Pope Leo XIV was in Naples on Friday afternoon, where – among the other important things he did – he venerated and displayed the famous relic of the city’s patron.
The mostly third-century bishop is beloved of Neapolitans and of Italians throughout the country’s southwest (especially though not exclusively), and he is beloved of a great many Italian-Americans, who still celebrate street festivals for him.
San Gennaro, as he is known in Italian, St. Januarius in English, is a fascinating figure who lived and served during the heady days of persecution under the Roman emperor Diocletian.
His name comes directly from Janus, the Roman god of liminal spaces: Beginnings, endings, gates and doorways, passages and transitions.
Janus was often styled bifrons – literally “two-faced” (but not in that term’s current colloquial sense) – and was typically depicted with one head and two faces looking in opposite directions.
That Leo XIV should have chosen to venerate St. Januarius on the anniversary of his election may have been an accident of scheduling and circumstance, but if it was an accident, it was a happy or at least a powerfully suggestive one.
Year One of the Leonine era was in many ways a “January” year – a year of beginnings and endings, of transitions and of transition broadly – and the remarks Leo XIV made in Naples (and Pompeii) on the very day his first year turned into his second were very much looking backward and forward.
At the Tempio della Carità – the “Temple of Charity” – in Pompeii, Leo made special and particular mention of the charitable operation’s soup kitchen named after Pope Francis.
That mention was a standout, because Francis constantly preached charity-in-action and certainly practiced what he preached throughout his reign.
Francis’s modes and manners of Church governance were not universally appreciated even by those enthusiastically supportive of his program and outlook, but there is no gainsaying his commitment to what Catholics call the Works of Mercy.
Leo also remarked how the “Temple of Faith” and the “Temple of Charity” nourish and support one another.
“Here,” Leo said, “in the works of the shrine, the power of Christ’s Resurrection is experienced every day; through love, it renews hearts to the good life of the Gospel.”
“Here,” he said, “the ‘Temple of Charity’ and the ‘Temple of Faith’ sustain one another.”
This was – one thinks not incidentally – the vision of St. Bartolo Longo for the whole Valley of Pompeii, whose people the great nineteenth century saint tirelessly served for more than half a century.
“[Longo] called the Valley of Pompeii a ‘place of love that warms the heart’, a ‘triumph of faith and charity’,” Leo said, “virtues that he defined as ‘two wings joined in the same flight’.”
Longo, who reverted to his baptismal Catholicism after practicing Satanism (which was somewhat in vogue among the enlightened elite at the University of Naples, where he studied law), upon returning to the Catholic faith and practice, resolved to teach the people of the valley and serve them charitably in their great spiritual and corporal need.
He found the local people woefully untaught and powerfully superstitious, so he set out to engender in them a knowledge of the true faith by rekindling the true piety – especially Marian devotion – and practicing charity.
He became a lay Dominican and eventually a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.
Leo canonized Longo in October of last year and characterized his visit to Pompeii as being “in the footsteps” of the saint.
From an Augustinian friar who is a master of rhetoric – in the mold of his spiritual father, who is the uncontested master and spiritual biography and human psychology – the invocation of Longo in those terms is too dense and richly layered for unpacking here.
Suffice it to say Leo knew what he was doing.
In Naples, Leo quoted Francis at the beginning of the copious praise he had for the city and the people – the faithful and the broad citizenry – and though he did not shy away from the city’s grave problems, neither did he repeat Francis’s stentorian 2015 denunciation of the city’s corruption, exploitation, and criminal violence.
Anyone who even casually observed Leo’s recent visit to Africa must know where Leo stands on such matters and understand he is not shy about them.
Instead, Leo recalled Naples and Neapolitans to the best traditions of their faith and their civility.
“Naples today faces a dramatic paradox,” Leo said. “The significant growth in tourists struggles to generate an economic dynamism capable of truly engaging the entire social community,” while Naples “remains marked by a social divide that no longer separates the center from the suburbs.”
The divide cuts through and is “actually pronounced within each area, with existential peripheries nestled even in the heart of the historic center.”
“In many areas,” Leo said, “a veritable geography of inequality and poverty can be seen, fueled by long-unresolved problems: income inequality, poor job prospects, a lack of adequate facilities and services, pervasive crime, the plight of unemployment, school dropouts, and other situations that burden the lives of many.”
“Faced with these realities,” he said, “which at times take on worrying proportions, the presence and action of the State is more necessary than ever, to provide security and trust to citizens and to eliminate the possibility of organized crime.”
“In this context,” the pope said, “many Neapolitans nurture the desire for a city redeemed from evil and healed from its wounds.”
“Often, they are true social heroes, women and men who dedicate themselves every day, sometimes simply by faithfully carrying out their duties,” quietly working “so that justice, truth, and beauty can find their way through the streets, institutions, and relationships.”
“These people must not remain isolated,” he said, “and for their commitment to permeate the very fabric of the city, we need to create connections, work together (lavorare in rete), and foster (fare) community.”
What we witnessed in Pompeii and Naples on Friday was, in short, the Leonine program at work.
Pope Leo XIV adopted much of his immediate predecessor’s vocabulary and drew on its pastoral verve, then delivered it through a distinctly Leonine channel – hence in a quintessentially Augustinian register – that acknowledges the bad and the broken in order to set the good and the wholesome in high relief.
According to the old adage, politics is downstream of culture.
Year One of the new Leonine era has been primarily cultural, an exercise not so much in direct intervention as sympathetic healing apt to take down the temperature and – to speak in a galenic register – to bring the humors into balance.
Leo XIV has not eschewed the hard work of governing the Church, so much as he has diligently pursued a course that will create conditions in which to take the hard decisions.
“Peace,” Leo told diplomats on May 16, 2025, a week and a day after assuming the office he now holds, “is built in the heart and from the heart, by eliminating pride and vindictiveness and carefully choosing our words.”
So far, he has led by example.
Follow Chris Altieri on X: @craltieri
