The Pauline Leo

Pope Leo’s fine homilies and speeches during his recent apostolic journey to France have been amply applauded and extensively commented upon. His homilies at the Place de la Concorde and at Lourdes, his addresses to youth and to European leaders, were substantive and repay careful rereading. Yet, sometimes brief, passing remarks can also offer significant insights into a person’s heartfelt views and sensibilities. Three such have struck me in the past weeks.

In his September 30th audience, Leo gave those gathered in Saint Peter’s Square a personal appraisal of his trip to France. He told the attendees: “I would like to gather my thoughts and impressions–still very vivid–of this pastoral Visit.” Among the points he underscored, this especially drew my attention.

He said: “The Church … is not made up of stones or cement, but of people who love Jesus Christ because they have been loved by Him.” Notwithstanding the glory of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the immense joy at its “rebirth” from the devastating fire, the Christian faithful themselves are the living stones of the Church. And they live from and in the love of Jesus Christ, who, as Saint Paul proclaimed, “loved and gave himself up” for them (Gal 2:20). This primacy of the love of Jesus is a hallmark of the New Testament witness and of Leo’s teaching. And Paul is the first theological troubadour of Christ’s love.

A second remark worth dwelling upon occurred in the press conference Leo held with journalists on his return flight from France. Whatever one’s assessment of the prudence of such spontaneous exchanges, their very spontaneity can disclose what lies at the forefront of a person’s concerns. Thus, when a French journalist asked whether some of the Pope’s assertions may have been an intrusion of “religion” upon “politics,” the Pope replied simply, but firmly: “when I went to France, I went primarily to preach the Gospel, to preach the Good News, to reaffirm what Jesus Christ himself says when he says “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” so to speak the truth that Jesus offers us.”

Here too, one detects clear resonances with Paul. Recall his bold conviction: “The love of Christ urges us on because we are convinced that one has died for all … He died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor 5:14-15). This is the native language of Christian faith whose foundational “grammar” is Jesus Christ himself: his redemptive love and atoning presence. Leo employs Christianity’s Christological grammar in fresh and appealing ways. And, like Paul, he insists upon its universal salvific significance. The Christian can scarcely restrict the Gospel’s import to some merely private realm, deprived of political consequence.

The third remark that I find key to Leo’s vision came during a brief encounter, on October 1st, with a delegation of the Lutheran World Federation. He said:

I earnestly appeal to all believers, and especially theologians, to set their minds on Christ and his Gospel … Christ must not become a “foreign word” in our world. Our world needs ecumenical witnesses to Christ who make him known through their lives and actions, for Christ alone is the living source capable of fulfilling humanity’s deepest longings.

Leo’s appeal, “especially to theologians,” is telling. I have long decried that Christ has too often been conspicuously absent in many academic settings. Paul’s Christological parrhesia has sometimes ceded to Christological evasion and timidity. Hence, one welcomes Leo’s exhortation that Christ not become a “foreign word” in the world–or in the Church!

These three remarks, each in its own way, reflect an overarching theme of Leo’s theological and pastoral magisterium: the centrality of friendship with Jesus Christ. We find a distinct echo in his talk to the young people in Paris. “Here, then, is the source of true freedom: a living relationship with Jesus.” Jesus, the Pope proclaims time and again, does not merely show the way; he is himself the Way, the Truth of the Father, and the measure of authentic human freedom and flourishing. One recognizes the same passionate urgency and commitment that Paul manifests when he exclaims to the Galatians: “My little children with whom I am in travail until Christ be formed in you” (Gal 4:19). Christification, being formed in the likeness of Jesus Christ, is the believer’s vocation and destiny.

There is, of course, no discrepancy between attending to the Pauline Leo and acknowledging the Pope’s Augustinian heritage. Indeed, Augustine’s crucial conversion experience was itself inspired by the passage in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that enjoined him: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires!” (Rom 13:14).

Nor need one fret that to accent the Christian’s defining relationship with Jesus Christ and to urge growth in friendship with him is to countenance a retreat into an individualistic spirituality and a merely private piety. Leo’s episcopal motto, derived from Saint Augustine, forbids any such reduction. “In Illo Uno Unum”–“In that One Christ We Are One.” Leo, in the footsteps of Augustine, thereby underscores the inseparable nexus between Christ and Christians, between Head and members. And both, of course, only herald in their own age Paul’s intense realization of the corporate nature of salvation in Christ, “the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God” (Col 2:19).

Pope Leo has often referred with filial appreciation to his predecessor, Pope Francis. He has frequently expressed esteem for Francis’s Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, “The Joy of the Gospel”. That document marked the true beginning of Francis’s own magisterium. Less known, and to my knowledge, not yet cited by Leo, are the moving final words of his predecessor’s magisterium. Yet, in many ways, they can well serve to recapitulate Leo’s own variations on Paul’s cosmic Christological symphony.

On Easter Sunday 2025, in a homily preached in his name, the gravely ill Pope Francis cried:

Let us run towards Jesus, let us rediscover the inestimable grace of being his friends. Let us allow his Word of life and truth to shine in our life. As the great theologian Henri de Lubac said, ‘It should be enough to understand this: Christianity is Christ. No, truly, there is nothing else but this. In Christ we have everything’.

Making his own these resonant words of de Lubac, Francis then boldly voiced his own conviction: “Sisters, brothers, in the wonder of the Easter faith, carrying in our hearts every expectation of peace and liberation, we can say: with you, O Lord, everything is new. With you, everything begins again!”

This faith-filled conviction clearly animates Leo XIV as well. With you, Lord Jesus, everything is new; you are yourself the joy of the Gospel.