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“We don’t actually know what Pope Leo is yet,” my friend observed. “Right now, we are seeing the post-Francis era,” he continued, “and I don’t think we are going to see the Leo era until next year.” My friend – who happens also to be Crux’s managing editor, Charles Collins – made his remarks to the BBC on Christmas Day, ahead of Pope Leo XIV’s first-ever Christmas urbi et orbi blessing. It struck me as a succinct statement of a keen and penetrating insight, one no other Vatican-watcher has articulated as well as Collins in the nine-ish months since Leo’s election, except Andrea Gagliarducci (especially in his Monday Vatican columns), another dear old friend and veteran observer of Roman affairs. “The pontificate of Leo XIV hasn’t truly begun yet,” Gagliarducci said in last week’s column – not the first time he has said such or similar – but he also noted how we can catch small glimpses of what he expects the pontificate to be, when Leo does come into his own. “A pontificate not of rupture but of adjustment,” Gagliarducci wrote. “Not a pontificate of restoration,” but “a pontificate of renewal,” albeit one within the traditions of the office and of the Church for which the office is given. Folks who were hoping for swift abandonment and reversal of some of Francis’s less popular measures were bound to be disappointed – and they have been, largely – but there is a significant sense in which the folks hoping for perfect continuity with Francis – a Francis II in everything but name – were always going to have the harder time of it. “The prayers of both could not be answered,” to say it with U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, “that of neither has been answered fully.” “The Almighty,” Lincoln said, “has His own purposes.” Francis was an anomaly, a disruptive force and a cyclonic presence in the papal office, who unleashed enormous energies but did not harness or channel them. In his own words (or those of his closest advisors), Francis described his way as “start[ing] processes” rather than “dominating spaces” because “time is greater than space.” “Reform on the go,” is how Gagliarducci described Francis’s approach to reshaping the Vatican and the Church, while Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro called Francis’s leadership “open and incomplete.” The great paradox of the Francis era was that Francis eschewed the trappings of papal reign while nakedly wielding the raw power of the office, and so in the name of a “healthy decentralization” that concentrated power in the person of the pontiff, who then discharged it. Francis certainly shook things up in the Vatican and in the Church – that it was past time for a shakeup was one of the very few things on which people across the spectrum of opinion in the Church agreed when Francis was elected – but after a dozen years of Francis’s whirlwind leadership, the structural and cultural issues driving the dysfunction he inherited were – are – still present. The work of his successor – whoever he would be – was always going to be the work of consolidation, ordering. It was always going to be a work of “absorption” to use Gagliarducci’s term, and you need an institutionalist for that. In Leo XIV, we have a fellow who is an institutionalist by character and temperament, whose biography suggests he is powerfully and perhaps uniquely suited to the task of the present moment. The best treatment of his life, it happens, is El Papa León XIV. Ciudadano del mundo, misionero del siglo XXI, by Crux’s own Elise Ann Allen, soon to be available in English as Pope Leo XIV: Global Citizen, Missionary of the 21st Century. Allen also secured for Crux the first interview with the neo-elect Pope Leo XIV, which you can read here (links to parts 2-6 at bottom of article). Lest I be accused of giving myself short shrift, it is worth mentioning that both Collins’s and Gagliarducci’s readings of the Leonine pontificate in fieri may be taken to extend an observation this Vatican watcher made on the day he was elected. “He is – if I could put it this way – a theological moderate, as far as I can tell,” I told Ryan Piers of LNL, minutes after Leo’s first appearance on the loggia, “I think we don’t really know who he is until he shows us, and who he is in the office of Peter is bound to be very different from who he was as a ‘private citizen’, as it were.” “So,” I said, “this is very much a ‘wait-and-see’ moment.” “That said,” I offered by way of conclusion, “the choice of ‘Leo’ – the fellow who was the father of Catholic social teaching in the modern era – is very telling, but again, we are going to wait and see.” With the closing of the Holy Door in St. Peter’s on the Solemnity of the Epiphany, January 6 – the end of the Ordinary Jubilee Year of Hope (inaugurated by Pope Francis in what proved to be the final year of his pontificate) – and the first extraordinary consistory convoked by Pope Leo XIV to open on January 7, the wait may well be nearly over and the new Leonine era about to come into its own. If the letter – obtained by Crux – which Leo sent to cardinals ahead of Christmas is any indication, the first steps will be at once cautious and momentous. A rereading of Francis’s Evangelii gaudium – the first major document of Francis’s pontificate to have been entirely the work of Francis himself – and a “deep dive” (It. approfondimento) into Francis’s apostolic constitution, Praedicate Evangelium, are both on the agenda. So are “synod and synodality” especially in the key of “efficacious collaboration with the Roman pontiff, on questions of major importance, for the good of the whole Church.” Last on Leo’s list of things to consider ahead of the consistory is “liturgy: a profoundly informed theological, historical, and pastoral reflection ‘to conserve the sound (Lt. sana) tradition and open nonetheless the way toward a legitimate progress’,” as the Fathers of the Vatican Council II put it in their constitution on the sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. That is a lot. That is also a small sliver, only, of what was sitting in the proverbial papal in-tray when Leo came into the office, but the wise governor knows better than to attempt everything at once.

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