Prelude: As we welcome Pope Leo XIV, we do so with full awareness of the Church’s failures as an institution. Church-sanctioned teachings too often became instruments of empire, rather than channels of Christ’s peace. They upheld systems of enslavement, patriarchy, and racial hierarchy, instead of challenging institutions and bidding them to change. —
When Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost was proclaimed as Pope Leo XIV and then stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, for me it was a moment of disbelief and wonderment: The first American-born Pope in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Then came his Urbi et Orbi (to the City and the World) blessing, in which he repeatedly, and beautifully, invoked peace.
“Peace be with you all…Peace be with you…. The peace of the Risen Christ - - an unarmed and disarming peace, …uniting everyone, always in peace. …a Church that always seeks peace, …for peace in the world.”
In this moment he was fulfilling both the Prayer of St. Francis, “Make me a channel of your peace,” (a prayer that Elizabeth and I spoke and our guests sang at our wedding denoting the purpose of our partnership twenty years ago) and the dream of Pope Francis, for a successor of humility, service, pastoral care and continuity.
As someone who has spent most of my public life standing for peace, speaking for peace, working for peace, legislating for peace, this moment represented a leap from wild surmise to wild faith embracing the possibility that even as the world trembles from powerful forces of fragmentation, (some emanating from America), and while certain elements threaten to fracture the world politically, economically and militarily, the white smoke drifted upwards, cleared, and, enter a new Pope! Yes, an American. His message, peace and unity. A new Vicar of Peace on Earth for the Prince of Peace.
Cardinal Prevost’s choice of the name Leo is a signal of union with the striving of the Church to be a voice for the voiceless, to exhort a theological foundation for Catholic action, guided by a moral vision which infuses eternal and temporal spiritual Christian principles into the material world, sanctifying it.
His namesake, Pope Leo XIII, brought to the furnace of the Second Industrial Revolution a desire to penetrate the truth of oneness, to reconcile the unity of opposites, labor and capital, rich and poor.
In his Encyclical, Rerum Novarum, “On Capital and Labor,” Leo XIII established the moral case for labor unions and the rights of workers, amidst crushing western societal inequities of wealth and cruel working conditions and slave labor wages for workers. He was on neither the side of socialism nor capitalism. Human dignity transcended ideology.
The social doctrine of Leo XIII became definitive, a bedrock for 20th century Catholicism and would be reflected in the moral teachings of his papal successors, inspiring principles of social and economic justice to be integrated into everyday life in secular society.
This is how lay people, such as Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement derived the moral authority to act. Her commitment to social justice came directly from Rerum Novarum. Generations were so inspired, myself included.
In 2004, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, in the spirit of and literally with words from Rerum Novarum, I was privileged to speak these same principles of support for workers’ rights as a spiritual imperative, to the Iowa AFL-CIO, entitled “The Soul of the Worker.”
Forty years after Rerum Novarum, in 1931, Pope Pius XI, in the face of rising fascism, totalitarism and the Depression again, in Quadragesimo Anno, “On the Reconstruction of the Social Order,” insisted on the dignity of labor and fair wages.
John XXIII in 1961, issued Mater et Magistra, “Christianity and Social Progress,” expanded concerns about inequality and the necessity for social and economic justice globally.
Two years later John XXIII connected social justice with peace based on justice, in Pacem in Terris, “Peace on Earth,” a hymn to global humanity, another papal teaching which informed my own world view.
In 1967, Pope Paul VI presented Populorum Progressio, “The Development of Peoples,” a critique of the destruction and exploitation of neo-colonialism globally.
Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical, “On Human Work,” Laborem Exercens, 1981, placed people before profit, stressed workers’ rights, unions and derived from and strengthened the nonviolent Solidarnosz (Solidarity) trade movement in Poland which organized in opposition to state repression, high food prices and dangerous working conditions.
One of the most important moments in my own life came when I had a private audience with Pope John Paul II, thanked him for sending his light and truth to the world and brought him greetings from Cleveland’s Polish community, which still remembers his visit to St. Stanislaus Church, as Karol Cardinal Wojtyla.
Centesimus Annus, also by John Paul II, “The Hundred Years,” literally one hundred years after Rerum Novarum, which John Paul discerned as a “lasting paradigm,” in a world witnessing the collapse of communism and the moral challenges of global capitalism.
And then the Encyclical, Laudato Si’ “On Care for Our Common Home,” (2015) written by Pope Francis, echoed Rerum Novarum’s exegesis on economic inequality and malignant materialism and then linked it morally and spiritually to environmental justice and ecological collapse. This Encyclical should be read repeatedly for its eminent power and also because it represents the continuity of ethic, spirit and morality which brings us to the new Pope Leo.
Shakespeare’s Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet, asked: “What’s in a name?” What we are called at birth may or may not align with who we are.
It is when we name ourselves that we express our essence.
At my confirmation by the Archbishop of Cleveland, I chose the name Patrick, after St. Patrick, because it aligned with my Irishness and defines my inner nature: Walk with faith, fear nothing but the Lord.
Robert Cardinal Prevost chose for himself the name Leo XIV. He has shared something essential about himself and in doing so intimated what we may expect from his papacy.His life’s journey, from Chicago to Chiclayo, in Peru, where, as Bishop, he became known for his humanitarian nature, his support for “the least of our brethren,” those poor, the marginalized, the homeless, resonates with the most noble spirit of America, embodied in Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me. I life my lamp beside the golden door.” - This is the spirit of our new Pope, Leo XIV.
He began with the Order of Augustine, and followed spirit signposts on his journey which would lead to the Throne of St. Peter attended by St. Augustine and St. Ambrose: The imperative of the exploration of one’s own inner world, the search for that “imprisoned lightning,” truth that dwells within; love and harmony as a path to God, being transcending having, the necessity of spiritual renewal, the soulful process that led to the anguished exclamation of an Anglican cleric, John Donne, in his Holy Sonnet XIV: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”
While we are cautioned about prediction, Leo XIV, is prepared to address the moral crises of our present time: Those forced into mass migration by endless wars, the rending of the seamless web of life, ecocide; the threat of nuclear war, the substitution of virtual reality for reality, artificial intelligence for real intelligence, the real trade deficit in which, as Esau (Genesis 25:29-34) we trade our souls for a ‘mess of pottage.’
Once the Church has fully confronted its own demons, the clerical abuse, the marginalization of people based on gender, identity, or culture, from the stolen lands and the shattered lives of Indigenous peoples, the spiritual violence done in the name of salvation, looking away from people swept up in genocidal wars, then the Church will be fully prepared to insist upon recognition and reconciliation with true moral force.
Truth and reconciliation can lead us to peace. In Leo XIV’s hands, truth is an instrument of moral clarity.
As Cardinal Prevost, he showed his willingness to confront political leaders who justify exclusion and violence in the name of heaven, or who seek earthly empire, or who try to make nationalism holy by wrapping it in scripture.
Leo XIV will be a moral counterforce, as was Leo XIII, asserting the golden rule to those who prize the rule of gold over human dignity and the survival of the planet.
At a time when the global conversation is being shaped by weapons, walls and war, Pope Leo XIV offers another language, a language of healing, humility and hope. His presence in the Vatican reminds us that peace is not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love.
Perhaps our American brother, Leo XIV, can help guide our fellow countrymen and women from the oppressive singularity of polarization and division, to multiplicity and universality, so that we begin to see ourselves, materially and spiritually, individually and collectively, as part of the world, interconnected and interdependent, a nation among nations, rather than a nation above nations, and that we can merge into the universality promised in America’s first motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” Out of Many, We are One.
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