“The Church needs you.”
In the first week of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV spoke these words to members of the Eastern Catholic Churches gathered in Rome to celebrate the Jubilee. On June 2nd, he also honored an Eastern Catholic martyr, Blessed Iuliu Hossu, the Greek-Catholic Bishop of Cluj-Gherla. These providential encounters with the Christian East remind us of John Paul II’s insistent cry in Ut Unum Sint: “the Church must breathe with her two lungs!”
Pope Leo’s address for the Eastern Catholic Jubilee points to a few ways the Western lung can find inspiration for its Eastern counterpart.
1. Liturgy
First, Leo points us to the most obvious point of influence: the beauty of Eastern Catholic liturgies, which have preserved their transcendent mystery.
He comments, “The contribution that the Christian East can offer us today is immense! We have a great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty!”
In a world that has turned away from God, the path back is not through mundane, human-centered experiences. The West needs re-enchantment, and the Christian East offers needed witness to the way Christian liturgy can awaken the heart and imagination.
2. Asceticism
Just as the Eastern Churches have preserved their ancient liturgies, they have also maintained traditional forms of asceticism — the penance and self-discipline that have shaped Christian conversion. Pope Leo also sees this as a way of overcoming the eclipse of God in Western culture:
It is likewise important to rediscover, especially in the Christian West, a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity (penthos)! It is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism.
Pope Leo succinctly summarizes the spiritual malaise of Western individualism, with God’s presence obscured by the constant distractions of our culture, with its monetized distractions that serve our material comfort. The asceticism of the desert focuses on Christ, turning the mind and heart to him, and disciplines the body, rather than pampering it, so that it, too, may praise God. The Church in the West often caters to our secular, consumerist culture rather than offering a serious challenge through self-discipline.
3. Prayer
Leo also emphasizes how the ascetic tradition leads to personal transformation in prayer. Eastern prayer uses icons to mediate the presence of Christ and prays especially by invoking his name in the Jesus Prayer.
The goal is divinization, finding peace through healing and transformation by grace, as Pope Leo highlights:
Your traditions of spirituality, ancient yet ever new, are medicinal. In them, the drama of human misery is combined with wonder at God’s mercy, so that our sinfulness does not lead to despair, but opens us to accepting the gracious gift of becoming creatures who are healed, divinized and raised to the heights of Heaven.
Here again, we find a broader horizon for prayer that draws one beyond a fixation on feeling and comfort.
4. Synodality
Finally, as the Church discerns a proper approach to synodality, an ancient practice of episcopal governance, Leo looks again to the East as a model. This synodality is not a democratic free-for-all that tries to reinvent the Church for a new age. Rather, it expresses the communion of the Church and the responsibility that bishops bear for the governance of the Church. Leo draws this out:
Thank you, dear brothers and sisters of the East, the lands where Jesus, the Sun of Justice, dawned, for being ‘lights in our world’ (cf. Mt 5:14). Continue to be outstanding for your faith, hope and charity, and nothing else. May your Churches be exemplary, and may your pastors promote communion with integrity, especially in the Synods of Bishops, that they may be places of fraternity and authentic co-responsibility. Ensure transparency in the administration of goods and be signs of humble and complete dedication to the holy people of God, without regard for honors, worldly power or appearance.
Let us hope that in this area, as well as the others, the East can remain a model for genuine renewal in the Church.
A Recommendation
For anyone interested in learning more about the Eastern tradition of prayer, I recommend a new book, at once deep and accessible, by Dr. Alexander Harb, The Kingdom of the Heart: Meditations from the Christian East (Sophia Institute Press, 2024). I found in the book’s third chapter, titled “The Heart,” another important reason for engaging the Eastern Churches.
Their tradition helps counter our culture of distraction and superficiality by creating interior watchfulness:
“To be constantly on the lookout for sinful or distracting thoughts and impulses is called nepsis, or watchfulness. This concept is discussed by virtually all of the Eastern Fathers. … Everything that we do makes an impression on our hearts, and therefore to be watchful, we must recognize the things that threaten the light of God there. So too, we have to know how to defend our hearts.”
Harb references the liturgy often and draws extensively from the Eastern Fathers, especially those of the desert. Here’s one example from St. Antony the Great:
“To guard the heart, Abba Antony would call out the name ‘Jesus’ continuously; then he would say it silently in his heart. Abba Antony would tell his disciples, ‘The kingdom of Heaven is within you . . . . Thus living, let us keep guard carefully, and as it is written, ‘keep our hearts with all watchfulness.’”
Growing in watchfulness will enable us to respond to the call of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: “Let us be attentive.” To turn our attention back to the Lord, we would do well to look East, as Pope Leo has wisely recommended.
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The Holy Father commends the Eastern Churches for having retained “the sense of mystery that remains alive in [their] liturgies.” Meanwhile, in the West, some high-ranking prelates, including his predecessor, seem hell-bent on destroying that very sense wherever it threatens to be revived in the Roman-rite Church — and I’m speaking not only about the Tridentine Mass, but also about any mark of reverence (kneeling for Communion, use of Latin, women’s velings, etc.) in the Novus Ordo. Meanwhile, they have little problem with cirque de soleil extravaganzas posing as worship. I pray that Leo will at least begin to turn this situation around here at home and that the passing of Francis will mark the final nail in the coffin of liturgical experiments that, as have proven conclusively, simply don’t work.
Are we speaking of a continuum of uniformity vs. experimentation and a need to strike a balance?
Perhaps I should have used the term variation rather than experimentation, sorry.
This is a timely and much-needed reflection. In addition to the Eastern tradition’s powerful emphasis on nepsis—that vigilant attentiveness to the heart—one cannot overlook its equally profound theology of intercessory love, most luminously embodied in the writings of St. Silouan the Athonite.
For Silouan, to guard the heart was not only to reject distracting thoughts but to let it become a dwelling place of Christ’s own love for enemies. “Keep your mind in hell,” he wrote, “and despair not”—a paradox echoing the Cross, where Christ interceded for His executioners.
This deep current runs like an Ariadne’s thread through the whole of Scripture: from Abraham’s plea for Sodom, to Moses interceding for the idolatrous Israelites, to Paul’s sorrowful longing for his fellow Jews—each prefiguring the supreme intercession of the Crucified Lord.
The Eastern Fathers remind us that true watchfulness is inseparable from mercy, and that spiritual vigilance is perfected not only in stillness, but in the pierced, praying heart.
Pope Leo’s turn toward the Eastern lung of the Church is not only liturgical but deeply Christological—calling us to a renewal of our interior lives, where attention, forgiveness, and intercession converge in the likeness of Christ.
“For anyone interested in learning more about the Eastern tradition of prayer…”, Dr. Staudt recommends a good book.
For anyone interested in also understanding what Pope Leo means when he urges the Eastern Churches to “preserve your traditions without attenuating them […] lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism”…yours truly recommends an insight about interreligious “pluralism”…
As with consumerism and attenuation:
“Islam has not wanted to choose between Heaven and Earth. It proposed instead a blending of heaven and earth, sex and mysticism [!], war and proselytism, conquest and apostolate [!]. In more general terms, Islam proposed a blending of the spiritual and the temporal worlds which neither in Islam nor among the pagans [!] have ever been divided” (Jean Guitton, “Great Heresies and Church Councils,” 1965, p. 116).
So, yes, about the “Eastern Catholic liturgies, which have preserved their transcendent mystery”.
This article presents a vision brimming with hope for the future of the Western Church, yet it cannot but call to mind the great paradox that lingers unaddressed: How is it that such lofty expressions of renewal coexist with the relentless suppression of the Latin Mass? That sacred liturgy, imbued with the reverence and mystery that nourished the faith of centuries, has been met not with magnanimity but with restriction—indeed, often with outright censure—by bishops, cardinals, and even the successors of Peter themselves. Is it not the very fabric of Catholic tradition that should be guarded, not diminished? When shall Rome, with a voice full of conviction, affirm the rightful place of the Latin Mass in the life of the Church, granting local parishes the freedom to cultivate this venerable form of worship according to the needs and desires of the faithful?
Nobody really tries to offer cogent answers to such questions. Pope Benedict XVI suggested “hermeneutic of continuity” as a prophylactic, but his successor spurned that. It would be great if Pope Leo would give a try.
It really is a form of intellectual schizophrenia to praise Eastern liturgies, and then to attempt to slam the door on a recovery of analogous features of the historic Roman Liturgy. Pope Francis did that. Does anybody remember his praise of the Ukrainian Catholic Liturgy based on his experience o0f it in Argentina?
AMEN!
Yes, how to restore the whole “fabric” from the fragmenting”seamless garment”?
Speaking of Pope Leo’s latest messages, has anyone read USCCB’s report at https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/diversity-cause-strength-not-division-pope-tells-rome-clergy
Does anyone detect a ‘spin’ in the first paragraph? Does the body of the report appear congruent or different from the first paragraph??? Please explain to help me understand. Thanks.
Why not have married priests with families like the Eastern Church and the New Testament Church !
Meiron above – I see what you mean about diversity being a strength but I wouldn’t worry too much. For me, the main takeaway from Leo’s talks to priests is the complete change of tone from what we/they have been subjected to pre-May 8.
Let us pray and hope the wind change lasts.