every sentence he speaks, every initiative he undertakes, or every appointment he makes as if the Church’s future were hanging in the balance. That adds yet another burden to those Robert Prevost assumed when, a Chicago White Sox fan and thus a man familiar with suffering, he said “Accepto” in the Sistine Chapel a month ago.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
And yet, Leo XIV did reassure: “For you I am a pope, with you I am a Christian.”
How for the Church to be the “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium) together with “communio” (or the “ecclesial assembly”) under the “universal call to holiness”–so deformed by the mongrel “synodalism” of Leo’s predecessor?
“…there are potential downsides to the Petrocentrism—the tight focus on the papacy and the pope as the index of All Things Catholic—that has been on display throughout the Catholic world for some time now.”
I have long thought that the papacy since the late 20th c. to present is overexposed. This overexposure trivializes anything weighty the Pope might want to say. Same goes with the Pope’s travels around the world. It makes him look like a rock star on a world concert tour. The Church did rather well with a Pope stationed in Rome (or Avignon) about whom not much was known. The Church grew over 2,000 years without relying on papal jet travels around the globe, lightning speed communication and TV appearances. This might just be one of those instaces of “less is more”.
Maybe he should switch to walking or take a boat, like Jesus or St. Paul.
meiron: excellent suggestion. And, since neither Jesus nor Paul took along the press pool on their jaunts asea, Leo should consider leaving them at home too.
Deacon, is it possible that God is providing the world exposure for the Pope for a purpose?
Br.Jaques: I place utmost importance on the role of the Pope in leading the Church temporally. It is because of that fact that I simply question the prudence of placing the papacy under a microscope. Meaning is imputed to every move the Pope makes, the cape he wears around his shoulders, whether he lives in the papal palace or Santa Marthe, that he visited Castel Gondolfo, etc, etc. A little bit of mystery in life is healthy, that’s all
Good points Deacon.
George Weigel wrote that perhaps there is too much Petrocentrism in the Church.
God’s Fool quipped that perhaps there is too much foolishness in the CWR comment section.
“…too much foolishness in the CWR comment section,” especially in a posting time-stamped June 4, 2025 at 5:10 AM.
Agreed…
Yes. Furthermore, it’s both problem and solution. Reasonable advice from Weigel not to dissect every sentence or examine every appointment, although some of us who have labored in the fields at home and in the missions have had a reasonably different, existential perspective than scholar George Weigel.
Doesn’t life in the trenches differ? A pope’s voice is heard loud and clear in Africa as was attested to with Fiducia Supplicans. As it was in the parishes at home in the US and throughout the world Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and secular. However we got to this point of acute attentiveness to what the Pope says is described better than I can by Weigel as he references Leo XIII.
Although, the issue for some of us remains the immense power of the pope’s voice insofar as practice of the faith that Christ revealed. For those of us in the trenches it was a life and death struggle under Pope Francis’ administration of the papacy. Many demanded answers regarding doctrine, many lost faith. The sheep, the faithful ones who attended Mass, were crying out. Presently there’s hope for recovery. And a realistic attentiveness to what is said and done in Rome. A priest is a sentinel not a journalist, editor, or scholar. He owes his raison d’etre to Christ. And with Christ in instances when there is difference with what is said by a Roman pontiff.
Well said!
I rarely agree with Mr. W., but here he admirably gains my approval.
Since the election of the new pope, CWR commenters, as had been their wont with Francis at the helm, now dissect and analyze Leo’s every public utterance through various colored lenses. We’ve begun to magnify every little misdirection or ambiguity and impute motives. Fortune-tellers, we are, studying cards or sticks or tea leaves.
We understanding did suffer anxiety over the words of Leo’s predecessor; truly that fellow did warrant watching with wisdom as Jesus had advised.
One staid commenter suggested we give Leo the benefit of doubt. But no, another noted, the Catechism said nothing on it.
We went on, posing one cautionary note after another: Pope Leo may be misleading because he uttered ‘such and such,’ and the sky will soon fall in.
Francis continually showed that salvation did not depend upon him (Thank you, Lord Jesus!), and a pope may not even know or point the way. As Weigel says, the pope is merely a sign of unity, so let’s allow Leo that. At least for now.
Petrocentrism is necessary it is the heart, we the branches. Without him we would wither up die. The blood and life flow from him, producing the strength we need to live and evangelize, and then back to him for refurbishment and renewal. He serves in the person of Christ ( as High Priest ) . We, the flock, need him to lead us to good pastures and to protect us from danger. Christ entrusted the Church to Peter (a very imperfect man) and his successors (also very imperfect men) and we (also very imperfect people) are obliged to follow them. Let us not begin this pontificate by criticizing our God given leader, but by supporting him and letting him lead us to the good pastures.
Begging to differ slightly. JESUS is the vine and we the branches. Jesus said that those who do not eat His body and drink His blood have no life within. Yeah, the pope acts in Persona Christi, but He is not Christ. Distinctions matter.
We did NOT need a pope like Francis to lead us since he sometimes pointed to a path than wasn’t safe to travel.
At Matthew 12:46-50, Jesus designates his brothers: “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” Thus Leo said with Augustine: “‘With you I am a Christian and for you a bishop.’ In this sense, we can all walk together towards that homeland that God has prepared for us.” I think Leo himself sees us as brothers, sisters, and mothers more than he imagines us as patients and himself the doctor in a field hospital of his own design.
I wholeheartedly agree that we should not criticize the beginning of Leo’s pontificate. We should grant him many benefits of doubt. Most importantly, we should PRAY, as Jesus did, that Satan may not sift him. [Sifting separates….]
We read: “He serves in the person of Christ (as High Priest).” Not quite, Christ is the vine and the PAPACY is his vicar on earth, in “hierarchical communion” with the other Successors of the Apostles (Lumen Gentium).
So, in step with both Weigel and your general notion, how is this supposed to work in a desacralized/post-modern world where details matter?
In the centuries after the retrenchment at TRENT, the most credible rapprochement was the reaffirmation of the very nature of man in Rerum Novarum by Leo XIII—after whom Leo XIV wisely identifies his papacy. The perennial task remains the same: how to connect with and leaven a “demythologized” world, one that favors action at the expense of contemplation, manipulation in place of relationship, quantity over the real, ideologies and memes over the deeply concrete, and cramped rationality over the openness of faith—all in the face of a radically existing and profoundly mysterious “universe.”
VATICAN II begins by basing aggiornamento (engagement) on ressourcement (the Incarnation as testified in Scripture and cogitated by the Church Fathers).
Thinking about the CURRENT MOMENT, details do matter even at the beginning…A transoceanic ship steering even one degree of course can end up in a strange land. Likewise, the directional interference of private electronic devices on airplanes—and the catchall of controverted moral and ecclesial stuff dragged onboard by compass-challenged “synodality.”
Which might be why, looking ahead, POPE ST. JOHN PAUL II, gave us in 1993 the compass of Veritatis Splendor! Reaffirming the inborn and universal natural law and moral absolutes—as now explicitly part of the Magisterium.
Again, the mission is to consistently engage the “world”—in season and out of season—with what the Creed witnesses as to the nature of the Triune GOD, and what the Second Vatican Council was also getting at in Gaudium et Spes when it affirmed the nature of MAN….Noting the “binding force” of the natural law (n. 79) as revealed in the concrete Incarnation: “Christ the Lord, Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself [!] and makes his supreme calling clear” (n. 22).
SUMMARY: A stitch in time saves nine.
‘At the American founding, there were some 25,000 Catholics in the United States, and it’s a safe bet that fewer than one hundred of them knew the name of the pope (Pius VI, as it happens) or what he did. ”
********
I’m just curious why that would be a safe bet?
Yesterday in history, Jun 3 1098, Liberation of Christian Antioch by the Crusaders: in this video by military historian R. Ibrahim:
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2025/06/03/today-in-history-video-crusaders-liberate-christian-antioch-from-muslim-tyranny/
Thank you, George. I am in total agreement with you.
Most can easily veer into an all-too-familiar error, mistaking papal visibility for the vitality of the Church itself. This “Petrocentrism,” the idea that the Church’s life rises and falls with what’s said or done in Rome, undercuts the very ecclesiology recovered by Vatican II and reanimated in Pope Francis’ emphasis on synodality. Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) could not be clearer: the Church is not defined solely by its hierarchical center, but by the whole People of God. The Council’s recovery of collegiality, the shared governance of the Church by the pope with the bishops was a deliberate correction to centuries of excessive Roman centralization. The Church is a communion, not a corporation. Pope Francis’ renewed focus on synodality deepens that conciliar vision. A synodal Church listens, walks together, and discerns God’s will through the Spirit, not merely from papal pronouncements. In other words, the life of the Church is not measured only in what comes from a Vatican balcony, but in what rises from parish halls, village chapels, refugee camps, and kitchen tables where real Catholics live their faith. The Spirit who descended at Pentecost didn’t establish a papal press office but empowered a people.
Deacon Dom: And here we are in agreement. While the Church is not unaffected by a weak Pope, the Church does not rise or fall on the man who is Pope; Christ and the Church are One. We need always a Christocentric Church and not a Petrocentic one.
The only area I am in disagreement with you about is synodality. It had devolved under Francis as ‘synodality for synodality’s sake’. Firstly, we are a hierarchical Church and Synods ought to include bishops alone. If a bishop wants first to consult his flock, he can do so. Secondly, the problem with the Synods is that the process was hijacked by those intending to alter fundamental Church teaching cf. the German delegation.
The barque of Peter seems to be sailing in calmer waters now after some recent storms.
Let’s hope what storm damage there is can be quickly and quietly repaired.
The only real issue is whether he desires to conform the world to God or conform God to the world.
I’m just grateful that Pope Leo is worth watching/listening to.