A Homily for the Third Sunday after Easter

+ It has been a momentous week. Habemus papam! After a period of concerted prayer and fasting and—to be perfectly honest—not a little concern or even fear given the exercise of the papacy over the last twelve years, the Church of God now rejoices in the election of Pope Leo XIV.
 
I say “rejoices” not because I have the privilege to know the man personally or have been able to study his curriculum vitae and past writings and discourses and form a personal judgement on their orthodoxy or prudence, nor because I am aware of his interior dispositions in respect of acts of governance he has carried out on behalf of others—the replacement and removal of the bishop of our own diocese included. Indeed, it is quite possible, even probable that Father, Bishop and Cardinal Prevost made mistakes of judgment in the past, or that he has even been wrong in his understanding of some matters. He may even have found himself in positions where he has had to sign-off acts that he would not himself have initiated. And, of course, these are not any cause for rejoicing. Far from it.
 
No, I say that we rejoice in the election of Pope Leo XIV because we are Catholics and because we hope and we pray that in His Providence, Almighty God has given His Church the new Supreme Pontiff He wills for our time and that we need. And in this fact alone, as Catholics, our natural response (our default position as it were) should be to rejoice.
 
But it is, of course, a reality that the abuse of the papal office to push forward personal and political agendas in any age detracts from its integrity and erodes the filial loyalty Catholics should naturally accord it. This does very great harm. And it is a sad reality that today, for this very reason, the new pope is being evaluated and examined as might any new political official. What will he do? What kind of Church does he want? Will he allow the ordination of women? Will he attempt to totally ban the older liturgical rites? Will he accept divorce, same-sex marriages, etc.? The list goes on and on whilst Catholics who seek to be faithful withhold their consent, as it were, to his election.

We need to be clear. No pope can legitimately do such things. His authority and power is not a positivisitic one as might be that of a president or a prime minister. He cannot do what he wants. The Pope cannot sign a shower of ‘executive orders’ (called a Motu Proprio in the Church) and change things immediately according to his personal wishes. No: the Pope is a steward, a custodian, a guardian of the Deposit of Faith, one whose primary purpose is to protect all that Our Lord Jesus Christ revealed and taught as the Truth necessary for the eternal salvation of every man and woman in human history, that the Church has herself faithfully taught throughout the ages in her unbroken Tradition.
 
The issue is, therefore, not what Robert Prevost thinks about divorce or the Latin Mass or women’s ordination or whatever—or even what he has said or thought about them in the past. Rather, the fact is that Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, has been given the duty to ensure that when the Church is confronted by these or any other questions that may arise, we—that is, he himself as Pope and the entire Catholic Church, its hierarchy and all others—remain utterly faithful to the teaching of Christ and to all that has been handed on in the Church’s Tradition, knowing all the while that, as St Benedict teaches so often in his Rule about the abbot’s exercise of authority, the Pope shall have to answer to Almighty God for all of his deeds on the day of Judgement. 
 
This is a terrible responsibility for any man and whilst we rejoice that this yoke has been taken up anew, our rejoicing must be realistic: the faithful exercise of the papacy requires that its holder is open to and receives the grace of the office to which he has been called. Here, we have a vital part to play through our prayer and sacrifices offered for Pope Leo. There is a reason that the Pope is prayed for the Canon of the Mass: he needs our prayers, and out of filial loyalty we are obliged to offer them generously and in good faith.
 
Whatever of the exercise of the papacy in recent years, those times are now past. As Catholics we must pray fervently that Pope Leo shall receive an abundance of grace so as to be a strong and faithful steward of the Church’s treasury of grace and Truth in our age. Indeed, we may well pray that in the face of the powerful currents of politics and of positivism in the Church and of the cancers of relativism and syncretism in the world he has the strength to embrace the wisdom contained in an expression cited by one of his predecessors when first elected pope: In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas. (John XXIII, Ad Petri Cathedram, 1959) In essentials, unity; in what is not essential, liberty; in all things, charity.
 
Let us pray earnestly, then, this morning in this Holy Mass and throughout this pontificate, that through Pope Leo’s humble and faithful exercise of the Petrine Office, the sadness and distress that we have known for a little while now (and which lingers in the mouths of many) may indeed be turned into a true experience of that paschal joy of which this morning’s Gospel speaks, which nobody can take from us. Amen. +